Happy Protesting Holidays?
While Occupy camps elsewhere in the nation are being shut down, Jeff Woods notes that Occupy Nashville’s protesters are “hunkering down for the holidays.”
When the governor and first lady switched on the lights on the Capitol’s Christmas tree this week, there they were like Santa’s merry elves milling about on the Legislative Plaza in the seventh week of their occupation.
….Occupy Nashville now is drawing national attention as a man-bites-dog oddity.
“I feel like in a lot of ways … Nashville is starting to become maybe a bit of a tender spot or a hearthstone for other occupiers,” one demonstrator, Samantha Blanchard, told MSNBC. “We’re like the little heartbeat, the little southern hospitality of the movement.”
To paraphrase our favorite aide to the governor, Thaddeus E. Watkins III: Fun times!
For this, Occupy Nashville can thank Gov. Bill Haslam. His ham-handed attempt to clear the plaza boomeranged. At the start, Occupy Nashville was a few crust punks and old hippies. Now, protesters claim a core group of nearly 100, with maybe 400 part-time supporters, and there’s a federal court injunction protecting the encampment–at least until sometime next year.
If Haslam had only waited and thought things through a bit, the public response might have been more to his liking. Since his blunder, police in other cities have shocked the nation by wantonly pepper-spraying protesters. By comparison, Tennessee’s troopers were teddy bears.
Legislators Not Impressed
State Sen. Jim Tracy tells the Shelbyville Times-Gazette that the normal paths for state legislators into and out of Legislative Plaza don’t really take them past the “Occupy Nashville” protestors who have camped out on the plaza since October.
And state Rep. Pat Marsh said he’s had no contact with the protestors but that their camp is “a mess, and it looks terrible.”
“Early on, I walked through there,” said Tracy, saying he asked some of the protestors about their specific views and demands and got vague responses.
Just as in the case of Tea Party protests two years ago, there’s no guarantee that any particular organization or website represents the views of any specific protestor. But the website at OccupyNashville.org states its goals as being “1) End Corporate Personhood 2) Remove Money & Financial Influence From Politics 3) Support & Solidarity With Occupy Wall Street.”
Tracy said there have been concerns expressed by some legislative staffers about public urination and use of electric power without permission.
Nashville a National Occupy Base?
Occupy Nashville will likely hold its ground for the next couple months, even as police around the country break up similar encampments, according to WPLN.
A court injunction says protesters can keep camping near the state capitol. Some Nashville occupiers see that as a chance to expand while efforts elsewhere dwindle. There are more than fifty tents in the plaza at the state legislature, mostly around the edges. Now occupiers are adding a new row straight down the middle.
A federal court order says occupiers can’t be arrested just for being there, though they can still be cited if they do anything illegal.
Simon Dillon has been traveling and staying with various Occupy groups, and he says Nashville’s relative safety drew him here.
“The potential this camp has with the injunction protecting it, this can be actually used as a national base and still be in compliance with the law, and basically not have to worry about getting the infrastructure set up.”
Dillon says one advantage Nashville has is it’s relatively organized. He points to a code of conduct meant to separate occupiers who’ve agreed to behave from outsiders taking advantage of free food and a place to crash.