Mother of four leaves family to camp out with fleabaggers:
Priorities: Mom leaves family to sort laundry for OWSers
I'm feeIing a bit low-energy today, which is a pity, because I'd love to heap torrents of molten scorn on this woman. But her story speaks for itself:
A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park -- keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.
“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.
“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.
Hessler -- who ironically is married to a banker -- arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
She swears she’s not romantically involved with her new friend.
Yesterday was a typical day for the pair, who woke up at 8 a.m. on their little patch of paving stone near the communal kitchen and dashed off to Trinity Church to wash up.
Hessler emerged an hour later, her brown hair in dreadlocks, wearing a T-shirt depicting Han Solo and Princess Leia kissing, and bearing the slogan “Make Love Not War.”
She got coffee and a granola bar from the protest kitchen before sorting laundry for two hours.
The unemployed Long Island native compared her decision to abandon her family to Americans serving in the armed forces.
“Military people leave their families all the time, so why should I feel bad?” a defiant Hessler said. “I’m fighting for a better world.”
She said she had been following the movement on Facebook, and the more she learned, the more obsessed she became with joining the demonstrators. [. . .]
Hessler has spoken with her family -- husband Curtiss, 42; son Peyton, 17; and daughters Kennedy 15, Sullivan, 13, and Veda, 7 -- just three times since leaving them. “Friends are taking care of them,” she said.
Not everyone has supported her decision. “My mother told me I was being very selfish,” she admitted.
And her husband, a former Bank of America financial adviser who now works at a local Florida bank, is perplexed. “He says he’s working for ‘the Man,’ and I’m fighting against him,” she said.Let me get this straight. She traveled a thousand miles from her husband and kids so she could sort laundry and clean up after the fine folk of the Occupy movement. And she likens what she's doing to what our men and women in the military do. [Insert your own outrage here.]
My youngest daughter said it could be worse: this mom of the year could have brought her kids along with her. And considering that rapists, thieves, drug addicts, union thugs, and literal rats are common features of these lounge-ins, I think she has a point.
Horror stories abound. Via Verum Serum: Occupy Oakland devolves into "Lord of the Flies"
About 3:30 Tuesday afternoon, a group of roughly 50 people gathered by the man’s tent and told him he had to leave. Some were speaking calmly. Others weren’t. It was then that the man pulled out a large kitchen knife and threatened the whole group…It was only when someone picked up a piece of wood and cracked him across the head that the ordeal ended.Similar scenarios are playing out in Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, and elsewhere, but no one will do much of anything to put an end to these public nuisances. How can this not come back to bite Mayor Bloomberg and his ilk? On Wall Street, residents are not happy:
"They are defecating on our doorsteps," fumed Catherine Hughes, a member of Community Board 1 and a stay at home mom who has the misfortune of living one block from the chaos. "A lot of people are very frustrated. A lot of people are concerned about the safety of our kids." Real children come in a distant second to the pseudo-adults occupiers.
punditandpundette.com |
