The hippies squatting on Wall Street have reportedly violated numerous laws, including property rights and traffic laws, and they’ve been committing various illegal and unsanitary acts, including defecation, in public. Besides disrupting traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, here’s a rundown of the hippies’ acts of anarchy, mayhem and depravity and what I think it means.
At the private Zuccotti Park, which, in a zoning deal between New York City’s government and property owner Brookfield Office Properties, must be accessible to the public, the crowd numbers in the thousands. They are squatting in violation of the property’s terms, consuming illegal drugs, and, according to one report, robbing people. But, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama publicly sanctioning the hippie squatting and occupation, police have refused to enforce the law. This week, the property owner finally wrote to the New York Police Department (NYPD) asserting that the trespassing has created “a health and public safety issue that must be addressed immediately.” Police are supposed to clear the occupants tomorrow to have the park cleaned. [10/14/2011 update: the city retreated from its position, backed down, and refused to clear the park and Brookfield yielded to the Bloomberg administration, so the hippies scored a major victory.]
The mob is on the move. Shouting “Tax the rich!” some of the herd descended upon city sidewalks, moving en masse toward their goal to harass private citizens at their properties, marching uptown to target individuals they deemed “rich” and demanding a government-controlled economy. One protester told the Associated Press: “It’s time for a new New Deal.” The press, unsurprisingly, is practically part of the movement (including Fox News Channel, which aired an all-female panel of pundits that giddily endorsed the occupation). Yahoo! News’ The Cutline published businessman Rupert Murdoch’s physical address. Millionaires and billionaires are being targeted for what organizers call a “willingness to hoard wealth at the expense of [others].”
In Washington, DC, six hippies were arrested for storming the United States Senate’s office building and the National Air and Space Museum had to be evacuated. Over a hundred hippies were arrested in Boston when they stormed a recently planted greenway named for President Kennedy’s mother.
In Atlanta, the hippies invoked rule by consensus and, in a collective chant captured in a video clip and posted on YouTube, refused to allow civil rights leader John Lewis to speak to the crowd. The premise of the refusal is that the individual must submit to the group; no one person may appear better than others. As FoxNews.com observed:
“So when the group’s leader, a bespectacled man with a bullhorn, said anything, he spoke in clipped fragments so the rest of the crowd could repeat what he was saying back to him. Another rule — no clapping, because “clapping can prevent someone else who is addressing the assembly from being heard.” Instead, the leader urged everyone to use effusive hand signals to show approval. With these fundamentals in place, the assembly spent 10 minutes debating whether Lewis should be allowed to speak before the crowd, which had gathered as one of many offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York.”
At the end of the disgusting display, with John Lewis, rejected by consensus, exiting the mob’s presence, someone shouted: “John Lewis is not better than anyone! Democracy won!” It was like watching a cult chant before drinking cyanide-laced beverages in Jonestown. Or before jumping someone and beating him to a pulp.
In Los Angeles, where hippie leader Charles Manson had led his “family” to target and stalk the rich for mass murder in the late 1960s, a hippie apparently known as Ringo blurted out: “French Revolution made fundamental transformation. But it was bloody.” He wrapped things up by calling for armed revolution: “So, ultimately, the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class. Long live revolution! Long live socialism!”
Here is a hippie that understands what the movement means: not just anti-capitalism, though certainly they seek to destroy whatever is left of capitalism in America and they have shown, with the tacit approval of the United States government, that they will violate the law, disregard individual rights, and target the individual with threats, intimidation and the initiation of force. They ultimately seek to overthrow the government of the U.S. to the extent it still stands for protection of liberty and the rights of the individual. These drug-induced hippies, who started in earnest at New York’s wretched 1969 festival known as Woodstock in the year one of their own led the Manson Family murders, spawned new drug-induced hippies, a filthy bunch less civilized than the previous batch. They have been ignored and evaded as harmless airheads with vacant eyes, love beads and Volkswagen minibusses for decades. But the hippies were festering while America slept, with Americans refusing to think and oppose the New Left on principle with arguments based on reason, egoism and capitalism.
So, here come the hippies. They never wanted peace and love. I suspect that we’re about to find out what they do want, what Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff warned they wanted long ago in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and The Ominous Parallels, respectively: regression toward a primitive lifestyle and submission to total government control.
It has been said by some (and they’re probably propagandists) that the Wall Street occupants, whom I suspect are organized and coordinated by an unseen, as yet unidentified force, were triggered by an image created by an anti-capitalist Canadian group called Adbusters, which Reuters has linked to self-hating, rich anti-capitalist George Soros. The image shows the iconic bronzed Wall Street bull, with a ballerina posed in motion atop the charging beast, a powerful symbol of America, New York City and capitalism. Both bull and ballerina appear clearly in the black and white image. But behind them, emerging in a gray fog, comes a charging mob of masked, faceless brutes, crouching like zombies with fists clenched around clubs in contrast to the unsuspecting dancer. The implication is an intent to destroy beauty and the beast. Whatever the source of the image and the origin of the claim that it led to the lawlessness in our streets, it’s an appropriate previsualization of what we’re seeing and what we may all yet live to see: the end of a land where one is essentially free to charge forth in enterprise, make money and pursue one’s happiness, and the beginning of tyranny. Anyone who knows what it means to be free can sense that the bull is about to be gored.
