LEM Vista

Tuesday 27 December 2011, Olympia—This is the view from the Law Enforcement Memorial Vista point on Christmas eve, the 24th. A few of us Occupationists were there singing Christmas holiday carols.

In the foreground is the former site of the Occupy Olympia encampment / Occupy Wall Street Solidarity Village. The camp was there for about two months, and it underwent a lot of change in that time. As time went on, and daylight hours dwindled as the Winter Solstice approached, more and more people with chronic behavioral impairments made the camp their home.

In mid-December, the state agency that controls various usages of the Capitol Campus (Department of Enterprise Services, or DES for short,) evicted the camp/village. State Patrol officers in riot gear were sent in.

The day before the eviction, Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire made a statement to the press. When asked about the eviction, she said that she was tired of looking down at the camp and thinking of people freezing to death there.

Many people are still tired of thinking about people, disabled and impaired by our harmful economic system, freezing to death, or otherwise suffering undignified and miserable deaths.

Many people are sad, and sick, because our government has failed to regulate against harmful economic activities.

Some people have asked why riot gear clad law enforcement officers were sent in, rather than social workers, and/or healthcare providers.

Many people still understand that the camp/village was a legally protected First Amendment Act of peaceable assembly to petition for redress of grievances. Many if not mostly all of the village campers considered themselves to be protesters, even those whom were most afflicted and impaired by the intrinsically harmful effects of our system.

What people do to each other in order to accumulate wealth is sad. At the Olympia Occupy Wall Street Village encampment, the brutal effects of an inhumane economic system were evinced first-hand. It was raw.

The past couple of nights, with the storm, I have been thinking about all of our homeless/ houseless neighbors.

Meanwhile, some folks sit on enormous caches of wealth while millions and billions of people the world around suffer.