What now?

Gambit's Charles Maldonado wraps up the Duncan Plaza Occupy protest that ended last night with two (sort of) arrests but no real incident to speak of.

The final eviction of Occupy New Orleans won’t gain the national notoriety of New York or Portland or other cities where police officers (with better reputations than the NOPD) seemed almost gleeful at getting their chance to crack hippie skull.

But that doesn’t mean that what happened in Duncan Plaza this past week or the two-month-long occupation preceding it, wasn’t important. It is, and not (or at least not only) because of the sort of abstract, dinner-conversationey First Amendment issues — whether the protesters had a right to camp there forever, whether that is or should be considered protected speech.

Occupy in general is a story about income inequality, corporate ethics and influence in government, all of those things to which it’s diligently managed to, finally, draw our attention. Occupy New Orleans and the people in it, however, touched on major problems (maybe all of them except, happily, the murder rate) specific to this city. It’s a City Hall story, meaning local government and what it can and should be doing, not the actual location of the encampment.

If it's true, as Maldonado claims, that Occupy NOLA truly called attention to New Orleans' most pressing problems of income inequality and influence in government (and I would dispute that it actually did this but that's for another time) the question then is, what next?

If the movement is more important than the actual encampment, then shouldn't that movement continue now that the camp has been broken up? Will it? Or was Occupy NOLA really just a loose combination of chronic attention-seeking "activists", itinerant rail kids, and mentally ill homeless who, thanks to a momentary fad born out of a completely different kind of event in New York City, were temporarily co-located?

The very fact that Occupy NOLA was as incident-free and peaceful as it was should tell you something about how little it managed to threaten the authority structure. Indeed it's only really being moved now because Mitch wants the area around City Hall and the Superdome looking extra vagrant-free during the upcoming Bowl games. Otherwise, the camp could have been ignored indefinitely.