occsea_sccc_10.jpgAbout 40 tents are set up right now and a trickle of new campers are arriving on the south lawn of Seattle Central Community College in Capitol Hill, where Occupy Seattle is staking its new base tonight. Here’s an absolutely terrible photo of the scene:

There are easily 150 people—but it’s dark, so it’s hard to count them or take a clear photo—and they’ve built a pretty groovy little village. Some people are ladling out hot soup and one guy is making tea, while others are drumming and shaking maracas, and other folks are smoking cigarettes in the “designated smoking area.” I made the mistake of setting up my tent in the designated smoking area and failing to set up my tent in the designated “do slugs of whiskey from a flask” area, because there is no such area, unfortunately. Drinking isn’t allowed. In other news you probably won’t find surprising, I’m not very skilled at setting up a tent.

They’ve scattered lots of straw about so it’s sort of like being on the set of a play that takes place in a medieval barn, only the cast is wearing Gortex and tight denim.

The sentiment I’ve heard from campers is that, while a community college isn’t what they’re protesting (it’s an icon of what many of them support), this a good place to send down roots. From here, they can focus on protesting banks, exposing runaway corporate control, and focusing on what matters—instead of expending energy on a squabble with cops down in Westlake Park. As for how they settled here, college president Paul Killpatrick has given his tepid welcome to the Occupiers, and today the American Federation of Teachers-Seattle, Local 1789 (AFL-CIO)—the local teachers’ union—declared its support. Protesters give the teachers a lot of credit for cranking cogs behind the scenes to neutralize opposition. I saw a couple cops earlier, but they seem to be on low alert.

60 replies on “Seattle Central, Occupied!”

  2. @50

    From what I understand, you’d just carry on living right where you are, but they’d smash the banks so you wouldn’t have to pay that mortgage anymore. Which is only fair, since you wouldn’t technically own the place anymore, either. You’d be allowed to keep living there due to established occupancy or something.

    Theories of anarchy diverge significantly when it comes to the question of property, but they’re not like the communists, so you don’t have to worry about your house being torn down and turned into a grain combine or anything.

    Me? I’m not “down there,” I do my camping in the woods, the way the good lord intended.

  3. @52 As I said, good luck getting more than 100 from the 99% to your circle jerk.

    Btw I don’t mind paying my mortgage. My house is still way above what I paid and with all my equity have built a nice nest egg. I won’t need to ever shit in a bucket.

  5. Out of curiousity-

    How does one protect a nylon tent from the mind rays the big banks and the feds use to control the people 24/7? Do you have to use tinfoil and duct tape for a sort of inner envelope? Or do you just need to cover your head?

    For just $15 a box of foil or roll of tape, I’ll provide the tinfoil for Occupy Seattle, out of my deep feeling of solidarity with the good men and women down there.

    No thanks needed. I’m just glad you guys are on the front line protecting this 99% fella from the evil corporations.

  7. @54 – Are you still here? There’s a new Occupy post up. It’s all Nazis now. Congratulations, you’ve successfully avoided my question.

    @56 – SCCC is better than City Hall because the core OS organizers didn’t make a huge shouty deal of refusing the space SCCC offered in preference to defiantly occupying Westlake. City Hall would be better by most other measures, but that one trumps everything else.

  8. I take my earlier comment back: the troll is beside himself, and that noted blowhard Seattleblahs felt the need to say something, the occupy folks must be doing something right.

  10. It just seems like now the protestors are sticking it to an underfunded community college by making them pay for all the maintenance to house them. This is a college that had to close a few departments last year due to lack of funding and faces more cuts this year.

    Could they possibly have picked a place LESS likely to have any impact on the people they are supposedly protesting?

    The place in washington state to really have an impact is in Olympia, where the lobbyists pass the corporate money out to the legislators.

    I think moving to SCCC is just an easy answer for the protestors, i though the whole idea of the Occupy movement was to get the right solutions, not the easy one.s

Comments are closed.