LETTERS FROM OCCUPYAmerica

Zuccotti Park Requiem

Woodstock lasted a long weekend amid rain and mud; the Zuccotti Park encampment lasted two months amid rain and snow.

Neither was precisely planned. A for-profit music festival, Woodstock was relocated at the last minute due to pressure by neighbors, and then the gates, through which 50,000 ticketed concert-goers had been expected to walk through, were thrown open- free- to accommodate the nearly 500,000 who came. Same with the OWS movement; originally slated as a small sidewalk gathering alongside the charging Wall Street bull – it then got relocated at the last minute to the 1 acre Zuccotti Park due to pressure by managers at the original site.

Woodstock became the concert heard around the world, spawning hundreds more seeking to recapture its feel - as did Zuccotti Park encampment, with hundreds more springing up around the world. Woodstock was a celebration of free love and sharing, an alternative, more open vision of society. So was the Zuccotti Park encampment.

Refocusing After The Police Raid Zuccotti Park

Hours after New York police raided Zuccotti Park in Tuesday morning’s wee hours, arresting 140 Occupiers, a 29-year old New York filmmaker stood by the park, protesting for her first time. “There are a lot of similarities between what is happening here, and the Arab spring,” said Cathy, who went by her first name only. “And the more force authorities use, the more people will gather.”

Christopher Guerra, 27, who had manned the movement’s information desk by day before returning at night to his Newark home, said a friend’s 3 a.m. emergency call had alerted him to the raid. 90 minutes later, he watched from the sidewalk as police officers in riot gear tore apart tents, while others cut the bolts with which protestors had chained themselves to trees – and then arrested them.

Guerra also saw three protestors mount metal barricades to reenter the park. “They were thrown to the ground and beaten,” he said. “They weren’t fighting back. It was a war zone.”

How OWS Has Built on the Tactics of the 60's

Have the predominantly young Occupy protestors shaped a smarter, more effective movement than their parents did?

“What’s remarkable is how this movement gained almost immediate public support,” said Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, assistant professor of history at Cornell University. “The 60’s anti-war movement took years to change public opinion. Likewise, many resisted the civil rights movement.” Here the public, which usually resists change, almost immediately came around, she said.

Occupiers are challenging adversaries no less powerful than those set against their parents, who found it challenging to push the national conversations away from pundits’ focus on alleged “outside agitators” and “Communist infiltration.” Occupiers, however, have already changed the conversation away from tax cuts and austerity, to one about economic inequality and runaway corporate power.

Today’s Occupiers have also exploited different circumstances. “A lot of resistance to the civil rights movement came from the rank and file of local communities, where many opposed (school) bussing,” she said. “These differences led to internal community struggles.” By contrast, Occupiers represent local communities pitted against national business elites and their political allies. “The dynamic is different,” she said. Unlike 60’s protestors who looked like outsiders, Occupiers embrace the image of the “working stiff.”

Stormin' Zuccotti Park

At the end of last week, two days after a snowstorm smothered the Northeast, closing highways, shuttering schools, and leaving over a million homes without power, the drums at Zuccotti Park could still be heard from two blocks away.

Tents had replaced tarps, their ground sheets no longer resting on cold concrete but on painted wooden boards amid relaxed police enforcement. A man drumming on a metallic Captain America shield was accompanied by a cohort pounding a blue plastic garbage can and a saxophonist belting out the Hava Nagilah. A two man crew avowing support for “the American people” interviewed onlookers for Iranian TV. Asked, however, how Occupiers compare to Iranian protestors, they refused to comment, or even to give their names. Meanwhile, four Hasidics with long sideburns toured the encampment. “The city ought to pay the protestors,” one man finally pronounced. “This is great for tourism.”

Little of this, however, impressed Jessica Lemmer, a 21-year old New Jersey college student, who had been camping here with her boyfriend since late September. Back then, she said, there had been “lots of space.” Now, she found park “too crowded, stifling.” So that evening, she was going home – for a long soak, a wash with organic soap, and a few nights in her warm bed. And then, she said, she would return.

Inside Zuccotti Park

What a visitor to Zuccotti Park first notices are not the cardboard “Occupy Wall Street” signs, or the blue tarps, or the black and red crossed medical center. Rather, one notices the drums - snare drums and congas - and a hand-painted drum large enough to accommodate five men and one woman simultaneously beating on it.

Still, the drums multiply, coming out from under blankets, from beneath tents, from behind trees until, by five o’clock, they have taken over Zuccotti Park’s western stairs, just as Wall Street personnel head home. The drums challenge the self-proclaimed financial wizards, answering back with a vibration which pierces the soul, demanding attention. The drums are the voice of the protest – deep, proud, and impossible to ignore.

It is the end of October, more than one month into these protests that were announced, improbably, by the satiric, anti-corporate Canadian magazine, Adbusters. The protests were ignored at first, many predicting it would not last a day, let alone a week or a month; and yet they continue, as we head into the 2012 elections.

Does Zuccotti Park Mark a Turning Point?

Friday morning’s scheduled confrontation between OccupyWallStreet protesters and Mayor Bloomberg’s Police Department was averted in the wee hours, with the Mayor rescinding eviction threats and allowing protesters to remain camped out in Zuccotti Park. Interestingly, announcement of this high visibility reversal came not from the Mayor, who was described as “appearing frustrated.” Rather, it came from Deputy Mayor, Cas Holloway.

Much like Tahrir Square, whose protesters utilized both traditional and social media to bypass President Mubarak, so, too, did New York protesters utilize these media to circumvent the Mayor. In a city beholden to Wall Street revenues for its tax base and financial well-being; in a city whose Mayor made his billion dollar plus fortune catering to Wall Street’s wants and needs, such a crucial policy reversal was no small thing. Instead, it may be the first visible crack in an American political system which no longer represents its constituents.