Occupy Wall Street

There is a statue of George Washington across from the New York Stock Exchange, on Wall Street. It’s banked by steps where tourists often stand, to get their pictures taken in the heart of American capitalism.  But at present, it’s difficult to get close to the old man. Around him, and around the steps are barricades, the metal kind, linked together to contain the statue, and the steps, from passersby. One can enter the steps, but only by passing through a narrow gap, policed by Federal police (because this is a federal monument). Some of the police are, oddly, wearing SWAT uniforms – as if someone was about to start a riot, or start shooting the street up. Not that they’d get very far, because Wall Street itself is barricaded, both at the ends, and along the edge of the sidewalk. It’s tricky to maneuver in this old lane. This, not coincidentally is also where Occupy Wall street activists are currently… occupying.

The original location had of course been Zuccotti Park, a hundred yards away. Since mid-march there was an occupation at Union Square, twenty blocks north, nightly cleared by police. Now the group, the stalwarts who hold down the space, have got prime real estate, one half of the steps, within the barricades, directly across from the stock exchange. But it’s a nerve grinding space of harassment and intimidation. I went by there yesterday for an hour or so. I was with Sidney and Mac and an Irishman and his three year old Scarlett. We had a stroller with us. We were told immediately that we couldn’t bring  the stroller into the steps. But we couldn’t leave it beside the steps either. In fact, we couldn’t stop touching it at any time. So we took turns holding onto it, outside the barriers, on the sidewalk as we stayed within the barricade.

It was a motley collection of folks inside the barricade. Most Occupy activists are busy elsewhere – organizing for Mayday, simply getting on with their lives, maybe going to meetings or organizing in their neighbourhood or workplace. Those who spend time here are able to do so for a variety of reasons. There was the one young man, about 25, bearded, holding a hand lettered sign from the AIDS march earlier in the day, that read how he lost two uncles to AIDS and that the government needed to tax the rich to end the ongoing deaths. He told me that he’d been at Occupy since the first day, and that his family is worried.”I’ll get a job”, he explained – but not until after Mayday. There was the veteran peace activist who had trained the young ones in Non violent civil disobedience. He’d been there a lot, and was tired but angry. He told us about how he’d been told that he could hold a sign, but not lean it against anything. When he’d been there the previous night, he rested it against his knees and the police snatched it. He put on his Guy Fawkes mask after a while and sat there quietly. The tall, young, African American man, silently holding his sign about human rights. The gaggle of college students talking about their courses. The older white woman with her canvas shopping bag. And the young, white man who was celebrating his 21^st birthday.  His long hair held back with an American flag bandanna, he argued that we needed to work together to resist the penny harassment. I agreed wholeheartedly. Because it’s the little things that are wearing people down. After a while, one of the federal police told us that we needed to remove the stroller. I asked him if we could put it up at the top of the steps or where we might put it and he advanced on me threateningly, yelling ‘didn’t you understand what I said?! Get rid of it!’ This of course meant that the stroller and its owners had to go. I walked with them to the end of the street and then returned to do some reading. Ironically, I was reading a book on the Public Sphere and 19^th century social movements. I tried to return to the steps and was told that only 25 people were allowed to sit in the ‘protest’ side – 25 filling maybe 20% of the space there. So I went to the other side of the statue. Unfortunately here, no one was allowed to speak loudly or sing, a fact we quickly learned when some folks tried to sing a version of Officer Krumpsky from West Side Story. Nor were we allowed to hold signs.  I tried to be tricky, simply holding up the title of the book as I read, hoping it would speak for itself. However, the idea caught on and people got sheets of the latest ‘Occupy’ newspaper and held them up as they were reading them. Immediately, we were all cleared from the ‘protest’ side of the steps. Spilling onto the sidewalk, one older activist held onto one of the barricades, rattling it. Immediately, he was tackled and arrested. No one was really sure what the charges were. Every day there are arrests like these, they don’t make the paper, and they are intended to dissuade anyone interested in protesting. It can work. As I was about to leave an older white man got onto the steps, called on the passing tourists to support these young people. He explained, “I came out of the civil rights movement, and I am proud to be here today with these young people as they defend our rights and our freedoms. God bless ‘em.” Despite the messiness and lack of clarity around what’s unfolding on those steps, I think that their endurance is a sign of how committed some of the people mobilized by OWS are. If they aren’t worn down by the police and the neglect around them, it bodes well for the larger struggle to create a fairer world.