NYC Day 2.2 - Occupations

At the end of the HighLine, we hopped on a subway down to the Financial District.

nice address...

Not sure if you heard, but there has been this little protest-like thingy going on in New York City for a while. Well, now that I am writing this, apparently “the Authorities” have broken up and dispersed the protest, but trust me, we were there at Occupy Wall Street a few days before the Man had to go and harsh their buzz.

Zuccotti Park is located just off of Wall Street, actually closer to the 9/11 Memorial than to the New York Stock Exchange at the heart of Wall Street. The location, however, provides space for quite the detailed camp-out. From the outside it looked like complete chaos.

Walking through, you see a complex community, with everything from a medical tent to a community kitchen. Guys on bikes generating electricity, women knitting mittens, pretty much anything you might want in a small community.

Note, when the break up of OWS happened the next week, there was much talk about the need to remove the “huge piles of garbage” for human health and decency reasons. We saw no piles of garbage, but a well-organized recycling and composing system at the community kitchen (see above). Come to think of it, it was the only place in New York City where we didn’t see large piles of garbage. You see, there aren’t any back alleys on Manhattan, and no dumpsters, so every night, people take all the garbage out of the big buildings they live and work in, and pile it up on the curb – black bags of garbage are to New York what poodle poo is to Paris.

This pile of trash was in the Upper West Side, where the 1% live.

There was a stage where people were making speeches and singing protest songs, and from which the daily General Assembly makes organizational and logistical decisions. Although the General Assembly, with it’s human megaphones and waving fingers to express concurrence has been treated with derision by the American Media, from Fox News to the Daily Show, but I recognized it immediately. Although I don’t think the OWS organizers meant it this way, but their General Assembly is remarkably like the system that the Athenians used for societal decision making, the system that was the first to be called “democracy”. (Thank You, Brian D-W, for giving me the book from which I learned about the origins of Democracy).

After walking past the 9/11 Memorial, which was a strange amalgam of despair and American Exceptionalism, completely lacking thoughtful introspection or free expression, it was inspiring to walk around the edge of OWS, and hear the conversations going on. As passers-by provided support or criticism of the OWS residents, I never heard anger or shouting, but I heard snippets of many interesting discussions, the sharing of ideas, the challenging of dogma.

How can you not be inspired by a volunteer doctor standing there offering free Flu Shots to all passers-by, standing right next to guy holding a sign that says “Every vaccine contains either neurotoxin, carcinogen or sterilization agent”, and both were smiling, just getting their message out:

(you gotta click that one to zoom in and read…)

So we wandered through the shadowy tunnels of the Financial District, and had a few pints at a nice Wall Street Irish Pub, and on the way back to the subway, we ran into the bull that started this all.

For those out of the loop, the bull represents the growth of wealth by rising markets possible under a free market system. Apropos that the bull was surrounded by protective fences. That is what the OWS movement is all about: assuring those fences are protecting passers-by from the bull more than protecting the bull from passers-by.

Back up in Times Square we went to a crazy sports bar to watch the Canucks lay a beating on the New York Islanders. No-one seemed to care, as one of New York’s Football teams was losing on the other channel.