Text by Jim Hoey
Video by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi
A quick visit to Wall Street these days reveals a lot: it’s business as usual around Zucotti, or Liberty Park, bankers and stockbrokers pass by unmolested on their way to the next meeting or power lunch, and 2 massive towers rise up from within a camp of construction workers at Ground Zero. But the camp in the public park is unlike anything Wall Street has seen for a long time, and this ragtag group of Occupy Wall Street protesters are still out en masse, trying to hunker down and keep up the momentum of their fight through the windy Fall and chilling Winter.
Here at this site, we’ve been covering the protests, and the music that’s been heard around it, for a few weeks now. Any protest against corruption, inequality and injustice is not easy to dismiss, especially when it’s peaceful and has staying power, and it draws from all elements of society, as this one does.
In the first moments of the protest, which is now just over a month old, it was common to hear voices from the right trying to smear the efforts of these activists as just another group of smash- the-state anarchists crying about everything, ready to go wild in the streets. But with the first barrage of 700 arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge, and the videos of blatant police brutality that followed, it became difficult to write this protest off. More and more people from all over came out to support and march, and similar events around the country and the world sprung up in solidarity
As I visited the site yesterday with my friend and editor Sohrab, I had all this in mind. I had been able to go down once before but I was just passing by, I didn’t walk inside the park or interact at all. This time it was different. We were going to try to interview a guy who claimed to be a leader and starter of the protest, and also a victim of police brutality, (it seemed like an interesting angle).
When we got there, though, we couldn’t get in touch with the guy, so we just walked around and took in the scene anyway. In the span of maybe 2 hours, we saw the whole spectrum of what these protests are about.
First off, this is a spectacle, intended to stop you, draw your attention, and break you out of your routine. Yes, the music on the west side is always going, threatening to drown out your conversation at any turn, and the drummers are banging away on shoddy looking buckets, and anything they can get their hands on in one side of the park, while a quartet 20 yards away are doing a mini-classical concerto, and 30 yards away from that a guitarist, accordion player and singer are doing Woody Guthrie covers.
The signs you see all over are on the backs of pizza boxes or cardboard from the garbage, only some are pro, and the messages on them range from the inspiring and profound to the silly and stupid. Tourists pass by smiling and curious, snapping pictures of everything, no doubt wondering what took Americans so long to get pissed off. Then some 20-year old stumbles by, looking dazed and confused, sleepy in slippers, hairy, smoking a cigarette, looking for something.
People are sleeping alone in bags in the middle of the afternoon. Then you notice that all around you at once are hundreds of little conversations, interviews with radio and TV reporters, people asking each other why they are here. Some are pissed about the bail out, some people lost houses and jobs, some want to eradicate the federal reserve, anti-Frackers want to educate you about how mixing water and chemicals to drill for natural gas is going to kill people and the companies don’t care, Union workers are there to complain about health care and be interviewed by clean Fox News reporters, the Muslims want to lay down their rugs and bow and pray in the direction of Mecca while their Imam talks about the Prophet’s last sermon and how they are also part of the 99% and deserve a place here too. Gay-rights activists might also stop by and share the space with everyone to remind you that they are not going away.
In one spot, people are taking turns pedaling a stationary bicycle connected to a car battery to make energy to charge cell phones and laptops. A guy with a face tattoo is standing next to a Native American Indian in silence, holding a sign about socialism that some people are too nervous to read. You might see Russel Simmons walk through with a crowd stopping and hanging on his every word, phones up, record on.
The whole park yesterday looked incredibly chaotic, yet organized at the same time. (“This is what Democracy looks like”, turns out to be a pretty good chant.) And it’s undeniably inspiring to witness so much energy and community uniting for a common cause. People are pissed and they want the government to do something about it. They want to see politicians like Mayor Bloomberg and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney stroll by for a visit, and ask them how they can better represent the people.
What I think I’m going to ask the next to we go down is, “How long are you going to stay out here?”, and “What will it take for you to be satisfied?”. The big, “What next?” question is hanging in everyone’s minds and in the air, which is noticeably getting a little bit colder every day.
Check below for some of our videos from October 21, 2011.
