By Brett Yates
updated
Tue, Dec 13, 2011 04:20 PM
The day after Thanksgiving, I visited Zuccotti Park for the
first time. I did so as a tourist, not as a real protester - I was
in New York City with my girlfriend, celebrating my birthday,
cornily enough. Although I wondered whether it would seem
disrespectful, at a place where the angry and the unfortunate have
gathered to air serious grievances, to show up just for the
spectacle, my curiosity as to what, exactly, was still going on at
the Occupy Movement's epicenter 10 days after the police-raid won
out.
It had been an unseasonably warm day, but by dusk a mild chill had
set in. Quinn was carrying a bag from Ladurée, the deluxe French
pastry shop that had just set up its first American location on the
Upper East Side, and this, we knew, was the exact wrong thing to
bring to Occupy Wall Street, but maybe nobody noticed.
One thing about Zuccotti Park that I hadn't realized from all the
OWS photos - where, really, all I could see were crowded bodies and
tarps, signs and drums - is that there's no grass there: literally,
none. There are geometrically planted trees, whose bare branches
and trunks were bound with white Christmas lights, but these emerge
from a granite floor. It's not a green space but a gray space - not
so much a park as one of those burnished corporate blank spaces
that you see in modern business zones and office towers. With the
tents gone (banned by court order), Zuccotti Park looks amazingly
bare, cold, and lifeless, even with people in it - or on it, since,
unlike a real park, it provides no shelter in which to embed
yourself.
I arrived late in the evening, after dinner, and found the area
surrounded by police. The amount of money that New York City spends
monitoring the Wall Street demonstrators must be staggering: cops
were all over the park's perimeter, which was lined with metal
barriers containing small gaps by which, however, anyone could come
or go. There were about 20 people inside, and it looked like a zoo
habitat, or maybe a kind of quarantine, the police attempting to
contain some potentially massive outbreak by walling-in its first
victims.
Before coming, I had, of course, heard all the conservative
propaganda that had attempted to discredit the Occupiers - the
rumors that Zuccotti Park was rife with rape, theft, and drug use,
a hangout for homeless sponges and troublemaking drifters - and I'd
read, too, better articles that had described the stunning variety
of people who had come to Wall Street to voice genuine concerns and
protest important problems: professors and firefighters, laid-off
blue-collar workers, students and retirees. It was disappointing to
see how, by the night of November 25, it had, to some degree,
degenerated into a far less exciting version of the conservative
vision.
About a third of the Occupiers did appear to be homeless, some of
them sleeping on hard benches. Of the younger people, some looked
like college kids while others looked more like Jay and Silent Bob.
It was quiet, and the protesters' signs lay mostly on the floor.
One Occupier tried to pick up the "human microphone," but his few
echoes lost interest once they realized that he wanted only to
complain about a police officer who had bumped into him earlier,
and ultimately he was interrupted by another voice that announced
that a girl's shoes had just been stolen and that we ought to be
looking for them. This, too, failed to stir much activity. On the
western side of the park, an older guy holding a bag of weed asked
me if I had any rolling papers, as if oblivious to the enormous
NYPD presence.
I also noticed two rather more serious-looking guys,
thirtysomethings, engaged in what sounded like a conversation of
substance, and one of them, who maybe thought of himself as one of
OWS's ambassadors, shook my hand and thanked me for coming out.
This guy, too, seemed tired, however, and I heard him ask his
friend, who was apparently from California, whether he'd checked
out Occupy San Francisco. The friend had, and the first guy,
puffing a visible breath into the night, said, "I bet the weather's
better out there."
The Financial District is a lonely place in the dark, its daytime
population having retreated to the suburbs and its towers looming
above like malevolent giants. At Zuccotti Park, there's no obvious
place nearby where you can go to the bathroom; few businesses serve
customers in the area for very long after nightfall. It was clear
to me that, for the most part, OWS had moved on - the question was,
to where? What's the next step? Just recently, the police
dismantled Occupy Philly and Occupy L.A., arresting more than 250
protesters.
You never would have guessed by the paltry crowd in Lower
Manhattan that Occupy Wall Street has made such an impact on the
political landscape that Frank Luntz, the GOP's premier messaging
consultant, has had to warn Republican politicians that, in order
to win over the American public, they must now publicly pretend to
sympathize with the Occupiers, instead of simply condemning them.
"I'm frightened to death" of the Occupy Movement, Luntz said.
A lot of people, I know, remain anti-Occupy; they're proud of
"never complaining" and of "making do" without handouts - as though
the protesters were asking for any. I think these people want to
view themselves as the sole creators of their prosperity, to
whatever degree they prosper: in their Horatio Alger world,
political and economic systems don't shape our lives or ruin them -
can-do spirit (or its absence) does.
Maybe these people will be pleased when Zuccotti Park empties out
entirely. But protests always end; the question is whether the
ideas behind the protests survive, and whether we find ways to
implement them. In that sense, OWS has just begun. The Occupiers,
I'm sure, have plenty of can-do spirit of their own.
Tagged:
Gen Y, occupy wall street
