Occupy Everywhere

Babies, it seems like everyone (well, okay, no one) wants to know what I think about the protests underway in Zuccotti Park.

I've been (and am still) involved with projects and activism that seemed to me to be unambiguously and unequivocally The Right Thing, and getting anyone to pay attention to them has been a downright Sisyphean task. So at this stage of my political development ("Phase III: Exasperation"), I'm automatically impressed by any political movement, however inchoate -- or even incoherent -- that's capable of embodying the zeitgeist or getting call-outs from government or the press. And if the moral position of a movement like that is even within some threshold value of my own, then I feel compelled to help them, uh, capitalize on whatever traction they've magically acquired. Because if you wait around for a successful political movement that matches your beliefs and aesthetic to a T, you're gonna be waiting forever.

...By which I mean to say, of course the people at Occupy Wall Street are gross and often inarticulate, and if you're asking them (less than a month in) to deliver practical solutions to the problems they're shouting about, you're gonna be disappointed. But they've got some smart people doing media strategy for them, and they're fascinatingly well-organized. And most importantly, maybe, they're all really brave.

I don't agree with everything I've heard from the people there -- some of it doesn't even really make sense, like when someone shot down a plan to use donated money to buy sleeping bags, because we're supposed to be getting away from "buying" things from "companies." But there are a couple of things that I'm pretty sure are true, and about which I think I'm on the same page as everyone I've met at the park: First, what Elizabeth Warren said back in August: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody." Second (and more verbose), something that Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1969:

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.

Tom has been marching in some of the protests they've organized, including the really huge one that kind of shut down lower Manhattan on October 5th. His "Paul Krugman's Blog For President" protest sign was popular enough to make the front page of Salon.com. (Although apparently one lady he spoke to at the march accused Krugman of being "part of the system." "I didn't really have anything to say back to that weird old lady," Tom said.)

He and I went to a Sunday evening General Assembly a couple of weeks ago. In case you haven't gotten a clear picture from the news: The Occupation is centered in Zuccotti Park, which is a kind of gray stone corporate park, a rhomboid wedge between a bunch of big office buildings and sort of catty-corner to a construction site that's part of Ground Zero. There are narrow strips of flower beds around its edges and there are some little groves of flowers and skinny trees dotted down the middle. It's a place you might go to smoke cigarettes during lunch if you worked for J.P. Morgan Chase. The Occupiers have set up several tables in the park, some of which correspond to "working groups" that exist within the movement: There's a kitchen; an information desk; a medical tent; a media center with generator-powered laptops; and a comfort station, which hands out sleeping bags and blankets. The rest of the biomass takes the form of people with sleeping bags, tents, and tarps, who array themselves wherever they can. There's a scattered contingent of food and tchotchke vendors on the eastern edge of the park. They have the tentative air of dogs by a dinner table, like they're wondering if they'll be indulged or shooed away.

The General Assembly, from what I can tell, is both an alternate name for the Occupation itself, as well as a name for the style of all-hands meetings the Occupiers hold twice a day. Because they're not aloud to use to electronic amplification, they use a technique called "The Human Microphone" to make sure everyone can hear: The speaker speaks a few words, and some designated people near the speaker repeat what the speaker said, and then a second tier of repeaters repeats what they said. In person it's slow but effective, not least of all because it requires that the speakers edit themselves for brevity. The General Assembly doesn't include political topics except insofar as they're related to planning actions, so there aren't a whole lot of shrill or crazy people getting up to talk. The order of speakers is determined by what they refer to as a "progressive stack," which is a kind of FIFO queue with dynamic re-prioritization for underrepresented groups.

Most of the speakers were making announcements about the needs of various working groups or the services they provide. The medical working group wanted people to come see them to learn the symptoms of hypothermia. Comfort wanted to make it known that they'd appreciate donations of boots and sleeping bags. At some point in the stack, someone from the "safer spaces" working group read their notes. People occupying the park should come to them, they said, if they were feeling unsafe for any reason. In particular, they said, there was someone currently in the park who was considered particularly unsafe and who was to be avoided: "His name is Thaddeus. He's wearing an orange shirt and he's got a menorah on his head." Tom and I spent several amused minutes looking for a guy matching Thaddeus' description.

There are a whole lot of police down there, both in terms of boots on the ground and in terms of vehicles -- they've got a half dozen vans and a tower of fun. For the most part they seemed respectful if not friendly. I've seen footage of them being really shitty at some of the off-site events, but down at the Plaza they seem to be doing what they should be doing, which is making sure everybody's safe.

As we were on our way out, we saw a young, pretty blond woman get into a confrontation with the police. She'd locked her bicycle to part of her clothing and was attempting to sit down on the sidewalk at the north end of the park, presumably as an act of civil disobedience -- although she didn't say anything or even seem to be affiliated with the other Occupiers. The cops made a move to grab her bike lock key from her, but she tossed it to someone in the crowd who scurried away with it. Everyone had smart phones out and was filming the interaction, which culminated with the police cutting through the bit of her the bike was attached to and carrying her and the bike to a waiting paddy wagon. Everyone was chanting, "This is what a police state looks like!"

I don't think that's what a police state looks like, but then again I've never lived in a place that definitively was -- or was not -- a police state.