Paraphrased from a
Seattle resident who wanted to explain the glorious and infamous Capital Hill
Autonomous Zone:
Amidst a series of
erratic and contradictory moves from the mayor and the police chief that
resemble someone at a control board frantically pushing buttons at random, the
police completely abandoned an area they had been tear-gassing for the past
week, as a child who picks up their ball and goes home, or an abusive partner
who runs away in order to get their victim to beg for their return.
The people within this
neighborhood said "alright good deal" and jokingly referred to the
place as an "autonomous zone", and when the joke hit Twitter it
became a meme.
But that's mostly what it is. Outside of Seattle it's a dream to warm the heart
of a marxist and threaten the worldview of a monarchist; inside Seattle it's a
bunch of people milling around a park like they would have been doing on any
warm summer weekend, except that this time they're joking about having run the
cops out of town. There's no barricades, there's no Revolutionary Leader,
there's no list of demands, there's no articles of secession, there's no supply
problems, it's not some kind of micronation. It's a neighborhood going about
their business with a new in-joke to tell each other.
And the news reports are going wild about this fabled autonomous zone like it's a real threat. So for example, There's a news headline
about how the local police are trying to find the "leader of the
CHAZ".
Well they're not, and even if they did they'd spend eternity looking. Kind of hard to find a leader of a movement when it doesn't have one and doesn't exist. I mean you could grab someone and torture him to make everyone else in the neighborhood scared, but if they weren't actually making any political moves and they're not responsible for the police being gone then trying to scare the neighborhood into submission would be like trying to batter down an open door.
Also Trump is making
noise about sending the army in to conquer this upstart nation-state and while
it would be scary if he actually got anyone to do that, it would also be
hilarious if a bunch of soldiers marched into The Zone and found literally
nothing.
Or, more likely, they
would march into The Zone and then keep going out the other end because they
thought they hadn't found it yet.
That's about how the
situation is playing out between the news reports and the reality. Missed it by a mile, guys. Circle around and try again.