Last night I watched NBC nightly news, as I have begun to do every night since the police tear-gassed the "Occupy" encampment in downtown Oakland
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I learned straight up and first hand - although luckily for me, in a less violent way - at the very first set of protests I went to how deeply the media can skew what is going on there. Accordingly, I have never gone along with the prevailing view that the Occupy movement is a bunch of "directionless dirty scrub kids who are throwing littler everywhere and just refuse to get jobs and have no agenda". I won't at this point go into detail about what happened at the protests I was at vs. what I saw on the news later that night but I remember being rather gently patted on the head by one of the older women there at this sort of losing of my innocence, so to speak. It's amazing how the media can spin an event with a camera while making it look like "raw uncencored footage".
We walked through the Occupy NOLA camp here the other day, which the mayor is making noises about clearing out (so he probably will soon). It occupies the plaza park area in front of City Hall, which isn't really used for anything else anyway. It's a large collection of tents, everything is very neat and quiet. some people were playing guitar and the city set up a few porta potties for them, which was nice. one of the things in that park here is a permanent structure with a roof, a sort of large gazebo, and they have a banner hung from it and are running a sort of open library inside and people are sitting inside there reading and talking quietly. Horrors.
They will probably beat them all up and run them out in a few days.
We walked through the Occupy NOLA camp here the other day, which the mayor is making noises about clearing out (so he probably will soon). It occupies the plaza park area in front of City Hall, which isn't really used for anything else anyway. It's a large collection of tents, everything is very neat and quiet. some people were playing guitar and the city set up a few porta potties for them, which was nice. one of the things in that park here is a permanent structure with a roof, a sort of large gazebo, and they have a banner hung from it and are running a sort of open library inside and people are sitting inside there reading and talking quietly. Horrors.
They will probably beat them all up and run them out in a few days.
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