As a downtown loft-dweller, I don’t have a backyard. No patio, no terrace, not even a tiny Juliet balcony.

St. James Park, a block away, is my backyard. And I’ve wanted it back for a while now. I have faith that Justice David Brown will force that to happen — with a reasonable accommodation for Occupy Toronto participants — when he releases his decision Monday morning on lifting the temporary injunction that halted the city from evicting dug-in trespassers.

For those who ask why this Camp Whinge has become all about a park when the issues that the worldwide 99 per cent movement have spotlighted are so much more profound, I would counter: How would you like the protesters planting their tent pegs, with no exit date, on your front lawn in the Beaches or the Annex or suburban Scarborough? How’d you like your kids to play in the dump that St. James has become?

It’s so easy to be hospitable and solidarity-minded when not personally inconvenienced or if merely Occupy-slumming as an encampment tourist.

The mantra of real estate is location, location, location. So I’ve never understood why Occupy Toronto hunkered down in St. James Park, which is geographically removed from Bay Street, in a totally different orbit culturally and economically from the big bad world of financial privilege, and devoid of any institutions representing government.

It is simply a lovely little green space in Old York where seniors like to sit on the benches, tossing crumbs at the pigeons, where office workers take their brown-bag lunch, where pram-pushers negotiate the landscaped gardens and people like me enjoy the sunshine whilst reading a book.

A few years back, a different occupation occurred when the pretty gazebo was appropriated by rough-sleepers — mostly harmless homeless but also winos and druggies who occasionally accosted passersby, frightening women and children, rendering the park a safe environment no longer. Locals who objected were assailed for being unsympathetic to the dispossessed. Again, the needs of others were paramount and it took ages for police to roust the squatters.

We are not selfish or on “the other side,” those of us directly affected who’ve grown weary of Occupy Toronto protesters. I’m just as angry over economic disparities and corporate hedonism as the next working stiff. I feel just as disempowered by the titans of power, just as disgusted by the 1 per cent elitists and the felonious pocket-liners, just as marginalized by dynamics that prevent so many of us from ever prospering.

But bullies are bullies, however cloaked in legal arguments about the civil right to protest. No sensible person is denying the activists those rights. I’m not even opposed to uncivil protest because, Gandhi and Martin Luther King aside, peaceful protest is mostly an oxymoron unless the pushback dissident movement is massive, as witnessed by the Arab Spring demonstrations.

Those public square occupations, however, had specific aims: ousting autocratic regimes, defying police-state intimidation, promoting democratic elections. Most revolutions are drenched in blood — just as violence returned to Tahrir Square over the weekend. That’s the price of remarkable change and it takes brave souls to embrace the risks — not merely the toying-with-activism pup-tent brigade.

Want to storm the ramparts on Bay Street? I’m with you. Want to usurp my local park? We’ll part company.

The Occupy movement was always diffuse and socially ecumenical, which was both its strength and, as time wore on, its weakness. This is no longer a “conversation;” it’s just another one-way diatribe co-opted by special interest agendas.

The Occupy Toronto Manifesto I received last month was a mishmash of la-la demands, a Marxist-Socialist compendium of “musts” that stretched from higher taxes for the rich and protection of the environment to forbidding all Canadian military interventions in foreign countries and launching a “national dialogue … to deal with the pressing need for political reform.” In sum, it sought to impose the views of a minority on the majority, a far thing from what Occupy Wall Street was all about.

That manifesto has disappeared from the Occupy Toronto website. When I tried to recover a copy during a Sunday afternoon visit to the park, I was told: “Um, yeah, that was something not agreed on by the committee so just pretend that it never existed.”

Maybe the Occupy communications arm should put some of its own members on the “Distorting News” wall of shame that’s been posted on-site — basically a roster of all journalists and media agencies with which it disagrees.

Free speech, my ass.

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Move on.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.