Now that the protesters have left / been booted from Centennial Mall, what's next? That's a pretty complicated question depending on your answer to the natural follow-up: what's next for whom?
For the moment let's focus on Lincoln as a community. How do we want to balance the right (and need!) to protest with the rights and preferences of community members as a whole?
The so-called "Occupy" protests were pretty unusual in a lot of ways, not least for their insistence on camping out in places where camping isn't typically expected. In many cities the campgrounds were clearly illegal. Not in Lincoln. Lincoln's ordinances made the Centennial Mall tents perfectly legal, a fact that surprised most locals. It turns out there are a lot of places in Lincoln where it's legal to set up camp indefinitely. I'm confident in asserting that most Lincolnites want that "loophole" closed.
But how? It turns out that answering that question requires asking (and answering) myriad others. We don't, for example, want to go down the road of limiting protest to specific "free speech zones", yet we don't want a free-for-all either. Likewise we don't want to put a time limit on speech, and we don't want to let speech run amok so that we become hostage to what ought to be one of our most cherished rights.
The City Council plans to address all of this over the coming weeks. I don't know what Lincoln's new ordinances should ultimately look like, but I do have a two ideas to start with:
- Centennial Mall should be open 24 hours. I've heard talk of designating Centennial Mall as a "park" and therefore being able to close it overnight. That's a terrible idea. Centennial Mall is a natural venue for people to gather to vent. It should remain that way.
- Ditch the tents. Speech is made no less free by barring tents and similar structures from rights-of-way. Small canopies and open-sided or screen tents are probably fine for 24 hours; after that, a permit should be required. Reasonable limits could be placed on the location of any of these items in order to, for example, provide for clear walkways through the area.
What would you like Lincoln's future ordinances to look like?
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