An artist can engage with politics as a documentarian or propagandist, but at that moment, I was just a searching human, trying to figure out where I stood.
On September 30, Radiohead’s manager emailed Occupy, saying the band would play at the park. Thousands of fans flooded to Zuccotti. But the band never showed. It turned out the email was forged, an attempt to get the park to critical mass. Malcolm Harris, an editor at The New Inquiry, an online intellectual journal, later admitted to the prank.
It worked.
After the spike of press around Anthony Bologna’s pepper-spray ejaculation, coverage of Occupy was dropping off. The media only liked us when we were getting beaten, but now the only news we were making was the Concert That Wasn’t.
On October 1, Occupy called another protest. It was well publicized, and promised to be huge. Laurie, Sarah Jaffe, and I met up in the square so we could march together. We posed grinning with the Occupied Wall Street Journal. I tweeted the photo, adding with embarrassing earnestness: “Join us. Everyone join us.”
The cops eyed the Occupiers warily. “We’re an affinity group,” Laurie announced. “We stay together. We don’t make decisions without each other.” Her fey little face was solemn, but I wanted to laugh. What would happen to us?
The breeze was sweet as the march snaked up Broadway, in the direction of City Hall. As we turned toward the Brooklyn Bridge, the cops said something, and the protesters’ leaders something else, but I couldn’t hear either. All I could feel was the push of hundreds of bodies; it felt safe. And it was the Brooklyn Bridge! How many futile marches had that bridge seen? How many times had the police shrugged and let them pass?
“You can’t arrest a bridge,” the crowd chanted.
Laurie frowned. “Um, yes you can,” she said.
In London that previous December, cops steered more than a thousand protesters onto Westminster Bridge. Once trapped, the protesters remained kettled in the cold for hours. Those on the edges thought they’d fall into the Thames.
Laurie had an instinct for avoiding arrest. She turned away from the march. I followed her. The crowd surged on.
In the crowd, I saw Natasha Lennard, a writer who was freelancing for the New York Times. Slim as a greyhound, in dirty black jeans and cropped hair, Tash was nearly an aristocrat; she’d been a fashion model before attending Cambridge, and from some angles, her face still had a magazine perfection. But then she laughed, and the sound had a joy so fierce that it cracked her facade. Her eyes crinkled. She looked like an imp.
I met Tash’s eyes. She laughed and was gone.
The police arrested seven hundred people on the Brooklyn Bridge that day. Tash was one of them. She sat for hours, in the weak rain, waiting to be handcuffed. “For the briefest moment, the bridge and the city felt like ours,” she later wrote. “Call me fanciful, call me delusional—I said it was love, after all.”
If Michael Bloomberg thought hundreds of arrests would quash the protests, he was wrong. Each time the police beat down Occupy, it renewed its energy. The Brooklyn Bridge marked a turning point. Suddenly, Zuccotti became the place to be.
Journalists flooded the park, thrusting microphones into the face of anyone who looked interesting, demanding critiques of the global banking system. Celebrities swooped in. Patti Smith bought the People’s Library a tent. Jonathan Lethem read. The street artist Swoon left a painting in the park, next to the cleaning station where there were stacks of brooms for anyone to use. The Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek harangued the park not to fall in love with itself, and Susan Sarandon lectured a boy in tie-dye leggings, telling him that Occupiers needed to focus on getting out the vote.
Activists from Spain, Greece, Tunisia, and Egypt flew to New York to support the Zuccotti Park occupation.
The photographer Kate Black, a friend of mine, came down to the park with a tray of shrimp skewers pilfered from an art opening she’d bartended. Since they weren’t vegan, the soup kitchen refused them. She walked around the park, passing the shrimp out to more omnivorous Occupiers.
John came down too, bearing boxes of gourmet chocolates. By now he’d married—and well enough to go on benders at Claridge’s—but he hadn’t forgotten where he came from.
Even my mother marched.
One unseasonably warm night, I sat in the park listening to a young man play the viola and another young man recite poetry, reading a book from the People’s Library, eating free ice cream scooped by Jerry of Ben and Jerry’s fame. It had all the loveliness of a new world.
As the fall wore on, I brought mi padre down to Zuccotti. He’d given me my political bent, but the networked protests felt like something spontaneous, subversive, and new. I wondered what he would think.
We sat next to a working group that was discussing the theory of nonviolence. In Occupy, everyone had a chance to speak. This usually meant the conversation went nowhere. Mi padre started shifting with annoyance as soon as the occupiers began their finger wiggles.
“They have some good ideas, but they’re also pretending,” he said tartly as we walked out. He’d seen a lot of protests. The groups he’d raised me to admire—the Black Panthers and their Puerto Rican equivalent, the Young Lords—were far sleeker and more disciplined. Mi padre lived in Albany now, where the Occupy contingent there was less impressive—they mainly occupied a gazebo—but he admired their bravery.
As we walked away, the drum circle pounded behind us. Their noise had earned Occupy the contempt of many locals—though the police, who drove around the park each night blaring their sirens, hardly made things any quieter.
Mi padre asked if the drums were a psyop.
During the 2008 election, Sarah Jaffe and I had both volunteered for Obama’s campaign. Obama won, but the ideals we ascribed to him had lost all the same. Under Obama, the banks that wrecked the economy were bailed out. The war continued, now supplemented with drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. Guantánamo stayed open. Government spying flourished. The new administration locked Chelsea Manning in military prison. No matter what fine sentiments a politician expressed, the machine remained the same.
Occupy rejected the idea of leaders. This was in some ways a response to the way Barack Obama had failed us. Any leader could become co-opted, we thought, into a smiling symbol of what we despised. So Occupy chucked the whole notion of rallying around an individual; all we could count on was that we had each other’s backs.
This leaderless state did not go over well with the media, which soon fell into a knee-jerk portrayal of Occupy as a collection of dirty, drug-addled brats. Why didn’t we try to elect some officials? Why didn’t we choose leaders? Why didn’t we make some goddamn demands?
Even the liberal media figures many protesters had loved during the 2008 election turned against us. We were too raw for Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. When the Daily Show finally acknowledged Occupy, it spent the entire segment asking where the protesters pissed. No matter how progressive the media was presumed to be, when its reporters came to Zuccotti, they focused on the same white guys in dreads and tie-dye. We were beyond the pantomime of party politics, so we were lost to them.
Some protesters tried to use business attire as a creative tactic. Jeff Stark, an underground party promoter I knew from the burlesque scene, bought suits for Occupiers, knowing that TV producers would leap at a shot of cops dragging off a respectable-looking protester who was trying to close her account at a bank that received bailout money. But respectability politics doesn’t work. Suits or no suits, the cops kept beating the protesters. When the game is rigged, you can’t win by following the rules.
Winter came early, coating New York in a gray, piss-smelling slush. Occupy brought in gas generators to fight the cold, and to power the media tents. The police stole them, claiming they were a safety hazard. Occupy replaced them with bike-powered generators—the occupiers pedaling madly, as if to run away from the winter, from the growing divisions, from the future. Livestreamers made their names filming a park that i
ncreasingly despised them—night after night, fight after fight.
But how long could they stay? I kept visiting each day, my hands shoved into my pockets, the cold pricking me like needles.
When I wasn’t in the park, I watched Zuccotti’s livestream at home. The girl manning it coughed. Her nose ran. She shivered, wrapped in donated blankets given out by Occupy’s “comfort station.” She coughed again, then smiled. She—no, we—were still there.
There is no one story of Occupy. There is her story, my story, and those of all the others who joined the movement, with their traumas, hopes, and aching disappointments.
When I talk about Occupy, I’m still unsure whether to say we or they.
Nearly a month into Occupy’s existence, Bloomberg paid a visit to Zuccotti Park. He flounced through fast, casting stinkeye, leaving a chill in his wake.
The next day he announced that the city would clean the park.
We were filthy disease-spreaders, brewing up a Zuccotti flu. The whole park needed a good scouring before we could return. When we were allowed back, we could no longer stay the night. During the day, we’d be forbidden from setting up tents, even so much as laying an object on the floor.
The occupiers refused to leave. Instead, they announced they’d clean the park themselves. OWS took sixty thousand dollars from donations they’d raised and got a cleaning truck.
That night I was in London, watching Twitter for the inevitable police attack.
In New York, the sky leaked freezing rain. Fifteen hundred people descended on Zuccotti. The unions showed up—nurses, teachers, and Teamsters, shaking and coughing from the cold. By dawn, the crowd had swelled so much that organizers ran out of brooms.
As the pale sun rose, the crowd stood shoulder to shoulder, bracing for the police to charge.
But when Mayor Bloomberg saw more than fifteen hundred people ready to resist his riot cops, he flinched. Brookfield Properties canceled its cleaning operation.
Occupy would live another day.
All books about Occupy retell the story of that night. Despite the failures that came later, it was our golden time. In those brief hours before dawn, the movement took care of itself.
Briefly, we thought we might win.
By late October, there were hundreds of Occupy encampments. Tent cities calling themselves Occupy bloomed in LA and Oakland, Boston and New Orleans—in Rome, London, and Tel Aviv. Many of these encampments became life support for local homeless communities, whose members found they were being listened to for the first time.
But with Occupy’s growth came a coordinated crackdown. On October 25, local police shot tear gas into the Oakland encampment. A canister hit a veteran named Scott Olsen in the head, fracturing his skull. While medics tried to save Scott, the police fired more tear gas canisters at them. Scott fell into a coma.
With a thousand other protesters, I marched on the NYPD headquarters in Manhattan, protesting the police crackdown. Later I sat on my floor with John, drinking espresso, trying to come up with a new poster idea. Thinking of the tear gas canister that had wounded Olsen, I whispered a line: “Can you see the new world through the tear gas?”
We started sketching the idea as a poster, with John providing the composition and me the detail. I drew a Latina woman surrounded by clouds of gas, holding aloft an American flag. I made a high-resolution scan of the image, then uploaded it to an Occupy database of protest art. Soon it showed up at protests in New York and San Francisco.
To see my art held on the streets meant more to me than to see it hanging in any gallery.
Decisions at Occupy were supposedly made in Zuccotti Park at large public gatherings known as General Assemblies, or GAs. They were run along elaborate rules, derived from Quaker and anarchist principles. Anyone could speak at a GA, but to prevent white guys from dominating, women and people of color were slated to speak first. Decisions were made by consensus. This meant that anyone attending the GA could block a proposal. You indicated your approval or disapproval with hand gestures. Because the police prohibited amplification, GAs adopted a method called “the People’s Mic” in which waves of occupiers repeated each sentence until it traveled to the very back of the park.
GAs were supposed to be experiments in direct democracy—forums where everyone could speak and no one would be coerced to take actions he or she didn’t support.
But because everyone could speak, the GAs lasted for hours. Because anyone could block a proposal, soon only the most stubborn triumphed. Soon, all the real decisions were being made by working groups, which often met in the lobby of an office building on Rector Street. This made many at the GA furious. Where was the transparency if people were working in secret? Worse, the movement had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. Since the Occupiers were inexperienced at accounting, tens of thousands of dollars went missing or were wasted on frivolous pet projects.
The GAs soon dissolved amid accusations of financial malfeasance, punctuated by fistfights.
I attended only one GA in New York, in mid-October. Each sentence took three times as long to say, since the People’s Mic had to shout it from the front to the back of the park. Between the repetition and the lag, I couldn’t follow what was being debated.
If this is the new world, I thought, I don’t think I can suffer through it.
I left quickly.
Constant police violence began to take its toll. Occupiers grew more paranoid. Rumors flew that undercover cops had infiltrated the working groups. (After Occupy ended, several such undercovers were indeed exposed.) The NYPD watched the occupiers each day from their nearby tower, poised to attack, while the trauma they caused tore apart the occupation from within.
By late October, Zuccotti’s neighborhoods began to look like hostile camps. The east side was mediagenic: the press tent, the People’s Library, the radical grandmas knitting. On the west were the tents housing the poor people who needed Occupy most of all. When I walked through the west side, angry men hawked Occupy merch at me, shouting if I declined.
Some occupier friends told me that the NYPD was telling homeless people they could avoid police harassment by crashing at Zuccotti. While Occupy tried to be radically inclusive, the operation at Zuccotti wasn’t equipped to deal with mental illness or drug addiction. Fights began to break out between different groups of organizers—from the respectable, reform-minded camp who wanted Occupy to run candidates in local elections to those who wanted Occupy to care for the most marginalized members of society. The movement had become bigger than any one group could control, and everyone thought everyone else was trying to steal the reins.
Bloomberg kept announcing that Occupy’s days were numbered. Each day, the police would stomp into the park, stealing a tent here, a generator there. They lurked, malignant and constant, grumbling among themselves, shouting when Occupiers tried to take their pictures.
As threats from the mayor grew louder, survival in Zuccotti began to feel like Occupy’s main purpose.
I went to countless marches, squeezed between steel barricades. Once, as an officer ran past me to make an arrest, the loop of my purse snagged his pistol butt. For a second I was paralyzed, certain he would think I was going for his gun, and then turn to beat or kill me. When the strap loosed itself, I ran closer and saw the police pounding a medic’s head into the pavement. Young people in torn black hoodies chanted “Shame!”
Yet other times, I felt we were on the verge of some unnamable victory. I’d look up to see the frail turret of Trinity Church, and think, We have to do this, because we’ve done so much already, and I have to stay here, because nothing else means as much as this.
On November 14, 2011, the NYPD cleared Zuccotti Park. I was working in London again, so I learned about the raid online the next morning.
The police waited till one A.M. Then, with no warning—Bloomberg didn’t want to give Occupy a chance to summon crowds of resistors—the cops moved with military quickness to seal off lower Manhattan.
Then they surrounded the park. They gave the occupiers the choice to leave. Anyone who stayed would be arrested, their belongings destroyed.
Alerted by Twitter, journalists started gathering outside the police cordon. Police officers wouldn’t let them in, punching anyone who got too close.
Inside the park, the police began to destroy the occupation. They slashed apart tents that had been painted with poetry. They threw the People’s Library’s three thousand books into garbage trucks. They pulverized laptops, signs, and tents.
In the course of four hours, they effaced Occupy’s existence, like parents soaping defiant words from the mouth of a child.
There is a universal vindictiveness to the way governments destroy protest cities. They speak of them as disease vectors—as dirt. Amid the tents grows something so dangerous that no seeds must be allowed to remain.
As the police pillaged, seventy protesters—among Occupy’s most devoted—remained inside the park. They knew the raid was coming, and they’d known what they’d do when it came. The protesters surrounded the soup kitchen at the center of Zuccotti. They sat down, and they linked arms.
The cops went in with batons.
After the raid, Occupy was never the same. Land gave Occupy something to defend. While they had the park, Occupiers could spend their energies on feeding their people, keeping warm, and keeping clean, and this allowed them to look past internal disputes. The simple work of subsistence allowed them to carry on.
Now that clarity was lost.
Occupy continued, of course. For thousands of people, it had been the most vivid experience of their lives. The working groups still met in the broad glass atrium of 60 Wall Street. The marches continued. Zuccotti was barricaded, so we met at Duarte Square or Foley Square. In April, a hundred activists were able to spend a week in Union Square. But the police eventually routed them, as they routed us each time. The librarians kept trying to rebuild the People’s Library, but the police always broke it up, before the books had been around long enough for anyone to read.
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