#OccupyOurHomes Meets the "Housing Authority" — Roll Tape

If it’s a super-simple picture, I find it unusually powerful. Beyond the haunted and haunting quality of this abandoned foreclosed house, otherwise lost to the elements, to the taggers, to the person who comes around with the official notice and the staple gun, and to the groundhog day ritual of that mail carrier carefully sliding still another notice in between the exhausted others, we have the genius of the caution tape.

How smart, simple and confident it is for the movement to not only occupy the foreclosed home but to co-opt officialdom’s own institutional ritual for keeping the public at bay. I think the creativity and the audacity goes further than that, though. Occupy is not just “crossing the line” and appropriating the boundaries of a political and economic structure that has left American’s very access to shelter in limbo, the movement dares to occupy caution tape itself. Even if the smell of pepper spray will soon be wafting down the block, it’s quite a lucid and audacious assertion of the people’s authority.

I also liked this.

(photo: Mike Segar/Reuters caption: An Occupy Wall Street tape hangs across the door of an abandoned foreclosed upon property where demonstrators protested in the East New York section of Brooklyn in New York City, December 6, 2011.)