J. Bradley Ovitt, president of the Olympia & Belmore railroad, is less than happy with the Olympia, WA, city government. You see, a group of protestors are camped out on his rail, and he can’t get rid of them.
Wrote Ovitt in a letter to the city:
This letter is a formal request for the Olympia Police Department to once again take an active role in the removal of trespassers on the rail line into the Port of Olympia, as requested by the owner of the property, Union Pacific. Over the last several days, trespassers have occupied this active rail line and ignored requests by railroad employees to leave the site.
Where I come from, we don’t call this “protesting.”
We call it “criminal trespass.”
The protests are having serious economic repercussions, as companies down the line aren’t able to get the materials they need to operate. The city simply wants the whole thing to go away, however, claiming that it’s not their responsibility.
Said city manager Steve Hall:
This feels like a repeat of last year, and nobody wants to go through what happened last year. Their beef is really with the port, not with the city.
Among the protestors’ demands is that the rail line no longer be used to transport fossil fuels or anything that’s part of “military infrastructure.” They are demanding “democratic” control of the port by the community as a whole — which would not be “democratic,” but socialist.
They also want to transition port employees over to mythical “green” jobs.
Meanwhile, they’re trespassing.
Look, this appears to be pretty simple. They are breaking the law. That means it’s up to the relevant law enforcement agencies to clear the tracks of these trespassers, and it looks like that falls onto the Olympia Police Department.
I get that this is something they’d probably rather not do — but who cares? Every job entails some things you’d rather not do. In this case, that includes evicting trespassers who are negatively impacting untold numbers of people.
These folks have a right to protest, but they don’t have a right to trespass on property and they have no right to inhibit commerce. They need to be either arrested, or at the very least dragged away from the tracks so business can get back to normal.
What these Leftist protestors don’t understand is that they’re never going to actually win with these tactics. All they’re doing is pissing people off. Do that enough and no one will give a damn why you’re protesting.
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