“You just got here, didn’t you?” Sarah asked.
Shocked, I admitted that I did, to which she replied “Of course you just did. You look too wholesome.”
I had barely arrived at Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street, and I was already “found out.” My plans about lying about my name, lying about where I had come from, lying about being unemployed, dissipated right then and there. I was in the line for free dinner, having just staked out a spot and set-up my scant accommodations for the night. Yet, a few sentences into my conversation with Sarah, a nurse volunteering at the First-Aid tent who stood behind me in line, and she already knew that I was little more than a glorified tourist. To my surprise, she then told me, “We’re glad you came out. Our movement greatly appreciates your support.”
As the hustle and bustle and conversations died down, it was time to sleep. Zuccotti Park is in a prime location, a few blocks from both the New York Federal Reserve and the New York Stock Exchange. However, the most intriguing aspect of the park is found on its North-west corner. Depending on where in the park you pitch your sleeping bag, you can often see it as you lay down with your eyes open, adjacent to the starless New York sky, one of the partially constructed buildings destroyed in the September 11th attacks. Although not the Freedom Tower itself, the radiant glass paneling of the structure remains as one of the defining characteristics of Zuccotti Park, a symbol of freedom, a symbol of America – a foil, perhaps, to the mosaic of protestors that have been derided by scores of people, recently characterized by Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain as “Un-American.” The eerie glow of the construction cranes on the glass monolith was the last thing I saw before I fell asleep.
Despite the tendency of the occupiers to characterize themselves as the silent majority, as a voice repressed by the collusion of corrupt business and corrupt government, there is a silent majority within the occupation itself. You could sense it – eating breakfast, making signs, doing working groups – the sense that the majority of the people there were simply ordinary people, motivated by a range of more moderate beliefs ranging from cynicism over the relationship between government and the financial sector to anger over the shrinking education budget. This is perhaps one of the most significant differences between the current protests and the hippie movement of the 1960’s. While the Hippie movement was seen as a rabidly anti-American ordeal marred by characteristic flag-burnings, the Occupy movement is primarily comprised of much more moderate voices.
They are voices that do not seek to gut America, but re-envision it.
Reporters and Reefer
Throughout the park, it was easy to pick out the acts of debauchery, many of which seemed straight out of the counter-culture movement from the 60’s. Scattered amongst the masses were people in various levels of public undress, including one young girl clad only in underpants and scattered body-paint. The smell of marijuana permeated the square, an issue that the event organizers hoped to solve with the planned implementation of a “smoking section.” When night came, one could see and hear a few of the couples having sex, mostly confined to their sleeping bags, but in the case of one brazen couple, openly out in the chilly Manhattan air.
Just as easy to pick out were the reporters. The vast majority stood around the edge of the plaza, recording the rhetoric of the more outspoken and more flamboyant members of the community. They were characterized by their boom mikes and large, professional cameras, huddling like flies around the loudest voices. The vast majority were independent journalists looking for content to publish on their websites. However, whether it was the difficulty of transporting the equipment or an apathy for engaging with the quieter members of the movement, the center of the plaza was mostly untouched by the media. The big networks – CNN, CBS – were even more removed from the events. Despite having setup vans with cameras on cranes to record the event 24/7, I did not witness a single one of their reporters amongst the crowd, or at least no one admitted to being from a major station whose vans were suspiciously empty.
There were some notable exceptions. Geraldo Rivera, a noted commentator for Fox News, would arrive at the park around 4, only to have a massive crowd swarm around him and his crew, chanting in unison, “Fox News lies.” With the interviewee unable to hear Geraldo’s questions over the tumult of the crowd, the Fox News team would leave quickly, having barely done a single interview, to the cheers of the occupiers.
Underneath it all, there was the awkward, often contradictory, relationship between the observers and the observed. People would take signs and parade around the square, yelling to capture the attention of the digital cameras that paused to witness the unique sight; yet throughout the crowd, there were signs that warned tourists that if they dared to take pictures, there would be a fight. There was a press booth set up to provide information for the journalists, yet the signs concentrated at the perimeter of the square frequently decried how evil the media was. The dissemination of the opinions of the Occupy events has obviously been the result of the media, yet the message that the media have spread is one that the occupiers often see as a distorted perversion of the movement’s true message. After all, the most common account of the recent string of protests around the country has been the narrative that the movement is a poorly bundled collection of the most radical ideas that a small, confused segment of the American populace has to offer.
Convictions and Contradictions
There were many aspects of the occupation that corroborated this notion of the movement as fringe and confused. Within the confined space of the park, one could simultaneously witness signs that extolled the merits of Ron Paul and signs that rejected his qualifications, calling for the adoption of Marxism instead. There was no lack of opinions that would seem radical, if not borderline conspiratorial, to the general population. There was the large collection of anarchists, characterized by their ubiquitous logo, a capital “A” circumscribed with a circle. There was the inevitable group of occupiers taking a page out of the classics, holding up signs calling for “free love.” There were calls to abolish all currency. It has commonly been asserted that these divisions impact the ability of the movement to have any impact.
The triggers and catalysts for the occupations may be similar to the origins of the Tea Party, but here in the diversity of the cities, a cacophony of opinions has arisen, a sheer contrast to the single-minded goals of a Tea Party spawned in smaller, more personal, more homogenous communities. For all intents and purposes, it has become a forum. It’s amazing to watch as an environmental lobby from DC calling for more regulations and an anarchist demanding a return to small communities and the destruction of all government to find common ground, citing their shared belief in the ultra-organic agricultural model of Joel Salatin, featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemna. Even more interesting is observing how civil they are when they disagree, despite having convictions strong enough to drag them hundreds of miles to sleep in a park for a week. Susan, an unemployed teacher from New Jersey who had slept adjacent to me the night before, noted how the first impression she got of Occupy Wall Street was that “It’s such a peaceful environment…it is definitely not what I imagined of an overcrowded New York park.” During the day, the drums of Zuccotti could be heard from blocks away. But the quiet hours were truly observed; the park at night is debatably one of the quieter places in Manhattan.
Pluralism in the Park
It’s become a new fad among the anti-government crowd nowadays to quote the words of our founding fathers warning about the danger of powerful financial structures or of powerful governments. The words that seem to capture the movement more accurately, though, come from James Madison in his decidedly pro-government work, The Federalist Papers:
“Complaints are everywhere heard … that our Governments are too unstable; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority… for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice, with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.” – Federalist Paper 10
The pluralism that Madison thus advocates is exactly what is occurring in Zuccotti Park. These are people who feel that the two party system does not let their opinions be heard at the ballot box. They view both parties as corrupted. This is a diverse group of people each with differing convictions and a wide variety of opinions. It is a flawed approach, therefore, to assess the direction of the movement as a whole. Instead, the future of the movement lies in its working groups, collections of activists a few dozen in number brainstorming how to turn their specific causes, from increasing racial equality to campaign finance reform, into results – all conceived within the open framework of the occupation. Boiling down their complex and varying individual ideas is therefore not conducive to the simple narratives and headlines that suit the media. This is not about the left or the right, this is not about a single movement. It is story of many movements that simply share the same passion for activism and choose the same place to sleep at night. The reason the protestors are in Zuccotti Park is because they feel marginalized by politicians. They feel as if their voices are being drowned out.
Distilling a single goal from the movement’s multitudinous views would do more silencing than amplifying.