Saturday, November 12, 2011 :::
“It’s called Zuccotti lung,” said Willie Carey, 28, a demonstrator from Chapel Hill, N.C. “It’s a real thing.”
As the weather turns, the protesters in Zuccotti Park, the nexus of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan, have been forced to confront a simple truth: packing themselves like sardines inside a public plaza, where cigarettes are shared and a good night’s sleep remains elusive, may not be conducive to good health.
“Pretty much everything here is a good way to get sick,” said Salvatore Cipolla, 23, from Long Island. “It’ll definitely thin the herd.” To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it's funny because I don't know them. But also because they emit non-sequiturs like this:“I’m amazed that in a park full of revolutionaries, there are large contingents that can’t throw away their own trash,” said Jordan McCarthy, 22, a member of the protesters’ sanitation team.
Demonstrators do maintain a medical tent, filled mostly with over-the-counter medications and alternative treatments, like herbal remedies. Some have spotted shamans walking the premises... Volunteers at the medical tent also have on-call contacts in acupuncture, chiropractics, massage therapy and psychotherapy, protesters said.
“We’re a triage clinic,” said Pauly Kostora, 27, a former licensed nurse, as he rolled the tent’s single wheelchair into a corner. “We don’t pretend to be a hospital.” There's a lot of unexplored story behind that word "former".
I'd like to excerpt more, but I can't just take the whole story. For example, the next paragraph notes that the potential for bad press has led some of the protesters to hope that the people around them don't die. Different people respond to different incentives, I guess.Labels: occupiers, possibly unintented consequences
::: posted by Steven at 12:50 AM
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