COMMENTARY | There's more proof that the Occupy Wall Street movement is not only a sink hole of crime, insanity, and political extremism, but also of disease keeps rolling in. The combination of bad sanitation and unwashed bodies may be causing it.
Outbreaks of tuberculosis, a disease that used to afflict many people in the 19th century, including Chopin and Doc Holliday, have cropped up at Occupy Atlanta. Something called "Zuccotti Lung" has appeared at the Occupy Wall Street site. The symptoms appear to consist of uncontrolled wheezing, vomiting, and diarrhea.
For a group of people who are pretty sure that American society is messed up and needs changes, the occupiers have certainly proven themselves incapable of governing themselves in a civilized fashion. They seem to have recreated in miniature societies that are part Marxist communes and part medieval towns, with all the problems inherent in both.
None of the occupiers seems to have been in the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts teaches the proper way to maintain a camp, including sanitation and the necessity of digging latrines and then filling them properly after they are used. These common outdoors skills seem to have escaped the city slicker protestors who have gathered to whine about their lot in live.
It is not as if these skills are a great secret. Roman legionaries were able to build proper camps every day after a long march during a campaign, with tents arranged in strict rows, latrines where necessary, and issues of drainage and sanitation taken care of.
Instead the occupier protestors are become little more than medieval peasants, wallowing in filth, coming down with diseases that were long thought to be conquered. One can only hope that the Black Death does not show up in these encampments, for the sake of the surrounding population.
A modest suggestion may be to make the inevitable mass arrests a teaching experience. Instead of shuffling these latter day flower children to overcrowded prisons, the occupiers should be marched out to pre selected sites in the countryside and made to build their own prison camps under supervision. They will learn needed construction and survival skills they will serve them in good stead when they are released later.
After all, if Sheriff Joe Arpaio can put his convicts under canvass in the Arizona desert, the occupiers can learn proper camping etiquette as well as part of their punishment.
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