people there. Even after General Assembly ends I find myself being very attentive in situations where I’m not normally so attentive. So if I go get some food after General Assembly, I find myself being very polite to the person I’m ordering from, and listening if they talk back to me.
Maybe assemblies like this could even become a new basis for organizing political power on a larger scale. Of course, in the months to come this would be exactly what happened; as the call to occupy spread, assemblies followed. From Boston to Oakland to Missoula, Montana, activists wiggled fingers in horizontally structured meetings, using a common language to discuss problems both local and global—just as was hoped for, just as was planned. But the fact that there was a plan doesn’t mean that the plan was complete, or reassuring, or guaranteed to have the intended effect.
A spree of decisions passed by consensus the night of September 10. There would be no appointed marshals or police negotiators; if the police wanted to negotiate, it would have to be with the whole assembly. The General Assembly would start on the 17th at three o’clock—“and if we’re in jail we start it there.” A few rebellious minutes after ten, when the park was supposed to be closed, the meeting ended, and we huddled around tables at Odessa, a nearby diner, for drinks.
Throughout the week before September 17, there were committee meetings, civil-disobedience training sessions, and warm-ups. People from all over started sending pictures of themselves holding signs with their grievances against Wall Street, which were posted at wearethe99percent.tumblr.com. When the Arts & Culture Committee put on midday yoga classes and speak-outs in front of the Stock Exchange, onlookers were baffled, but that didn’t matter. “I’ve never felt so liberated, so free!” one of the planners told me, a Brazilian doctor studying for a master’s in public health. He was carrying around with him a hefty copy of Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.
Also in front of the Stock Exchange one of those days was a man in a giant white no. 4 lottery ball suit with an Uncle Sam hat on top that said “justice.” The suit, he told me, had been created for a business of his then in litigation. Next to him his colleague held a sign that said “Please Re-Elect PRESIDENT OBAMA Or The little guy Has No Chance.” I asked if they were involved in occupying Wall Street, and they informed me they weren’t. For them, the choice of location was a practical matter.
“We were at Times Square once,” the man with the sign said. “It was just too crowded.”
That week, too, Anonymous threatened a fearsome attack on bank websites. And more. No one could know everything that was happening, much less whether it would work.
“Maybe the General Assembly has been the really big central planner, but I don’t know,” Drew Hornbein told me that week over lunch. “There might be a lot of other stuff going on.” I mentioned the group organizing for October 6, and he asked me to send him some links. If Wall Street didn’t work out he could help with that.
There was a small meeting a few days before the 17th in the back of a bar in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn—for outreach, to talk about #OCCUPYWALLSTREET with some locals. It’s a mostly black neighborhood, yet all but one of us—hip-hop elder Radio Rahim—were white. Still, “What a propitious moment this is!” predicted a retired schoolteacher. “This is the moment.”
“This is fucking really new, this is the definition of a truly radical movement,” said one of the graduate students from the General Assembly. “So, yeah, we’re gonna win.”
Occupation was on my mind constantly as the date approached, but it was still a mostly secret fixation. Norman Mailer’s mesmeric account of the 1967 march on Washington, Armies of the Night, was on my nightstand. I saw “OCCUPY WALL STREET SEPTEMBER 17” scrawled in chalk near the fountain in Washington Square Park. On the whole, though, the city’s landscape seemed innocent of what was being planned for it—if what was happening was really planning at all.
On September 16, the night before whatever it was was slated to begin, I opted to pass on covering a civil-disobedience training to satisfy my curiosity about an occupation-themed Critical Mass bike ride setting out from Tompkins Square Park. Online, Anonymous associated the ride with something called “Operation Lighthouse.”
A critical mass there was not, unless you counted the police, who were stationed at every corner of the park and periodically motorcycled by to monitor the handful of bicyclists waiting in vain for more to turn up. The bicyclists accepted soup and coffee from enterprising evangelists and obtained a tepid blessing for the next day’s undertaking. Rather than invite the police to form a motorcade around the group, those present decided to leave the park one at a time and reconvene downtown for a scouting mission.
After riding into the Financial District and passing by Wall Street, I stopped in front of a boxing match two blocks south of the New York Stock Exchange. Seeping out from the Broad Street Ballroom, an inexhaustible electronic beat surged under a looping bagpipe track. Well-decorated couples and gaggles paid their forty-five dollars per person to slip through the doors and into the crowd surrounding the ring, where two sinewy fighters were bouncing back and forth, punching and kicking each other. They were following Thai-style rules, but the scene looked more like the last days of Rome. Along the back wall stood a row of Doric columns.
On the sidewalk, looking in and around, I recognized Marisa Holmes from the General Assembly meetings as she veered away from the entrance to the boxing match. She looked worried, but she usually looked worried, so it was hard to be sure. We nodded to each other knowingly, like spies, and maybe for a moment even questioned whether to acknowledge each other publicly. But we did, and we exchanged our reconnaissance.
She had just been down at Bowling Green, where a Department of Homeland Security truck was parked. Barricades surrounded the Charging Bull statue like a cage. I told her I had been up at Chase Manhattan Plaza, north of Wall Street, and it was also completely closed off. A stack of barricades sat in wait just across a narrow street. We stood in silence and watched as the fight ended, the combatants making a gesture of good sportsmanship. Marisa continued north to Wall Street, and I got on my bicycle to go home.
Nights in the Financial District are desolate, even ones with scattered boxing fans and police officers preparing for God-knows-what. One can feel the weight of the buildings overhead, all the more because there are so few people around to help bear the load. The buildings seemed completely different, however, while I rode home over the Manhattan Bridge. They were distant, manageable, and light. Rolling high above the East River and looking back at them, I wondered if they had any idea what was coming.
TWO|NEW MESSIAH
#BrooklynBridge #LibertySquare #NeedsOfTheOccupiers #NYPD #Occupied #OccupyDC #OccupyTogether #Oct6 #OWS #S17 #TakeWallStreet #TonyBaloney #WeAreThe99 #winning
When night fell on September 17, the Financial District had that feeling of loneliness about it again, of lifeless towers, of quiet. This night, though, it was at least somewhat less unoccupied.
One or two hundred people were huddled in circles, scattered around Zuccotti Park’s stone floor. A little before 10 p.m., more than twenty empty police vans passed by them on Broadway in a solemn line, their flashing lights lighting up the empty buildings above. Soon, on that narrow end of the park, there formed two rows of officers with clubs drawn and plastic white handcuffs dangling from their trousers. Two more rows lined the park’s longer northern and southern sidewalks. A trio of officers on horses stood in wait by a scaffold across Broadway. When a pack of boys on BMX bikes cruised past, officers mobbed them and told them to leave the area immediately. The boys tried to argue and tried to linger and witness what was or wasn’t about to happen, but eventually they complied.
The day had begun around noon, when the NYC General Assembly’s Arts & Culture Committee convened its “New York
