On Wednesday, I had the privilege of visiting the #OccupyWallStreet protest at Liberty Plaza in New York City. I shot some video, I listened to the organizers and I marched. I had a falafel and some juice.
What struck me the most about the developing scene set at the base of high-rises and bustling businesses was the sense of camaraderie and community. Several news articles have focused on the demographics present at the protest, some decrying the whole thing as youthfully naive and lacking direction, others praising the belief system, regardless of intent, inherently required to last what has now been almost two weeks. To me, the inclination to determine exactly what the point of #OccupyWallStreet is, or to corral the definition of the people who are partaking, is an unfortunate by-product of our culture of instant gratification, our 24-hour tickerification of the news, and our fine-tuned inability to make judgements about one another.
To be sure, I am slightly nervous that the current faces of the movement, those faces that aim to represent the identity of the 99%, are a bit outside of the mainstream to make the movement entirely relatable to the masses. It is not that I personally have any trouble identifying with the movement's current leaders -- mostly smiling, somewhat tattooed artists, new media professionals, modern-day flower children and assorted free-spirited, free-thinking inspirers -- it is that I fear they underestimate the nature of the bulk of the nation's low-income and vanishing Middle Class Americans who agree ideologically with #OccupyWallStreet but may not, in their daily lives, interact with folks as bohemian, enigmatic and willing as they. So, I am not-so-secretly hoping that there will be an effort to...pardon my french...normal-ize the identity of this movement for it to grow beyond the plaza, out past the cultural meccas of New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago. Something as simple as a few thousand union members signing on for the long haul could turn this trick in one fell swoop.
This is not to say that only kids are in Liberty Plaza. Quite the contrary is the case. I saw a union construction worker, afflicted with lung disease resulting from his efforts at the World Trade Center, with a well-trafficked booth/stand set up. I saw dozens of every-day grown ups partaking in and leading break-out organizational sessions. In fact, one conversation I had with a painter of roughly 55 years of age struck me as most central to the #OccupyWallStreet action: she stressed patience. The revolution we saw this year in Egypt, she said, took five years to cultivate. It started with some young leaders. It started in one place. And it wasn't reported by Anderson Cooper back then. We didn't Tweet about it then. But it was happening. And this, she insisted, was no different, if not wholly identical.
The mini-documentary, below, of my Day 12 participation -- "What Kind of Pie? Occupy!" -- was meant to convey the very interactive human element of the protest, the aspect that I see as currently driving this thing, the glue that holds together these disparate walks of life whom the public desperately wants to make a decision about.
The participants have created a kind of sign language/group chant hybrid to circumvent the illegality of using microphones. The way it works? The speaker addresses the crowd as loud as they comfortably can and, in unison, the crowd repeats what was said so everyone can hear it. A modified jazz hands/make-the-winner gesture, alternatively, indicates silent agreement, while a hands-out-in-front kind of zombie pose means you're not yet sure how you feel. This is how the hive mind works at #OccupyWallStreet. They groupthink everything.
There are various volunteer teams with self-selected leaders: Food team; Information team; Sanitation team; Comfort team. There is even a Media Team (...not just the kind that tirelessly edits video under an umbrella while it rains) which during my visit was offering "media training" to help people understand how to talk with the ever-encroaching media. This was a practice made famous in the music industry by Berry Gordy who, as the founder of Motown Records, ran a sort of all-in-one lifestyle cabal wherein the record label's artists -- often young and frequently hailing from upbringings that less-than-prepared them for the spotlight -- were offered guidance on everything from popular beauty techniques to magazine interviews and back. The media trainings in particular I found to represent the movement's interest in reaching beyond the plaza.
The march was the most exciting aspect as several very cool cheers ("We are the 99 percent...and so are you!") blasted through the streets. I volunteered my car to transport cooked food, but nobody has called me yet. They wrote my name and number in a composition notebook under a drawing someone had scribbled in their spare time. Truly, I only half expected them to call. After all, 38,000 Transport Workers Union members are headed there next Wednesday. I think they'll have all the manpower they need.