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A table at Zuccotti Park where free cigarettes were given out, taken three days before the OWS eviction. The inscription reads “Falling is still flying Have Hope Mon Ami.” Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
[Editor's Note: In the fall of 2011, Wired hired writer Quinn Norton to embed with the activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement and report back on what she witnessed. Throughout the past year, Norton filed a number of stories about the people behind the movement, the cops sent out to police them, and the clashes that ensued as a result. Now, Norton looks back on the year of Occupy.]“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” — The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
Shit’s fucked up and bullshit. It’s a phrase I learned at Occupy. “Shit’s fucked up!” they would chant in the streets,
“Shit’s fucked up and buuuuuullshit!” … drawing out the full and round and musical U in bullshit. It seems, whatever you think of their protest, this is a point that is impossible to deny. Shit, in America and beyond, is indeed fucked up and bullshit.
My first day covering Occupy was also my first eviction. I went down to see the protest’s midday march on October 5, 2011 in San Francisco. It was huge — the biggest thing I’d seen since the 2003 antiwar protests I’d participated in. It dwarfed anything from the BART protests I’d covered. But what was most remarkable was the response. We didn’t know yet what Occupy would be; there was no hint in the air of what was to come. But something was different from the start. There were honks of support, smiles on the faces of drivers blocked on Market Street. There was an inconvenienced bus driver, pumping his fist in support.
No more articulation than that — but it was enough to make people I was talking to on the net skeptical. We were so unused to the idea that people could want something like this.
By this point we were trapped in the amber of immutable America.
We were trapped in endless war and financial crisis, in debt and downward spiral that our leaders bickered about, but did nothing to stop. It wore away at people with the implacability of geological erosion. The American empire we never wanted in the first place was crumbling slowly, and nothing we did in our lives seemed to matter. We had learned in the past 10 years that we couldn’t change our fates, not with hard work, taking on debt, education, or even trying to live healthy. Even when we wanted to, we could not stop wars, rein in banks, repair our crumbling infrastructure or take care of each other. We couldn’t control medical costs or the price of an education. Gas was going up, temperatures were going up.
Americans themselves lived quiet lives of untold loneliness, socially isolated. But, as we’d come to learn, we’re always watched by our infrastructure’s silent machines. Lonely, but never alone. It had become an authoritarian failing state, but without the authority, or even the sense of change that comes with total failure. We were dying by bits and pieces, going numb and fading away.
It was as if so many of us, myself included, were looking at the protestors and saying, “Please, let something matter again.”
San Francisco’s first eviction, October 5, 2011. After giving Occupy some hours to evacuate, the camp was surrounded by riot police and taken away in city trucks. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
There were probably a thousand people in that march, and maybe 50 living in tents around the Federal Reserve building in San Francisco. They had a library, kitchen, the drummers, information tent — all these things that would become a part of my life in the coming months, but I didn’t know it yet. That night, three nights after the first tents went up in San Francisco, the police came.
Over the course of long and terrible hours, the SFPD evicted the camp. The police were cocky and condescending in ways I found shocking. My own memories seem so guileless to me now. My thoughts about the protesters and police in the early days feel like the memory of another person, so naive that she didn’t even understand that she didn’t understand how the world worked. That night’s eviction had been one of the more violent things I’d seen in civic space since the 1992 riots in my hometown of Los Angeles, just as I was becoming an alleged adult. The stuff of people’s lives was destroyed with little reaction from either side. Perhaps the most violent and shocking thing was the resignation of people losing the materials of their regular lives.
In Oakland, a few weeks later, I called my Wired editor to tell him I needed to expense a gas mask. “I want to tell you that’s ridiculous,” he told me, “but I can’t.” He agreed, and I got my mask.
Oakland was hard for me to work, both logistically and emotionally. They hated the press more than any other Occupy, and faced more violence. But they had the biggest actions, too, and the happiest and most hopeful people I saw in the movement. Children danced at the Port of Oakland closure, marching bands played. “We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!”
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A couple kiss in Oakland as the riot line slowly advances on them, the night after the November 2, 2011 strike and port closure. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
A couple kiss in Oakland as the riot line slowly advances on them, the night after the November 2, 2011 strike and port closure. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
It felt true, until night fell. The old women and children who had closed the port or marched in the street would go home. For those who remained, the nights often came to resemble a moving street battle more than a protest. Lines would advance and fall back, barricades went up, guns were fired, lives were destroyed. The next day, they would rebuild their camps. The camps were ragged, but beautiful too — hung with colored ribbons, cloths, the endless and endlessly decorated signs.
The first time I got teargassed was in Oakland while the line was slowly advancing on the plaza from the north. The police were dark against the night, the lights and flashes glinting off their riot face shields or gas masks. There was a press gaggle to the right of the protesters.
Just as I was running to join the gaggle, someone on the police line popped off a canister at the press. It hit the ground in my path, about six feet away from me. A small fire, a noise, and then white, smoke-like powder rose into the air. Everything in my body tried to run, but I managed to come back after a few steps away. I wasn’t really able to think. In my head, a voice was asking what the hell I was supposed to do now. “I’m one of the press,” I said to myself. “I should go stand with them.” I was very short compared to the other reporters, and the only woman. No one knew me, and no one talked to me. I wasn’t local.
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A line of riot police, wearing gas masks, used LED flashlights to prevent the press from taking photos. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
An old and confused homeless man started walking toward the line. He got within 25 feet of the police when one of them shot him in the leg with a less-lethal round. He screamed like an animal, and collapsed against a wall. Out of nowhere, Occupy Oakland medics rushed to him, carrying him into the cover of a recessed doorway. I took pictures until they carried him out, rushing him in front of the police line, to a station they’d set up that was full of teargassed occupiers.
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Black bloc protestors on Nov. 2, 2011 smashed the windows of several bank locations. This glass shattered into a mirror. Later protesters put up the sign. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
Like many of the West Coast megacamps, Oakland overflowed its plaza.
The second camp was in Snow Park, about five blocks away. I visited in November when it was 15-20 people. Its size would double before the end. The camp’s occupants were noticeably different. They were the slow, the weird, the awkward of Oakland’s Occupy, and told me that they’d been exiled from the main camp and sent here. The man who seemed to lead the group told me that they were seen as a drag on Occupy Oakland and were sent over here to get them out of the way.
Snow Park was used by drug addicts at night, and the park was habitually littered with used needles. Office workers in the surrounding high-rise buildings were hostile toward the Occupiers when they first showed up, he told me. But when the people from the offices saw them cleaning and tending the park and talked to them, the office next door sent over sandwiches for lunch.
I could see how the BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) crowd of Occupiers at the plaza might not want the slow pacifists around. The Snow camp people went back to the plaza for meals and General Assembly meetings, but they were otherwise marginalized. Again.
Occupy Oakland was, at times, almost as cruel and sick as the city of Oakland, a city with a history of poverty, racism, and desperate hope. Oakland had always been a microcosm of how America had failed a segment of its people. In California’s Bay Area, they’d migrated together, trying to resuscitate community in the face of often indifferent and sometimes hostile governance. The civic masters of Oakland had brutally taken away the humanity of its people, and the people responded by acting, at times, barely human. There’s nothing new to that. It’s the most predictable cycle in the world, and the problems of Occupy Oakland fit into the context of Oakland.
Back at the main plaza, I witnessed people at Occupy Oakland body-tackle and subdue a screaming, running woman. I took a picture.
Three people came over from the tackle and menaced me, a few inches from my face. I stood and stared at them. I told them they should tell me why they tackled her. They just told me to get out or else, and I waited for them to do something to me. While the woman screamed in the background, a very large man took me aside and said that in the recent arrests some protesters’ psych meds were taken away and not returned. He explained that the woman was one of them. The camp had tried to get the meds back from police, but were ignored. They were doing the best they could to take care of the mentally ill as they lapsed back into their diseases.
I told him, “You should have told me that instead of threatening me.” He apologized for the threats, but also made it clear they didn’t want me photographing the incident. What could I say? I had no way to verify his story. He could have been lying. But I knew the police had kept property seized from protesters, and every reasonable explanation for the scene I’d just witnessed was equally horrid and likely as the one he gave me. I hoped she would be alright.
But I couldn’t prove a damn thing.
Journalism is like that sometimes — there’s what you’re pretty sure you know, and what you can say. I couldn’t say for sure those shipped off to Snow Park were the short-bus kids, or that the woman getting physically restrained was being protected from herself. Both looked true to me, but all I had was my instincts. Besides, I had to leave soon for New York. I had worked stories at Occupy San Francisco, then headed south to Occupy Long Beach and L.A., and then raced back to Northern California the night Oakland was evicted. It was time to go east. I let both stories fall away, but they haunted me.
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The Audre Lorde to Howard Zinn library, at Occupy Boston in Dewey Square, on the night of Dec. 1. Nine days later the camp was evicted. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
Occupy Life
I traveled around to 14 of the protest camps, moving west to east. I saw the institutions and customs of camp life in a kind of reverse evolution, going later to the Ur-camp of OWS in lower Manhattan, to Boston, DC, and finally farthest east to Finsbury Square in London.People used to say the camps smelled.
They didn’t, usually. Occupy Oakland smelled, but not until after the eviction.
Occupy San Francisco smelled terribly, I was told by the occupiers, but I never knew why that one did in particular. DC had a terrible rat problem, but that was because DC has a terrible rat problem. The camp itself wasn’t so bad. As a journalist who stayed in the camps, I resented the police making a show of putting on hazmat suits during the evictions.
Occupiers were often poor, struggling, sick, even at times deranged, but in every camp I stayed in the residents poured huge effort into trying to keep things clean, under the circumstances. The reported Occuplague was a cold that spread around during regular cold season. I got it — hell, I might have brought it to new camps — it wasn’t a bad cold. There were no major influenza outbreaks despite it being flu season. Sick people tended to leave the camp, and return when they felt better. Each major camp had its medical consciousness and care embedded right in it in the form of the medic tent. The medics’ constant presence and patter made people, even myself, think about all those things our distant doctors had been telling us for years about keeping our hands clean and getting flu shots.
The tents were each their own world once you were inside. Some of them were perfect little homes, some were shooting galleries stained with feces. Most were just what a tent looks like when you’re trying to live in it. There was always a problem with trying to prevent the less-aware smokers from lighting their tents and camp on fire. Every major camp I visited had fire extinguishers, and many had to use them.
The common tents were usually cluttered, but not filthy. The Info tent, a gathering point for logistics and organizing, was always overrun with flyers. There were often common tents like Sign-making and Comfort that were fun to explore. The libraries in every camp were treated as sacred, and they were. They were all open and well-stocked with how-to and educational books, political tracts across the spectrum, novels and literature.
They were true libraries, trusting and trusted places. They were well-lit and quiet, kept as warm as possible through the fall and into winter. You could feel in the air how much the people loved the libraries. In Toronto, when the eviction came, they chained themselves around the library. In DC during the eviction, the librarians accepted being locked in for hours without food or water or bathrooms just to protect their library.
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Molly Crabapple, an artist who lives by Zuccotti, created art for the Occupy movement. This year she painted the park, and her vision of the movement. Photo: Molly Crabapple
The medical tent was always cluttered, but looked after carefully by the medics — except in DC, where all the medics had moved on to other camps. I always visited Media and let them know who I was. I spent a lot of time in the Women’s tent in a couple of camps. They tended to be quiet retreats, and I appreciated that. The Women’s tent in Boston, a green winterized army surplus affair, had been dropped over the wall from the underground freeway offramp by Dewey Plaza in the very early morning to defeat the Boston PD’s embargo of materials for the camp. Whatever it takes.
I almost never went into the DA (Direct Action) tent, the working group that planned protest actions, marches, and occupations. Press was, for understandable reasons, asked to not enter DA. I respected this, in part to remind myself I was in, but not of, Occupy.
I integrated into nearly every part of the lives of the people I was studying, but I never wanted any of us to forget that I was an outsider. In my postmodern media landscape, it’s been a continual problem where I am part of the story, and therefore part of creating it. Sometimes it was as simple as asking about things I’d seen at other camps, and then having the occupiers look at each other and decide to create the thing I’d just asked about. I was, by my presence, my mode of travel, and even my reporting, a mechanism of information-sharing between Occupy camps.
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More than a thousand occupiers gathered as morning dawned on Foley Square, after being driven away from Zuccotti the night of the OWS eviction. While some held a GA many others, exhausted, fell asleep on the ground. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
Zuccotti Park and the Pain in Hope
I moved on to New York in early November. I was doing it all as fast as I could, but I didn’t know it wasn’t fast enough. When I got to New York, the original Occupy Wall Street only had a week, but no one knew that.Zuccotti was so small. There was no room in the park — I could only sleep one night on site. It was crammed not just with occupiers, but all the little institutions they invented: the community kitchen, the comfort tent, the nic table, Media, Information, a place to teach classes, another to hold forth. Some would replicate everywhere, others, like the nic table, were only ever in Zuccotti.
My favorite place in camp was the sacred tree. It was a little tree, different from all the other pruned and identical trees of Zuccotti. It was in the western, “bad” neighborhood, next to the drum circle. The tree had shelves leaned against it, and they were a riot of colors and gods — full of the tiny bits of sacred matter humans focus their hopes on.
The sacred tree had a circle of low stone benches around it. There was a boy who smudged everyone with the smoke from a sage bundle. There were songs, and a girl who played a beautiful banjo like it was the whole world. I would sit there for too much time, awed by what I was seeing around me, wanting so much for it to go better than Oakland had. I was already tired.
I found a little carved wooden statue of the Hindu god Ganesha here. I knew him as the overcomer of obstacles, and I’d always liked him. Normally one puts candy at the feet of Ganesha, but I had a specific request to make of him, my little prayer for New York. In Oakland we’d collected rubber bullets from the night Scott Olsen was shot in the head with a gas canister. Here, 3,000 miles away, I was still carrying some of them with me. I put one of the bullets at Ganesha’s feet and said, “Please, please help this be better than Oakland was. Please let this be safe. Please let this be something.”
I pulled in an Occupier friend and showed him the bullet at Ganesha’s feet, and he nodded. But I could see he had no idea what I was talking about. He told me later he’d forgotten about it until he was on the bus headed to jail, the camp destroyed behind him. Then, he said, he finally understood. He told me he thought about it a lot.
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A statue of the Hindu god Ganesha at Zuccotti Park with a small round rubber bullet from Occupy Oakland at his feet. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
The people of Zuccotti were at the end of something. They’d come to this place as a refuge, not from danger, but still a refuge. OWS was a place where you didn’t have to pretend it was all OK. At the end of a near-fight on the rough west side, a young black man was pinned to the ground by fellow occupiers, while an even younger white kid danced around him, daring him to get up, taunting him with racist cliches, in the slurred and corrupted English of the American uneducated.
“It’s fucked up!” a man on the ground said, with that cortisol-strained last note, excited and exhausted, his muscles fatigued from holding on to the edge of readiness and never being used. And a woman, holding him down, replied, “That’s why we’re here.” She paused.
“That’s why we’re doing this.”
Occupy faced what is real in a way that so much of regular life never does. We deputize people, actual deputies, to make the hard parts of life disappear. But that’s all they do, make things disappear. They don’t deal with it, they don’t understand it. They don’t embrace it, and hold it on the ground until it calms down. They just beat on it until it finds a place to hide. In the end, that’s what they did to Occupy, too.
Like the America that contained it, Occupy was never merely its institutions. Which is good, because for the most part, Occupy’s institutions failed its multitudes of amazing people.
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Zuccotti Park, the home of the original Occupy Wall Street protest, through time. Clockwise from top left: The day before eviction, the day of the eviction, decorated with Christmas lights in early December, and in February of this year. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
The Rise and Fall of the General Assembly
The Occupy GA was a consensus committee lifted from the Spanish protests against EU austerity measures in the summer of 2011. It was the organizing principle of Occupy.The GA was the constitution, crown, and divine right of Occupy. All authority flowed from the process, but it was more than this. Something that, in a matter of months, was baked into the social order. The GA built things, managed money, let people who society had long been kept apart speak to and listen to each other.
The GA process also became part of everyday life: the queue, called “stack”; the people’s mic; consensus; arguments and counter arguments; points of information; blocking. Fights and logistical problems fell into little GAs, and the GA became a way of organizing thought. Hand gestures, called twinkles in New York, let groups express their feelings in silence. All of it migrated into the culture of camp life. After a while in the camps, you put your concerns “on stack,” and you twinkled people in conversation as a phatic. At first, like so many parts of Occupy, it was a wonder to see.
But living in parks, having to rub elbows with the people society was set up to shield from each other, began to stress people and make them twitchy from constant culture shock. Grad students trying to reason with smack addicts was torture for both sides. The GA became the main venue for this torture, and sitting through it was like watching someone sandpaper an open wound. Everyone said “Fuck the GA” as a joke, but as time wore on, the laughter was getting too long and too hoarse; a joke with blood in it. The metaphorical pain became less metaphorical with each eviction, with the gnawing feeling that something was coming.
Because the GA had no way to reject force, over time it fell to force. Proposals won by intimidation; bullies carried the day. What began as a way to let people reform and remake themselves had no mechanism for dealing with them when they didn’t. It had no way to deal with parasites and predators. It became a diseased process, pushing out the weak and quiet it had meant to enfranchise until it finally collapsed when nothing was left but predators trying to rip out each other’s throats.
By the time I returned to NY from visiting the camp in DC, exhausted with the pain of six evictions, the NYC GA was a place where women were threatened with beatings, and street kids with calls to the police. All the reasonable people had gotten the fuck out. It had become a gladiator pit no one enjoyed watching. Even Weev, the famous internet troll, didn’t last through the nastiness of the GA I took him to. He left while I wasn’t looking, without saying goodbye. We never spoke about it. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t have to ask why. It was the tiny, brutal, and bitter politics of failed people.
This is what the GA became in so many places.
“I saw women trying to talk, trying to question where the money was going,” an occupier in San Francisco named Morgan told me, “and the meth fiends running finance would get directly in their faces (and) give them the meth glare from just inches away. People would try to pull them back, and within a minute they’d be doing it again. No one got into Occupy to get into physical conflicts with speedfreaks.”
After pouring all his spare time and expertise into Occupy Morgan too left, defeated by the process. “I think all of us who believed in it feel the failure as part of ourselves. It was really difficult to see what it had become.”
The idea of the GA — its process, its form, inclusiveness — failed. It had all the best chances to evolve, imprinted on the consciousness of thousands of occupiers like a second language. No idea gets a better chance than that, and it still failed.
Fuck the GA. Bury it at a crossroads, staked through the heart, and pray it never rises again.
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Collections of protest signs tiled the ground at many camps, such as this one from DC’s 2nd Occupy camp. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
A Vacancy of Voice
It’s the job of a media to tell the truth to its society, but Occupy’s homegrown media refused to tell itself the truth about what was going wrong in the camps. That let the arbiters of truth become a few young men who figured out how to stream video from their cellphones. The livestreamers got drunk off their modicum of fame, behaving as tiny entitled prophets to the movement. Their ethics were incoherent, what they filmed was arbitrary, but they mistook randomness for truth. They had just discovered documenting events, and thousands of people flocked to see them do it. But without any traditions of narrative, they didn’t see their own commentary enter the story, how every shot and angle and word overlaid was editorial.There was no critique in Occupy, no accountability. At first it didn’t matter, but as life grew messy and complicated, its absence became terrible. There wasn’t even a way to conceive of critique, as if the language had no words to describe the movement’s faults to itself. There was at times explicit gagging of Occupy’s media teams by the camp GA, to prevent anything that could be used to damage the movement from reaching the wider media. Self-censorship plagued those who weren’t gagged, because everyone was afraid of retaliation. No one talked about the systemic and growing abuses in the camps, or the increasingly poisonous GAs.
Journalist Adam Rothstein showed up on the day of the first march in Portland and was there every day until their eviction, two days before Zuccotti’s. He started off with sanitation and doing the dishes, moved to media, and eventually started their paper, the Portland Occupier, independent from the GA.
“One of the main reasons I wanted to have the PO separate from the GA, is I wanted, from the very beginning, a means within the process for booting people out. The GA had no such process,” he said.
His original idea was to tell positive stories from the camp. He worked with media teams from Boston, LA, Chicago, and New York, and traveled to other camps to get the stories out. In time, Rothstein came to see that Occupy’s media needed to tell all the stories of what was going on: the wonderful and the terrible. By then it was too late.
I asked him if the movement’s media had failed it. “Yeah,” he replied:
Not failed for lack of trying, per se. Failed for inexperience, and failed for lack of seeing just how important that role was. Failed for tactical missteps, in not making a big enough impact as media, and failed for strategic missteps, of not taking a critical enough approach.“We needed Homage to Catalonia,” he told me later, referring to George Orwell’s book on being part of the failed coalition of anarchists, liberals and Communists who fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s. Instead of Orwell’s eloquent honesty, Occupy got egomaniacal live streamers.
What we really needed was someone to speak with compassion, as occupiers, about what occupiers were doing wrong. That small blade edge was so fine, given the criticism we were getting from the corporate media, given the criticism we were getting from supposed allies on the left, and given the few tools, resources, and talent we had to work with.
There was always more we could have done. But I don’t think anyone was really aware of how dire the situation was, and how slim our chances were of making it past what the larger media environment wanted us to be.
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Horses and riot police bearing down on people in McPherson Square at Occupy DC during a 12-hour eviction. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
A Brutal Response
After the coordinated evictions and the rising ferality of the remaining camps, people with means were hemorrhaging out of the parks. The rest, even me, were feeling abandoned. Occupy was becoming the second most fucked-up group of people in the parks.The first was still definitely the police.
The police were the most scared and most sadistic people at every scene. There was often mortal fear in their eyes, and they, full of disdain and constant readiness, stood their line against the protestors. The riot gear they wore was not comfortable or cool — it required a riot. But these tiny villages spent most of their time just trying to keep life going. Every interaction with the police was all or nothing; non-engagement or total war, or at least, what war looks like when one side is completely unarmed, and the other side playing to the media.
Some of the police hated Occupy, the inarticulate hate of someone facing an incomprehensible and thus not fully human enemy. Most of them were sure that the occupiers were much worse than they really were. They were eaten by terror of Occupy, because they were eaten by terror of everything. In places like New York and Oakland, the police were under constant threat — from their departments.
New York Chief Ray Kelly’s focus on statistical success turned NYPD into an organization of hatred and fear with policies like Stop and Frisk, and any deviation from policy is severely punished, sometimes by fellow officers. Oakland faced impossible orders to violently subdue a town blighted by poverty, racial issues, and a failing civil society — while never being brutal. But brutality is soaked into the police force’s bones so deeply the department faces a possible federal receivership.
The most authoritarian-controlled population in America is its prisoners, but second to that is its law enforcement. Even soldiers have more rights to refuse orders and get redress from the chain of command, not to mention access to the military’s seemingly limitless budget. Police departments are always on the edge of disaster, often trying to get the money for their departments via counter-terrorism funding from the federal government.
If you’re a cop in America, either terrorists are around every corner, or layoffs are. I wondered, how many cops slamming old priests into walls in New York were fantasizing they could be knocking out Ray Kelly’s front teeth?
The police would quietly tell stories of their own to me. Never attributable, never usable in the normal course of journalism. They were the terrible things that go on in dark places in America, the things that hurt them, that turned their assumptions about other people so dark. They talked of picking up the same junkies again and again, of returning beaten girls to their tormentors, powerless to stop the sickening cycle of violence. One told me he’d covered up a disturbing sex crime. I looked at him questioningly, and he explained that the powerlessness of the victim meant the best he could do was let them escape into the night. We were both distressed, but him with a gun, and me with a pen, were both powerless. On TV, police were supposed to have near-magical technology, able to fix all the problems of society in an hour with room for commercial breaks. The media also represented their culture to them as one of torturers: sadistic men doing whatever to get the job done, whether it was via 24 or the news out of Gitmo. In real life, they often felt frustrated and angry. Many, though never all, had forgotten the role of mercy within power.
Standing next to an older officer after one eviction, telling him what I’d seen and listening to him worry about how he was going to send his kids to college, I overheard the police talk to each other. Of the protestors they kept saying the same thing, the same three words to each other and walked away: “They’ll be back.” Some said it with scorn, lips curled. Some said it with fear, some excited for the action. Some said it with the watery voices of drowning hope: “They’ll be back.”
Please, let something matter again, let something change.
The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. “You may go through your constitutional ritual,” they intoned, “but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.” We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.
By late November, in the midst of the crumbling little societies, I was forgetting how to feel things. I started to take lovers the way war reporters drink. It wasn’t really to numb things — by late November I was entirely numb. I was made of ironic flesh, packed in styrofoam, a pair of eyes, a tape recorder, a camera, a staple of jokes.
I was doing unhealthy things just to feel anything again. I didn’t even argue theory much after New York. Weeks before, I’d stay up all night to talk about ways the people around me wanted to make a new world. I’d write my stories exhausted, but fascinated. Now I just asked about evac plans and took pictures of everything from every angle. I documented the sights and sounds of Occupy like an ornithologist on a sinking island, surrounded by its last birds. And after New York, I arrived at new camps ready to give last rites. I had little mental rituals at each new camp where I tried to spot who would get arrested and predict who would be beaten. The police always obliged.
As the camps became darker, the women mostly left, and those who remained were grateful to just be left alone. By my count Occupy had dropped from as high as 40 percent women to less then 10 percent, in an atmosphere of sexual violence, bare intimidation and hatred. By then for a certain kind of occupier, anything with breasts was a target in the camps, either for scorn or being too sexy or being insufficiently sexy. It was never the majority, but the majority did nothing to stop it. They had a progressive stack in the GA that purported to let women speak first, but no one talked about the comments, the groping, the rumors of rapes.
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The barricades at Occupy DC, in McPherson Square, were used to close off successive slices of the park during the eviction, penning the occupiers into smaller and smaller spaces. Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired
Piecing Together a Lost Humanity
By the end of the camps, it seemed we disappointed ourselves again, that Americans couldn’t change things. But that wasn’t true. “The inspiration that Occupy provided … politicized people who didn’t know that this aspect of themselves existed,” said Morgan. “Friends who just months beforehand had been too afraid of arrest to attend the BART protests eventually came to march proudly beside returned Iraq War veterans. Even if it didn’t work, it did change people.”From the beginning there were two main parts to Occupy. There was the cause of economic justice — the idea that resources shouldn’t be distributed so unevenly. This idea, in its myriad forms, drove marches and injected the rhetoric of the “99 percent” into the political dialogue. This was what the press often thought Occupy was all about.
Less understood was the other part of Occupy — the part that was about the need for community. Occupiers came to the camps to care for others as much as they came to be cared for. People had to find a way to matter to each other in ways that weren’t mediated by the social services, the justice system, the institutions we stick each other into.
It was this need to serve each other, not any political message, that stocked the kitchens and filled the comfort barrels. It was that which kept volunteers up for days, taking care of drug addicts and neurotic students and old men with failing bodies.
By DC, the last eviction I wrote about, not even I could stay outside this need anymore. We all stood on the police line, cold and wet and sad, 12 hours into the rainy eviction. We took blows and kicks from riot police and SWAT rather than step on the people behind us that had slipped in the mud. We had relearned in each argument and every pitched tent that the fundamental job of humans is to care for one another, to keep each other whole and safe.
It was this drive which linked arms and quietly waited for violence in front of a thousand TV cameras the world over — this, and nothing more.
The world says you need a thick skin. Occupy didn’t say that. It didn’t deny pain, or the time it takes to suffer that pain. They came to call each other brother and sisters. In the exhaustion that followed the Zuccotti eviction, a man got on the people’s mic and spoke to the stragglers, the homeless, the not-yet arrested. “You all have become my family in the last 43 days,” he said over the strange echo of many throats. “You’re all so beautiful. I love you all. No matter why you’re here tonight know you’re doing the right thing.”
When it was time to write my final pieces, I cried. I cried purgative tears, I cried what had built up in me over the weeks and months, but also I cried because it was a genuine moment. The numbness fell away and left me raw and aching. I apologized to the lovers and friends. I cried with my family, with my editor, with anyone who would sit with me. It wasn’t just the pain of the evictions. I cried in apprehension of watching people re-learning how to take care of themselves and each other, for failing, for trying again. I cried, too, for myself.
There was no real cynical distance in this movement. It was the opposite of politics that way; it was dirty and smelly and dark, and if you scratch past the patina of personal cynicism, every heart was made of crazy-glued porcelain. Every body was made of scars.
No one walked away from Occupy the same person. The occupiers will always say “we learned so much,” and the simplicity of the words belie how deep the change runs. We all learned so much in the season of Occupy. We learned there is a hostile army threaded through our nation. We learned that children can be casually brutalized, just to keep traffic from being inconvenienced.
We learned that Americans can come together and care for one another. We learned there is a great and terrible spirit in this land, the sleeping giant of our spirits summed together.
We don’t read about Occupy a lot in the wider media anymore. The pain from within the camps, and even more, the destruction from outside gutted much of the movement we called Occupy Wall Street. But the spirit is still stirring. In dozens of foreclosure defenses across the country, in the Rolling Jubilee, and in the ongoing story of Occupy Sandy, where many of those who had practiced in the parks managed to outperform the infrastructure of disaster. Organizations like FEMA, the National Guard, and the Red Cross failed to help a lot of people in New York in the wake of the hurricane. In many cases, it was the occupiers who got food and clothes to those who needed them, doctors to victims in the field, who comforted the lost, wounded, and broke, just as they always had.
Walking on the stones of Zuccotti at 1 a.m. on a February night, surrounded by police and private guards and the bronze man at the sacred tree who, in his non-sentient way, sat through it all, I began to feel the spirit of the place welling up through my soles. These stones were infused with something that the police and the powerwashing hadn’t driven away. They’d been soaked with the tears and sweat and sometimes blood of the children of present and future who lived here. It still poured out of the stones, like the ghost of an unrestful place.
The police stepped lightly on the stones of Zuccotti, and for the first time I could see that their steps had the quality of fear, fear of something too big and close to be seen, this thing that frightened the NYPD. Amongst the great edifices of lower Manhattan and the power of our nation, was the realization that it couldn’t last. The constructions of the great and good society were fated to fall.
On the night of Nov. 15, they hadn’t merely shot the messenger. They’d done that too, but they’d beat the people that had come back from the future with lifeboats. Like Anonymous and Piratbyrån before them, OWS was a messenger from the future, not so much fighting the system as explaining to the old way of doing things that it had already lost. That future, still nebulous, soaked into the nondescript stones of Zuccotti. But the old world around us had rejected the message from the new world, never understanding that theirs was a mission of mercy to the lost.
The future was still coming and Bloomberg’s army had only guns to fight time.
Comment: A great article I just saw today online. Definitely #OWS has passed it peak and will not be revived again, not with the electricity it had in its earlier days. It has become scattered out, more dispersed into other forms of social activism. It did not have the needed vanguard out-in-front leadership and structured organization mandatory for successful social movements, especially if it is to develop and blossom into a larger matrix for raising a mass collective consciousness. We need a flexible structured matrix that is built for sustainability with enough built-in flexibility to go underground completely if needed and be able to rise up on demand. Sometimes we need to be shape-shifters. ~Che Peta AKA Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan c/s
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