Occupy (v): to fill up or take up, to people

As the people’s occupation snaked through the streets of Manhattan it felt like we were doing something the city of millions had never seen. We were at least two thousand or three thousand strong. We were angry, but we were peaceful. A cluster of balloons floated in the sky ahead, tethered by the head of the pack, seeming to emit a buoyant sense of what Gandhi called right against might.

This is no a hodge-podge hippie movement, as is always the stereotype pinned on civil disobedience, but a peaceful, well-aimed, and growing consciousness that some of the money and power stuck at the top needs to trickle back down to the rest of the American people. About 80 percent of all new income generated in the last 30 years has gone to the top 1 percent. That’s not okay.

There has been a lot of talk about why we walked up the bridge – who did we think we were to block traffic in the middle of a Saturday afternoon? For one thing, this is civil disobedience. By definition it is offensive and obstructive to many; that’s how it gets attention. If we had just walked around lower Manhattan for an hour we wouldn’t have garnered half the attention. As for what actually happened, this is how I saw it:

As we reached the bridge, part of the pack began to walk up the pedestrian ramp that rises between the two directions of traffic. From my vantage point halfway back in the crowd, the front of the line seemed to hesitate at the road, then suddenly surge up it with a heady determination. I was shocked but invigorated by our assertiveness, and when I looked to my right and saw a line of police calmly separating us from the next lane of cars I figured they must somehow be okay with it. In fact it almost felt like they were escorting us up the bridge.

Once we had gotten almost halfway across the bridge, the police were suddenly no longer okay with it. The lane of cars was gone; the march stopped abruptly, and I could sense a pushing and pulling up at the front. The people behind us called for us to keep going, and the people in front of us told us to go back. What I later saw on YouTube was police at the front of the crowd literally dragging what seemed to be random people out and arresting them. “The whole world is watching!” the crowd chanted. Hey, it was true. Then, “This – is – a peaceful protest!”

It suddenly dawned on the thousand or so people that we were trapped, and likely to face arrest. A “Let us go!” chant began. Though the crowd had every reason to panic, everything stayed very orderly. Some people climbed 15-20 feet up to a walkway overlooking the road until the police stopped them and cordoned off the crowd. A man standing on the walkway above initiated a human microphone, a tactic frequently used in the occupation because megaphones are not allowed, in which the person speaking yells a few words at a time, and those words are yelled by the people within earshot, and the message expands outward in waves. In this case, the man with the vantage point was telling us we were probably about to be arrested.

My friends and I got arrested on the bridge at around 6pm. We were loaded onto an MTA bus with our hands behind our backs in plastic cuffs. The Transport Workers Union is now suing to stop NYPD from using them as accomplices in obstructing the people’s movement. As we were led to our bus, the crowd was singing the Star Spangled Banner. “The land of the free, and the home of the brave,” serenaded me as I stepped into the makeshift, extra large paddy wagon.

Some of the people with me began to lose circulation in their hands because their cuffs were too tight – they say theirs wrists and hands still hurt days later. I was lucky enough to have loose cuffs, only strong discomfort. We sat cuffed on that bus for a total of five hours as the Crown Heights, Brooklyn Precinct 77 struggled to process the hundreds of us. Feeding off of each other’s optimism, we made conversation with each other and with the policemen in charge of watching us.

The more talkative cop professed not to care much about the country’s economic situation, as he himself had a comfortable salary and benefits. When asked if he would join the force now, though, since compensation has been reduced, he said hell no. He also asked why we had clogged the bridge. We told him to ask his superiors why they let us.

He was a nice guy though – when my friend Jon was at the point of pissing himself, he unzipped Jon’s fly and let him relieve himself down the back stairs of the bus. We all got a good laugh out of that.

When we were finally let into the precinct station, they cut our arms loose and put us in 7′x5′ cells with six or seven of our comrades. At this point it was around midnight. We all pissed in the toilet before flushing it, in order to reduce the risk of it overflowing, as the toilet in the neighboring cell had done. We had nothing but each other – they had temporarily confiscated our shoes and every possession but our wallets. No phones for communication, nor to check the headlines and see what the world was seeing. Soon we had one more thing. A cop came by pushing a big plastic crate labeled “Jail sand.” They were peanut butter sandwiches that tasted like they’d been made months ago. Having eaten nothing since leaving Liberty Plaza nine hours earlier, I ambivalently ate mine. An Asian 38 year old in my cell used his to cushion his head against the wall. At one point I reached through the bars and threw my crust down the hall in frustration. We had no way of knowing how much longer we’d be in captivity. But we conversed warmly, bonding quickly in a climate of shared oppression, shared victory, and the shared knowledge that we are all firmly in this together.

For all we knew we could have been left there all night – and it crossed my mind that if anyone had to take a crap, our cramped cell, half occupied by the toilet and a bench, would become unbearably awkward. “Anyone got any TP?” I called out. Said Jon: “Use the sandwiches!” Laughter all around.

Around 1:30am, as conversations waned, Jon called out from the next cell down, “Okay, we’ve learned our lesson!” The whole row burst out in laughter.

My cellmates represented a diverse (though almost all white and male) cross-section of reasons for supporting the protest. JC had recently graduated from one of the top fashion schools in New York, and said his previous company had wanted desperately to hire him full time but simply couldn’t. He had just been fired and had spent the last week living and breathing Occupy Wall Street – something his employed friends couldn’t understand. A guy from the city and a guy from Rochester both had stories of restaurant managers trying to get them to work for free. Another cell mate, Julien, said he considers himself lucky because he does art handling for people who are, essentially, in the one percent. But he’s still very much of the protest – in fact he had been pepper sprayed the previous weekend. Sean, a sophomore at Wesleyan, sat awkwardly through a conversation we had about how a college degree is no longer remotely a guarantee of employment in this country. (Some 22 percent of college grads are unemployed, and another 22 percent are working jobs that don’t require a college degree. The average college grad is entering the real world with $20,000 of debt.)

I couldn’t help feeling the intense irony of the situation. Every day on Wall Street, stock brokers gamble with the world economy. Finance CEOs know that when something goes wrong they can take the money and run. The government will bail them out just like it did last time (the financial reforms made since then haven’t been nearly strong enough to change that). The people in cuffs are fighting for their own futures, and incidentally, for the future of this country. On the other hand, the last Wall Street manipulators I remember being penalized were Martha Stewart, Jonathan Lebed, and Bernie Madoff. Each of them was guilty of doing no more than what Wall Street does everyday, but on a scale that was respectively too high-profile, too embarrassingly juvenile, or too huge to ignore. They were isolated individuals who could take the fall without seeming, at first glance, to be impugning the entire system.

At around 2:30am, the cell next to me was finally released and handed their tickets. An hour later, they came back for us, taking a few every fifteen minutes. Finally it was just Julien and me, out of the 100+ protesters who had been jailed in that precinct in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn. We told each other whoever got out first would wait for the other outside and walk to the metro together. “I’m gonna go crazy if they leave me alone in here for too long, man,” he said. I was called first. Before, everyone had clapped when another protester was released. Now there was no one left to clap. The officer hurried me along as I put on my shoes and belt, placed my things back in my pockets. He said they were about to close and if I didn’t hurry I might be stuck overnight.

“You know where to go?” an officer asked me after I got my tickets and headed to the door. “Be careful out there,” he said. “Put that camera bag on your front.”

When I walked out of the Brooklyn Crown Heights jail at 3:30am there were several people standing across the street in the wet cold. One held a sign saying “Thank you!” and another held one saying “Occupy Precinct 77.” They took my name to give to the Lawyer’s Guild, and sent me around the corner to the welcome station.

Anyone who thinks Occupy Wall Street is unorganized is under-informed. Waiting for me around the corner were several more OWS people with cookies, chips, tobacco, water – all the comforts one craves on such a night. (Aside from beer and a deli sandwich, which came later.) My friends who had been released earlier were there too. As my friend Jon said while we were marching along the bridge, just before the cops sandwiched us – I had never felt more alive.

Occupy Wall Street is a self-explanatory movement. To be in Zucotti Park aka Liberty Plaza is to be in a warm, stimulating, relatively non-monetized community. There is plentiful food, donated by people around the city and around the world. When it rains, people walk around handing out ponchos. When it rains at night, people sleep there anyway. There’s a media and information center with people who, in my experience, were highly accessible. Conversations are happening all around. There’s a library, witty and incisive signs everywhere, meditation groups in the mornings.

Sure, many of the occupiers are too out there for most Americans to identify with. And in our fast-paced, pre-digested media culture the occupiers have befuddled superficial analysts by lacking one clear demand. But the underlying message should be obvious:

Wall Street in its current, loosely regulated, risk-encouraged form = too much private money in politics = rapidly growing wealth disparity = loss of democracy and the American dream.

It’s a message with the potential to truly resonate with the masses – dare I say, to even have party crossover appeal. Some 628 cities around the country and the world (up from 160 in the two days since posting this) - from Birmingham and Wichita to Dallas and Fargo to Tokyo and Tijuana – are preparing to occupy public spaces and condemn elite money in politics. They feel in their gut that now is the time to make something happen. If half of those cities have the audacity, patience and creativity of Occupy Wall Street, change is simply inevitable.

I and many others in my generation have been waiting our entire lives for the opportunity to coalesce our multitudes and right the ethical wrongs we’ve watched our country perpetrate under the guise of democracy. Indeed, for us American democracy has been, if not a guise, then a farce. We’ve come of age watching a president steal arguably two elections and lie his way into a costly war we’re still fighting – a war waged under the flimsy pretense of spreading democracy. Meanwhile the president we thought was the last great hope has fallen in line and largely been cowed by corporate influence – directly as well as indirectly, via the GOP. As a result it has become impossible to ignore the juxtaposition, and indeed causal effect, between steadily rising poverty and exploding wealth in the top 1 percent.

A middle-aged friend of mine, who came from DC to meet me in Liberty Plaza, said this movement reminded him of the Vietnam protests – except those were more social, more fun. People didn’t go to those protests alone, the way some seem to be doing now. There was no specter of economic depression. Now there is. For that reason we may be on the cusp of a global Tahrir Square – and it will be fascinating to watch how each city, state and country reacts.

Of course, major challenges lie ahead. The winter is coming, which will make it harder for people to continue occupying outdoor spaces. And though the movement calls itself the 99 percent, many at the lower end of that group are repelled by the image of a largely white, somewhat middle class movement they see as being ungrateful for what it already has.

But with each passing week the occupation is gaining more momentum and more penetration into mainstream consciousness. This Wednesday, major New York labor unions and NYU student walk-outs will join the march. All signs point to a relentless mounting of pressure. Sooner or later something – or someone – will have to give.

The devolution will be televised

In a perverse way it was the perfect disaster to catch our attention. Two towering monuments to our national identity (or at least that of our elites) spectacularly felled in one swift morning. It was an attack that shocked everyone, immediately. Even if you weren’t in New York, you saw it, heard it, felt it, in your living room or office or almost anywhere you happened to be.

Almost immediately there was a clear enemy group whom you didn’t understand and didn’t have to feel guilty about hating. It was never worthwhile considering their point of view; they were simply deranged, woman-abusing haters of freedom. Most importantly they were all the same – the Saudis who flew the planes were the Arabs who had WMDs in Iraq were the Muslims living in caves in Afghanistan was probably the turbanned man on the street – but was definitely not the Saudis and Iraqis to whom we pay $80 billion per year to fuel our addiction to oil.

“Except for our own Civil War, this [war on terror] is the only war we have fought where we are paying for both sides,” said former CIA director Jim Woolsey. “We are paying for these terrorists with our SUVs.”

The tragedies of 9/11 were gripping, made for TV material. Even in an age of high-metabolism media, the events of one single morning had staying power. They were visual and visceral, and they directed – and distracted from – the greatest disasters of the past decade (constant war and Wall Street’s self-enriching destruction of our economy, respectively). Ten years later they captivate us again, as they will continue to on many anniversaries hence.

But there are other tragedies, other emergencies, evolving over years and decades and even centuries, that can’t seem to get one blue, sunny, Tuesday morning’s worth of news coverage. They aren’t burning – or if they are, understanding what hit them takes more than a video clip. They don’t implicate people on the other side of the world as much as they do us. They’re slow and systemic, and if we began to acknowledge them we’d have to get start getting angry at someone. If we began to truly understand how someone is creating for our children a world that is technology-dependent yet nearly resource-depleted, totally alienated from nature at a time when nature is more unstable than ever – well, we’d have to get angry at ourselves.

But that won’t fit into one morning – and you won’t see it on TV.

On getting jumped

A few nights ago, three friends and I got jumped. I would certainly say we did nothing wrong – but people don’t punch strangers in the face for no reason. They don’t kick a man on his back just because they’re drunk. They flex and yell and physically dominate because they live in a material world where they have no material – and their hopes are fading fast.

Did you know that between 1980 and 2005, 80% of all new income generated in this country went to the richest 1%? That means 99% of us – in other words, you, me and everyone we know, worked our asses off for about 20% of what we deserved. In fact if median income had kept pace with economic growth since 1970, it would now be $92,000, not $50,000. Something’s wrong, folks.

From grades 7-12 I went to school with impoverished blacks from DC. From the beginning, the whites were put in mostly advanced classes thanks to the tracking system – a system that, purposely or not, looked a lot like segregation. In one non-track 8th grade class, a black student at my table started asking me to read him the board. I soon realized that he didn’t have bad eyes – he was illiterate. I had to wonder what kind of home he could possibly come from. Then I had to wonder why he should care about art, or arithmetic, or standardized tests. In 9th grade I watched two black girls rip each other’s earrings out in a playground fight. I watched in awe as a yelling, howling crowd formed around them. I wondered why they were so angry.

Now I know. This country more than ever before is leaving its disadvantaged behind. Meanwhile the few people on top are telling them, in the words of Bill Maher, “Shine my shoes, fuckface.”

No wonder they’re pissed.

I’ve read a few people who have described the anger of the poor much better than I can. Now I’ll turn it over to one of them. The following is from a brilliant book on Bombay called Maximum City, a Pulitzer Prize finalist by Suketu Mehta:

The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve-hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train, they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweat and farts. When they get home to the slum, their mothers and their fathers and their grandmothers will ask them what income they have brought home. Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob, part of a contingent of seventy patriots fighting for the country’s honor, walking unmolested into movie theaters, posh apartments, and the offices of the cricket lords of the country, smashing trophies, beating up important people who drive fine cars. All the accumulated insults, rebukes, and disappointments of life in a decaying megalopolis come out in a cathartic release of anger. It’s okay to be angry in a crowd; the crowd feeds on your anger, digests it, nourishes your rage as your rage nourishes it. All of a sudden you feel powerful. You can take on anybody. It is not their city anymore, it is your city.

You own this city by right of your anger.

 

With shit education, no money and nary a leg up through connections to the professional world, the inter-generationally abused members of our society still, at the end of the day, want something they can be proud of. Don’t we all?