With Advocates’ Help, Squatters Call Foreclosures Home
10th April 2009
When the woman who calls herself Queen Omega moved into a three-bedroom house here last December, she introduced herself to the neighbors, signed contracts for electricity and water and ordered an Internet connection.
What she did not tell anyone was that she had no legal right to be in the home.
Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend’s couch into a newly empty house that sold just a few years ago for more than $400,000.
In other words, she’s a thief. This is the reduction ad absurdam of the entitlement culture: If you want something, just take it. If somebody has something that you don’t have, you have somehow been cheated of it, you’re entitled to “take it back”.
In a functional culture, the legal system takes care of such systems, quickly and surely. In a dysfunctional culture, such as we are rapidly becoming, the law is ineffective. When it comes to be seen as ineffective, and when people whose property is being stolen grasp that emotionally, then you get vigilante groups enforcing the property rights that the official government can’t or won’t. And then Hell descends upon the just and the unjust alike.
These people are sowing the wind, and forgetting that they will reap the whirlwind.