Summer of Unrequited Love Seattle prepares to roll up its experiment in violent paradise.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-of-unrequited-love-11593559035?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
City officials on Tuesday began removing the barricades surrounding Seattle’s self-styled Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, or CHOP, potentially spelling the end of that three-week experiment in alternative urban living. Supporters lost no time identifying the malign force responsible for that fledgling nation’s quick descent into lawlessness and violence: “capitalism.”
So declared City Council member Kshama Sawant, in response to four shootings in 10 days within CHOP, a six-block area in Seattle that occupiers had cordoned off and blocked police from entering. The most recent shooting, on Monday, killed a 16-year-old boy and left a 14-year-old in critical condition.
Ms. Sawant explained on Twitter that the “tragic” killing “highlights capitalism’s brutality & endemic violence.” A CHOP supporter, Ms. Sawant declared: “Our movement rejects insinuations & falsehoods perpetuated by corporate & conservative media that this violence is outcome of CHOP or of our movement.” And here we thought CHOP was a demonstration of what was possible when men and women abandoned the evils of democratic capitalism.
Perhaps Ms. Sawant is testy because CHOP proved how fast the veneer of civilization can vanish when self-government through elections turns into no government through the mob, and public order is enforced by anyone with a gun rather than police. Businesses, residents and property owners in the zone have filed class actions accusing the city of depriving them of due process, while many occupiers have already fled—returning to the safety of civilization.
Even progressive Seattle Mayor Jennie Durkan has acknowledged the need for CHOP to rejoin the union and says the police will soon return to their abandoned precinct inside the zone. The mayor—who once predicted a “summer of love” in the zone—may have lost patience after protesters spray-painted her home.
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