Meenal Raval went to Lower Manhattan with others to experience and take part in the protest.
A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim and a Hindu from Mt Airy got in a car and headed to today’s Mecca: Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. We were there Oct. 8.
We were met with an amazing diversity and quantity of people crammed into the tiny park: young, old, white, black, asians, homeless, tourists, reporters, police. The perimeter of the park was surrounded by barricades, making the four corners of the park the only entry/exit points.
There was a certainly a police presence there, watching the crowds from outside the barricades, mostly looking bored. Inside, colorful tape tried to separate the pathways from the sleeping quarters where sleeping bags were lined up in rows with people napping, reading, talking, eating, playing chess, even painting one another’s faces. At one corner of the park was the library with plastic bins to hold categories of books. In the center, we found the station receiving donations of food, outdoor living supplies and electronics. Another sectioned off area housed the kitchen, with one person serving, another washing up at a sink and another putting away the washed up plasticware.
A low table (seemed to be milk crates topped with plastic tarp) had a cornucopia of energy bars, fruit, nuts, granola, hand sanitizer bottles and a jar of Vitamin C.
Despite the elbow-to-elbow mass of humanity, the space itself was quite clean. I noticed two young men constantly sweeping the pathways and managing the on-park trash & recycling. The free food area had several milk crates lined with clear bags and brimming with compostables. While we were there, there was a general assembly—we were alerted to that by people calling out "mic check." There was also a a teach-in about Columbus Day. At one corner were the musicians, with drums loud enough to make conversation difficult.
Some of the poster messages that resonated with us were:
- Open Your Eyes: This is the Revolution
- The First Duty of a Revolutionary is to Get Away With It
- To Ignore This Movement Would Be an Obamanation! Where Are You?
- I Care About You
- Justice is What Love Looks Like in Public
- Turn Off the TV—Go Out and Tell-a-Vision
- Dear 1%, We Were Asleep, But Now We're Awake
- The Beginning is Near
- Kill the Ego
Video interviews were ongoing, and there seemed to be as many cameras and cell phones clicking as there were people.
Just around the corner from the Ground Zero memorial, the Occupy Wall Street effort brought countless tourists—all to return home with their version of this story. I was inspired by seeing this woken-up America. This space, and I sense other Occupied sites around the country, are quickly becoming what permaculturists call "the edge," an intense area of productivity and useful connections—unplanned and springing out of pure coincidence. Also in this space, I sensed what Robert Pirsig in Lila defines as dynamic quality—a force of change, the “pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality”, something that can be recognized before it can be conceptualized.
All in all, the effort felt organized amidst the seeming chaos.
http://mtairy.patch.com/articles/occupy-wall-street-through-a-mt-airy-resident-s-eyes NOTE: MT. AIRY is a neighborhood in the NW section of Philadelphia PA
