Can the Occupy movement save itself?

Listen to Dave’s Commentary: Can the Occupy movement save itself?

Now that they’ve been evicted, the Occupy Wall Street offshoots have moved to a new tactic: Squatting!

“People being on the streets, empty buildings standing unused doesn’t make sense. And I personally find it disgusting.”

In Seattle, a group of anarchists moved into an empty house that had been stripped down to the plywood and put up a bed sheet banner reading “Occupy Everything, No Banks No Landlords” and spray-painted the anarchist A on the front door.

And when 97.3 KIRO FM’s reporter Ursula Reutin asked one of them how they justified trespassing:

“I really can’t speak on that because we haven’t talked about it collectively.”

“But the idea that you’re breaking the law? What’s your personal feeling?”

“My personal feeling is that I really can’t talk about that because I can’t represent other people’s ideas as my own.”

“I’m just asking you.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

Wow. For people who are sick of the world’s BS, this is one big pile of BS.

Here’s how the Occupy movement can save itself. When you take over a house, you tell the reporters:

“Look at this house. It’s one ugly house. It was ugly even before we hung our ugly sign on it. Even capitalists hate houses like this because they kill property values. So we occupiers are going to take down our ugly sign, and we are going to do an extreme occupier makeover so that ONE week from now, this house is going to be so beautiful, the neighbors will call us heroes, and we will expose the bankruptcy of a system that protects slumlords and their squalid property at a time when people need a place to live.”

That’s what I would say. And imagine if they actually followed through and started turning abandoned neighborhoods into Streets of Dreams — instead of pepper spray, we’d be washing their feet and anointing their hands.

Subscribe to Dave Ross’ Commentaries