The End of Occupy Boston

Mayor Thomas Menino did the right thing in the end, evicting without incident the remaining numbers of those who will go down in local folklore for many years to come as the Occupiers of Boston.

As nearly everyone in Boston knows, the end did not come with a bang, as TS Eliot so brilliantly wrote. It came with a whimper.

Forty-six Occupiers were arrested and they were given the choice of leaving peacefully with their things or being arrested and their possessions swept away as so much rubbish.

Shortly after 5:00 a.m. Boston Police moved in to remove the protesters and to re-establish the city’s ownership of the land on the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

The mayor and Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis poured over strategies and plans that led to the ultimate collapse of the Dewey Square revolution against the inequities carried out by the nation’s largest banks on working people and the middle class.

In large numbers, police moved against the demonstrators removing those who chose not to move one by one until the site was cleared of the men and women of all ages and persuasions who had occupied it.

Then came the Boston Department of Public Works with the really important work of dumping all the bric a brac and garbage that had accumulated over the months of the occupation.

DPW employees operating steam powered water sprayers removed graffiti while many others swept up items and tossed them into waiting trash removal trucks.

By 8:00 a.m., at Dewey Square, life had returned to normal on the spit of land the Occupiers had inhabited since last summer.

Where do we go from here?

The revolutionists – the occupiers that is – may feel they made their point and had their say and in fact, they did just that.

However, from our point of view, their revolution has failed miserably in Boston and in fact, has met the same fate in many other cities across the nation.

We congratulate the city for returning the land to the people – that is us – and for excising the people living there – that was them.

The removal was a surgical operation performed brilliantly by the police.

The Occupiers got away a long time with occupying a large downtown piece of the city. They used their position in that space to attract attention and they accomplished that, too.

But to what end?

What was gained?

What was lost when they were dispersed Saturday morning?

Not much.