"CHANGE YOU CAN HOPE FOR" HE SAID - IS THIS WHAT HE MEANT?

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• BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
• NOVEMBER 8, 2011
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
  

This Is What Anarchy Looks Like

More stories of violence at Obamaville.

By JAMES TARANTO

It’s not a good idea to feed wild animals. “Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators” at San Diego’s Obamaville encampment, reports Los Angeles’s KNX-AM. “But when they stopped, the protesters became violent”:

According to one city councilman, bodily fluids were used in the attacks.

“Both carts have had items stolen, have had their covers vandalized with markings and graffiti, as well as one of the carts had urine and blood splattered on it,” said Councilman Carl DeMaio. . . .

In addition to the attacks, the vendors also said they recently received death threats.

The New York Post reports on a similar situation at the original Obamaville, in Manhattan’s Financial District:

“I’ve been told, ‘Watch your back!’ 10 times,” Stacey Tzortzatos, owner of Panini & Co. Breads, located across from Zuccotti Park, told The Post yesterday.

She and her employees are terrified by the constant threats, which she said began after she demanded the protesters stop using her shop’s restroom as a place to bathe every day.

The final straw came about two weeks ago, when the demonstrators broke a bathroom sink, flooding the shop, and clogged the toilet–setting her back $3,000 in damages. . . .

And on Friday, she said, a crazed squatter burst into the shop and demanded that workers fill a 10-gallon container of water.

When they refused, “he banged it on the ground and started yelling” and threatened the staff, she said.

“He said he was entitled to have it for free.”

Reader Bruce Fancher writes to tell us of his visit to Zuccotti Sunday:

I was taking pictures when a muscular young man told me to stop. I don’t like to be told what to do so I answered something along the lines of, “C’mon, it’s a public park.” Apparently, he didn’t care to discuss it further, so took a swing at me and took off. I quickly ran over to a police officer about 25 feet away and, with blood streaming out of my nose described the suspect and pointed out where he was.

The cop was sympathetic, but in the way that he might be sympathetic if I told him that it was going to rain tomorrow and I’d been planning a picnic. That’s a shame, but what could he be expected to do about it? He called an ambulance for me and supposedly filed a police report, but I doubt anything will ever come of it, as the cops I spoke with didn’t seem to be particularly interested in finding the suspect. As one of them told me after I was treated by the EMTs, “Sorry about this, but if I went into the park it would start a riot.” The young woman EMT who treated me told me that this was the fourteenth time that she had personally been down there because of an assault.

It sounds as though the atmosphere at New York’s Obamaville has deteriorated considerably since our visit there three weeks ago. We found it populated mostly by innocent and well-intentioned, if confused, young people. Then again, that’s how “Lord of the Flies” began.

Bruce FancherBruce Fancher after his visit to Zuccotti Park.

But the boys in William Golding’s classic novel were stuck on an island with no supervision. The same can’t be said of the chronological adults at Zuccotti Park and the nation’s other Obamavilles. If New York’s finest in fact are refusing to enforce the law for fear of provoking the so-called protesters to further violence, it is a gross abdication of leadership by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who ought to take assault at least as seriously as he takes salt.
Reader Mike Basham, meanwhile, has a story from Washington’s Obamaville, down the street from the White House:

My elderly mother lives in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Like many of the buildings in that area, most of the floors are offices, but the top three or four are private apartments (this was the brainchild of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who lived in the building next to my mother).

On Sunday, a rowdy group of “protesters” were blocking all the entrances to the building, apparently not realizing that some of the doors they were obstructing were not for evil bankers and businessmen but for elderly ladies who just wanted to get to their homes.

My mother wheeled meekly up in her motorized scooter and politely asked the punk blocking the door to step aside. When he refused, she explained that he was standing in front of an apartment entrance, but he didn’t seem to care. So my saintly mother rammed him with her scooter, and he was so surprised, he moved out of the way.

As she was gliding past him and into her home, she turned to him and yelled, “And put out that damned cigarette!”

At least Mayor Bloomberg would find that a happy ending.
Don’t Know Much About History
From the Washington Examiner:

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson visited the Occupy DC group in McPherson Square on Monday evening after the group marched on police headquarters and city hall.

In an exclusive interview with The Washington Examiner, he compared the occupy movement to the Civil Rights Era sit-ins.

“All of it is occupying for economic justice. Dr. King’s last act on earth was to come to Washington and to occupy the Mall and put the focus on economic justice,” Jackson said. “He said it’s alright [sic] for the wealthy to get wealthy but not at the expense of poor people.”

Dr. King was in Memphis, Tenn., not Washington, when he was assassinated in 1968.