Last night, I got to thinking about Occupy Wall Street(OWS) and the time my wife and I spent visiting with the NYC protest group, back in 2011 and 2012. It inspired me to write a short post on "Waking Up".
https://steemit.com/redpill/@wakeupsheeps/what-was-your-red-pill-moment
Back then, we were so excited about joining forces, with a protest group, that was really sticking their thumb in the eye of Wall Street. Making a visible stand in Zuccotti Park, right across the way from the biggest banks and the NY Federal Reserve.
Whenever we could match our schedules with OWS marches, we would hop on a New Jersey Transit train and head for lower Manhattan. We quickly made a few friends, there were plenty of regulars in the OWS movement that were, essentially, full time protestors, even after the tents were removed. These people were living all around the city, on whatever couch or floor they could crash on.
The marches we joined were generally well attended, it was always hard to figure exact numbers, but there were always 500-1000 people involved. We marched from park to park, repeating protest chants, deviating our routes to avoid getting "kettled" by the NYPD. People would walk out of their buildings and join the marches, midstream.
We saw plenty of violence from the NYPD, they were out for blood. OWS was a pain in their collective asses and their dislike was quite apparent. I saw guys have their heads smashed through windows, batons used with impunity and arrests that were far rougher than could be justified. The beat cops were for the most part, very accommodating of OWS, it was their bosses, in the white shirts, that were out for scalps. They must have been told to make an example of the protesters by NYC Brass, because they were quite dangerous.
In one instance when they raided Zuccotti Park, one of the regulars, a very petite young woman was roughed up to the point that she was having convulsions, on the sidewalk, in handcuffs. My wife and some others finally were able to find some EMS workers among the cops to assist her. She had to be in that condition for twenty minutes before she was attended to.
May Day March
Our favorite trip into the city was on May Day, May 1st, 2012. We met up with a big crowd in Bryant Park, that crowd roused around 1:00 pm to march down to Union Square, where the crowd was enormous. Union Square was a permitted protest. They had live music and activist speakers. Groups from differing rallying points were pouring into the park by the hundreds. This is what I would imagine it was like in the middle ages, when the Nobles brought their armies together, to join the King's Legion of Forces, before a battle was fought.
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I'm not sure what the trigger was, but the crowd in Union Square began to slowly start the March around 4:00 pm. The crowd started heading South down Broadway. The whole of Downtown Manhattan was at a standstill. No vehicles could cross Broadway. The crowd was enormous. It was only 3 miles from Union Square to Battery Park, but it took us nearly four hours to get there.
Walking down Broadway, in the late afternoon, on a perfect Spring day, was pretty magical. The residents were hanging out of their windows, cheering support, same with people still in their offices. The NYPD was nearly invisible for the bulk of the walk.
The parade route brought us directly in front of City Hall and right through the heart of Wall Street. As you meander towards Wall Street, there is a bit of an uphill slope, the further South you go. As we were near the apex of the little hill, I turned around and looked back up Broadway, there was a phalanx of protesters as far as I could see, the roadway was completely blanketed. There had to be 40,000 people involved, official numbers say 15,000, but I beg to differ. It was such an awesome sight to see that many people, essentially saying, that there is something wrong with the system, just with their presence that day.
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As we were nearing the end of the route, it was getting dark, about 8:00 pm. We were passing by Zuccotti Park, heading towards the slight slope on Broadway, that filters traffic towards Battery Park, the Southern tip of Manhattan. This is where the police had been laying in wait all day. Looking down each side street, you could see the hundreds of cops mounted on bicycles, scooters and horses. There were empty transit buses transporting reinforcements to the scene and now waiting to transport any arrested protesters to jail.
You could feel a sense of claustrophobia in the air. I have never seen that many cops in one spot before. I knew that there was going to be a showdown in Battery Park. The marchers were heading into a fish trap set by the NYPD. I made a decision at that moment, our day of protest was over. I wasn't going to let my wife get injured in a police skirmish. I grabbed her by the wrist and we ducked into the Bowling Green Subway Station, the last escape before entering Battery Park, which the NYPD was going to evacuate, with menace, in about an hour.
Tom Morello's Guitarmy - We were with them all day Source
We missed the last 1/4 mile of the march, but we also lived to tell about it. We watched live-streams on our phones during our train ride home. We saw people we knew being arrested and roughed up. I guess I wasn't that much of a protester if I wasn't really excited about being arrested, but I wasn't. We went again on the one year anniversary of OWS, but that was the end of our times with the group.
I still believe that Occupy Wall Street frightened the Deep State to their very core. If the media hadn't done such an amazing job of portraying the group as dirty hippies with no agenda and no jobs, the general public may have taken a shine to the movement. Instead main street America, as per usual, sided with their invisible masters and decried the movement to be just a bunch of discontented deadbeats, getting in the way of real commerce. Just another example of how the beat-goes-on and the Powers-That-Be can maintain their control of the everyday man, simply by using the controlled media to spin the narrative in their favor.
Somehow the Wall Street Banks were able to paint themselves as the victims in this charade and gain the support of the people. It literally makes me shake my head when I think about how close that movement was to gaining real traction that could've made real change a possibility. It was that close to being the impetus that could have changed the world for the better.
What were your thoughts on the Occupy Movement?
Did you participate in any of the World Wide protest actions?
Were you rooting for the Big Banks or the Protesters?
- (There are no wrong answers)