UPDATE April 12, 2012

Dear Reader,

I just passed my national healthcare boards and will be posting again soon on my Occupy actitivites now that I have more time. Until then, I have taken the daily fight to Twitter. Follow me on Twitter www.twitter.com/sfitzgeraldva I look forward to tweeting with you all on there. I will have longer journal entries back here again soon. Please feel free to read my earlier journal entries on here.

Viva Occupy!

Your Loyal and Humble Narrator

SEE YOU IN D.C. FOR THE OCCUPY RALLY ON MARCH 30!!

THE OCCUPY WALL ST MOVEMENT - JANUARY 17, 2012 "OCCUPY CONGRESS"

"Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth." Oscar Wilde


"All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity." Friedrich Nietzsche



"He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man," Samuel Johnson

OCCUPY CONGRESS - WASHINGTON D.C.

         Well, I suppose I should begin where we left off back in late November. I must admit that my disappointing experiences with the local, much smaller Occupy Charlottesville took a little wind out of my activist sails, oh my brothers. That, plus the winter cold and the holidays meant that other than writing about Occupy I didn't do any further actual boots-on-the-ground activism again until mid-January. I have mentioned in this webjournal that I have an elderly Mother who lives alone and whereas at first, the idea of spending Christmas with Occupy was tempting, my familial obligations had to take precedence.
         Besides, the Occupy Movement itself had been left in somewhat of a precarious situation since the cops had routed out most of the camps in pre-dawn raids (pre-dawn in order to prevent live media coverage). The loss of Zuccotti Park in New York at first seemed particularly damaging to the movement's momentum and morale and there were many on the left and the right who prematurely predicted the end of the liberal grassroots endeavor altogether. Even Huffingtonpost and MSNBC, stallwarts progressive media organizations who had been behind us with full force since the beginning had even suddenly tapered their coverage. HuffPo used to have a tag on its frontpage specifically for "Occupy" and they removed that entirely.
         Things didn't get much better when on the Thanksgiving Holiday, the internet meme went around calling for all Occupiers to try to interfere with the "Black Friday" consumer rush by going to our local Wal Marts, filling a cart with merchandise and then abandoning it somewhere in the store then find another cart and repeat. The idea was to take that merchandise out of circulation or at least delay it in order to hurt Wal Mart's profits. I didn't agree with this tactic at all. People who shopped at Wal Mart were doing so because they were poor. Interfering with Grandma's desire to get a Christmas present for her Grandchild that she could afford seemed to me like going after only the lowest hanging of fruit (when it was the corporate ROOTS that truly needed the focus).
         There was another Occupy demonstration in December that blocked shipping yards for a day. Again, interfering with the work of middle class longshoreman to bring goods to the masses wasn't exactly something I could get behind either. So as 2011 came to a close, I was feeling somewhat disheartened by what had become of this completely necessary revolution. Gone was most of the fervor, the great will to change, the solidarity of the resistance that had caught me up way back in September. All of it had been swept up and trashed like so many tents in Zuccotti Park. Of course, whose bright idea was it to begin this movement in September right when the colder weather was beginning to become a natural impediment not to mention the holdiays?
         As the New Year rang in, I started to poke around the different Facebook pages and websites of the various Occupy chapters, national and local, to see if anything was starting to happen. I came across Occupy Congress which was to happen January 17, 2012. Yes! The movement had some life left in the old girl yet! I decided immediately that I would definitely attend this event. This was a national calling. This was going to be something similar to the incredible energy from the original Zuccotti Park occupation in Manhattan. This would surely wash away whatever bad taste that had been left in my mouth from my recent let down, Occupy Charlottesville experience. Plus, this new rally was to be held at the U.S. Capitol! Back in D.C.! This was where I thought all along where we really needed to focus our collective efforts.
         In the days leading up to the rally, I happened to catch the movie "V for Vendetta" on cable and was again completely enthralled. I had been a big fan since before it was a movie, in fact, I owned original copies of each issue of the source comic book. Even though, Alan Moore, the writer, had since disavowed the movie adaptation actually claiming that the movie producers had taken his "anarchist vs. totalitarianism" theme and made it decidedly more American with a "Neo-Liberal vs. Neo Fascist" twist. BUT. The speeches Mr. Moore, a most gifted writer, gave to his Guy-Fawkes-mask-wearing-protagonist (which were very nearly the same as in the comic) were of such passionate eloquence and timelessness (and timeliness) that I found them as formidable and memorable as anything composed by Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson himself. In one particular case, Moore even took the wisdom of Jefferson who said, "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty" and made it succinctly modern with, "The people shouldn't fear their government. The government should fear its people." I could get that tattooed across my heart I believe it so much.
         I should take this time to also talk a little bit about the aforementioned Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes (whose history is also shown in the V for Vendetta film) was a British revolutionary in the early 1600's who attempted to blow up the houses of Parliament but was caught and hanged (yes, the past tense of hanging someone is "hanged" not "hung"). Now, Guy had his own reasons (Catholicism vs. Protestantism) and for his failed efforts, he was not only tortured and executed, but burned in effigy and in celebration by English children for hundreds of years after that (hence the advent of the Guy Fawkes masks). The English turned it into a holiday (which eventually became what we know today as "Halloween) which exalted the freeing of their island from supposed Catholic rule. 
       As used by Mr. Moore in "V for Vendetta" the anarchist/freedom fighter/terrorist/protagonist who wore a Guy Fawkes mask had co-opted its symbol for his own use. And in turn, the modern internet hacker, activist ("hacktivists") group who refer to themselves as "Anonymous" co-opted the mask for their own purposes, as has now the Occupy Movement. Now, it has been pointed out that the huge conglomerate (see Bad Guys) known as Time/Warner owns the rights to the image and therefore every mask sold to every protester wearing one actually feeds the coffers of the big business enemy. My thoughts on this are identical to my thoughts on using an Iphone.   I love the idea of using the machines against their very makers. Using the Iphone has helped me immensely in my Occupying activities, everything from posting Occupy material to get the word out, to using the GPS to find my way to the camps, to actually ordering my bus tickets on the fly. The same applies to the use of the mask. Because you see, I did, in fact order my very own "Guy Fawkes mask" from Amazon for less than ten dollars. For the benefits that I got out of wearing that mask for even just one day I would have paid one hundred dollars for it (and I still have the rest of the year and beyond to continue its use).
         Now before you think I've gone off the deep end, wearing masks and the like, oh my brothers, consider: we live in a media-saturated, 24 hours, seven days a week, soundbite, quick-flash, reductivist Information Age and one of the things I talked about in my last journal entry as I was picking my sign slogan "End The Wars Tax the Rich" that (in addition to believing in it wholeheartedly) I was very interested in doing my part to consolidate the message of the Occupy movement. While I believe in the "Big Tent" principal- that there are a myriad of worthy injustices that were deserved of attention, I did see where this approach could caused confusion and how it gave the right wing ammunition in their invalid spin that we Occupiers "had no clear message." I felt similarly about the Guy Fawkes masks that folks involved with Occupy Wall St have been wearing since Day One. It was about maintaining a theme, it was about consolidating in solidarity. What was interesting to me was that most of the Occupiers did not know that the masks come from Guy Fawkes and either referred to them as "V Masks" after the "V for Vendetta" character or "Anons (short for Anonymous)" masks.
         But I knew.
         And it meant a lot to me. What else attracted me about it? I liked the anonymity in the moment it afforded the wearer. Now, obviously if I was putting my name to this blog that showed obviously that I didnn'treally care if I was on some government list for expressing my First Amendment right of Free Speech in the Occupy movement. So it wasn't THAT kind of anonymity I was referring to. No, I meant when you were actually there at the demonstration. It was about what it meant to give over your identity entirely for the cause. It was pure. It was striking. Impressionable. Instantly identifiable. Inspiring. And yes, a bit scary. The smile on the mask is both knowing and innocent, good and evil. Was it smiling with you or at you? Of course the downside to this mask was that it also dehumanized you. This wasn't good for either recruiting Middle America or for when you found yourself against some pepper spray happy cop. As for the former, Middle America, I was beginning to think that the Occupy movement wasn't going to end up being the impossible-to-live-up-to-saving-grace-of-the-left-end-all-be-all-party but instead more like Occupy was the modern, leftwing Big Bang which was entirely necessary in its initial explosiveness and would in time give birth to a less extreme, liberal movement that was more Soccer Mom-friendly. Who knows, maybe it could even be the Democratic Party itself (if the Democrats could remember that they were supposed to be the party of the left). As for the latter, what happened when you wore this mask and faced militant police? Well, your loyal and humble narrator found that out for myself, oh my brothers, and I will get to that later...
         The days leading up to the event passed by maddeningly slow in anticipation. I was reading all of the excited comments posted by Occupiers who were also planning on attending. There seemed to be just so much pent up frustration and rage that people were feeling about the economy and the lack of jobs and everyone had just been getting more and more wound up listening to the bullshit rhetoric of the current Republican primary season (who had gone so far as to blame the poor for being poor! -Herman Cain).   So many Occupiers had all this energy they had been building all November and Winter that they were ready for the first major Occupy endeavor of the new year.  On the flip side of that, legions upon legions of right wing assholes were busy trying identifying the Occupy camps (which from my own personal witnessing had seemed to have all been mostly co-opted by homeless people and Bonnaroo kids) as the entirety of the Occupy movement itself, completely ignoring we "non-camper" Occupiers.  This was a severe misconception (or intentional lie) about Occupy but here was the truth: the people at the camps were by and large NOT present in large numbers at the big rallies. I'm not saying that the camper Occupiers weren't equally important but that there was a separate, much larger faction to the Occupy Movement which were mainly people who chose not to camp.
        Also in the news, Billionaire George Soros, whom many tin-foil hat wearing Republicans believed was secretly funding Occupy Wall Street (if so, where the fuck is my check, George?) had recently predicted that the movement would turn violent this year and the resulting clampdown by the cops would result in deaths. I really hoped that it wouldn't come to that because once that line had been crossed, there would be no going back. In fact just this week, there was another major confrontation between the cops and the Occupiers in Oakland involving tear gas, flash grenades and four hundred arrests. Four hundred! This wasn't Syria. This was Oakland, California!
         I and many, many other Occupiers were chomping at the bit to get back involved. So on the morning when my mask arrived in the mail (just like in the movie "V for Vendetta," strangely enough) on the day before the demonstration, I was like a kid on Christmas . I furiously tore open the Fed Ex packaging like so much festive wrapping paper and when I got to the goods at the center inside I admit was taken aback a bit.   There is it was.  And since it was this mask itself that was the face of the star of the movie, suddenly having it in my hands felt like I was holding a celebrity face.   Of course I had to try it on immediately. Looking at myself wearing it in the mirror gave me a bit of a rush. It was like trying on a uniform for the Occupy Army for the first time. It was odd that solidarity could be found in collective, self-imposed anonymity. Yet there was. In wearing this mask, as I mentioned, you sacrificed the most important thing you had, yourself, your individuality, your identity. Instead you become an idea. And ideas were dangerous because ideas were not arrestable. As the revolutionary icon Che Guevara said to the man who had come to execute him, "Shoot, coward! You kill only a man." If you eliminate one person wearing this mask, all across the world more pop up. The creative team behind "V for Vendetta" both the comic and the movie gave us a gift, a modern, globally recognizable image, a marketing tool, an advertising graphic shorthand that I and many others intended to repurpose, to rebrand and utilize to its fullest for the Occupy cause.
         As for what to wear with it, I took a page from Shepard Fairey's Guy Fawkes Obama send up of his own famous Obama "Hope" poster and added a black hoodie and matching cargo pants for comfort and utility. I wanted to look like the guy in that poster come to life. As for my sign? I chose my "RISE UP" sign that I had held at both Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan and Occupy D.C. Why this one? As I said I was feeling like the movement itself was in danger of petering out. What it needed was a good kick in the pants. What was needed now was to remind people who we were and what we were doing. As I stood in front of the mirror, swathed in all black save for my Guy Fawkes mask and raised my sign above my head, the image cut quite a figure and when I pictured myself holding this sign high in front of the Capitol building and its battalions of police, I knew this would be a great image, a great message to send out in that place, in that time and especially in that mask to: RISE UP!
         I gathered all of my necessities, my food, water, sanitizing lotion, (loaded bowl), everything I would need for the next day, into my black backpack. I made care to wrap my Guy Fawkes mask in a shirt and carefully positioned it in the bag as not to get crushed or damaged, then went to bed early with visions of revolution dancing in my head. Just to get to D.C. I had to drive for an hour from the Outer Banks in North Carolina to Norfolk, Virginia where I caught a four hour bus to D.C. All in all it took me from the time I got up at 6 a.m. to the time I arrived in D.C. around 2:00 p.m. - eight hours- just to get there. The Greyhound journey on the half empty bus was pretty uneventful and not altogether unpleasant as I had my own row of seats and I have mentioned before that these buses now come equipped with both electric outlets and internet so I spent most of the bus ride intermittently sleeping, going over my mini-speech, and catching up on the latest politics. I didn't know if wearing a mask precluding anyone interviewing me (as had been the usual at these types of things) but I wanted to be ready in case they did.
         When I arrived at the urban D.C. bus terminal, I was greeted with a completely grey, overcast sky with an occasional drizzle. I didn't know how the fuck to get to the Capitol from where I was but hey, not a problem, I had Siri. Here was a perfect example of where I used the machines against their corporate masters. If I didn't hadn't had Siri I may have been walking around for a long time, or been endlessly asking for directions. With Siri I was on my way to the anti-corporate demonstration immediately. Thanks, Apple! On my way, I dug out my little bowl and tucked behind a parked car and sparked up. I was starting to go back and forth in my head as to whether or not I should be doing that particular activity while Occupying. At any point during this demonstration, anyone could suddenly be spread-eagled against a wall or a squad car at any officer's whim. And although, Occupy Congress that day was legal with all the necessary approved permits and thus we were within the letter of the law, every single Occupier there had a target on them I was sure.
         As I made it to the Capitol, I knew that the event was to take place on the West lawn, or grassy side of the grand building. Somehow I ended up on the East side so I had to walk all around the giant plaza of the Capitol to get to the event. As I passed the North section which was basically a huge, concrete courtyard, I saw that I was the SOLE Occupier on this side. There I was walking, all alone in this vast, vast space and I wasn't the only one aware of my curious, solitary presence because lined up against the Capitol building there were cops with assault rifles about every twenty or so yards.  They were just at the ready, facing out into the empty plaza (empty except for me) watching and waiting for an excuse to pull that trigger. Suffice it to say, it was a very, very lonnnng walk around because from the looks of me (dressed in all black with a rolled up sign under my arm) I'm sure that it was very clear to them that I wasn't in D.C. with some school field trip, that I was an Occupier. I could feel their stare burning into me. I could almost read their big, collective thoughts: Why was this guy away from the group? What was this individual in all black with the full back pack up to on this empty side of the Capitol building? In actuality I was just trying to get around to where everyone else was but I suppose to the cops guarding it looked very much like I was casing the place out, probing for weaknesses, maybe an unguarded entrance, or generally just up to no good.
         As I rounded the corner, off into the distance I saw the open expanse of greenery filled with protesters numbering close to a thousand (by 2 p.m.) in what looked to me like some glorious outdoor May Day celebration in mid-January. I excitedly took a pic and posted it to my Facebook.  Here were my people!  My fellow revolutionaries! My kindred spirits! Fellow patriots who got off their asses and gave a damn about our Democracy being usurped by the wealthiest one percent. I felt like the "Bee Girl" at the end of that old "No Rain" video by Blind Melon.  
         I started across the field and I could see different groups coming together under different banners. Occupy Orlando was one. Occupy Portland was another. There were separate groups gathered together having simultaneous General Assemblies. I was not a big fan of the General Assemblies. There was just too much opportunity there for the damaged and the attention whores to commandeer the attention of the group and steer the meetings into uncomfortable conversational cul de sacs. Too many opinions, too much opinion and not nearly enough action from those things in my opinion. And as for those awful mic checks? The so-called "People's Mic"? Where everyone blindly repeats every two to three words the any speaker says? I wasn't into that at all. I'd seen it backfire as well where people went along repeating something someone was saying when all of a sudden the speaker took a sharp turn into Crazytown and the sheeple who went right along with it, like bison following one another over the cliffs, ended up saying something they didn't agree with at all.  Whenever I heard someone yell, "Mic check! Mic Check!" UNLESS it was revealed to be utilitarian in purpose, like say logistics or to tell everyone the police are on their way, this speaking device just made my skin crawl. If you wanted the attention of the crowd, earn it with the eloquence, relativity and power of your words, earn it with your passion, earn it with your truth not some cheap carney trick . Using this "People's Mic" device to hear the sound of your own voice was a rampant Occupy addiction and I wasn't going to enable it.
         As I immersed myself further in the throngs, I saw everything from aging hippies flying upside down American flags, to college students, to Mothers with children, Iraq Veterans, and even a retired Police Captain. I could hear scattered percussion all around the park but thankfully no drum circles. As I got closer to what was essentially the "front lines" of the demonstration, the area closest to the Capitol, I heard loud, forceful chanting,
          "Show me what democracy looks like!" "This is what democracy looks like!!"
I could just start to make out something beyond the crowd, something uniform, something dark blue. Here we go, I thought. It was a literal wall of cops surrounding the perimeter of the park. Crazy numbers of cops. I hadn't seen law enforcement multitudes like this since Zuccotti Park back in the beginning. Beyond this line of po po, there was another further up on the Hill, another up the Capitol stairs and then there were even more stationed all along the Capitol building itself. The police presence was definitely totalling in the hundreds. As I continued my way through the crowds, I began to pick up bits and pieces of conversation.
         "...got arrested..." said one voice.
         "...that's why they're yelling..." said another.
        Arrested? Yelling? At who? What was going on? This event only just started a couple of hours ago and it was still daylight!  I had gotten here as fast as I could but the event had already been going for two hours.  Apparently I had missed some things.
       As I made my way closer, I saw at the edge of the area where we were permitted to protest, where the blue, police wall stood on the opposing side facing us, a group of Occupiers were screaming at the cops who were now protecting other cops who had just arrested an Occupier.  I later learne that this Occupier arrestee had allegedly violated the boundaries of the permitted protest. So that meant that for his troubles he got tackled by five cops and a heavy knee in his back as he was taken to the ground for good measure.  I further learned that there had actually been a few arrests made already including one on the Capitol steps which, according to Occupy witnesses, had been instigated by undercover cops who were posing as Occupiers who were shoving real protesters off of the stairs (before they cut us off from that area altogether).
         "Fuck you!" "He wasn't doing anything worth arresting him for!" "We pay your salaries, too!"     
         These were all things that were being shouted at top volume at the Capitol Hill cops.  So that was how it was going to be today, eh?   I bent down to my knee, pulled off my backpack, unzipped the top and slid out the mask. In an instant it was tied around the back and in place on my face. I pulled up my black hoodie over top, strapped on my backpack and unfurled my "RISE UP" sign. The thrill of donning the mask at the U.S. Capitol in the presence of all of the totalitarian numbers of cops, standing united with my Occupy brothers and sisters was instantaneous . In fact it reminded me of another work by Alan Moore called "The Watchmen." In this series, there was a character who wore a mask that resembled a Rorschach inkblot test that psychiatrists used. When this character first put on that mask he described it as his "real face." Well, for me, in that time and in that place, this mask felt like just that, my 'real face.' At the foot of the hill that led up to the Capitol, a group of protesters were holding various banners and whatnot with the iconic government building in the background. I went and stood next to them and held my "RISE UP" sign over my head with all of the forceful, completely earnest intent I could radiate. I knew exactly what I was doing putting this mask, with this black hoodie look from the Fairey poster together with these particular words on this sign and standing in front of this historic, symbolic, photogenic building. To me, this image was everything that this event was about (for me) and everything (in my opinion) that it should project to the world in a nutshell. From my perspective, this was quintessential. So instead of waiting for someone else to do it, I just did it myself.
        It wasn't too long before cameras began snapping around me.  And that was the point. This was what I could contribute to this movement in addition to my participation of just showing up. To the Occupy table I brought total causal solidarity, my physical attendance and an artistic, visual flair married to a workable understanding of mass media pschology (and a will to just fucking do it).  Various people started to come up to me. 
        One of the first was this model looking guy who looked kinda like Ace from American Idol, a twenty-something, thin, white guy, with medium length, brown curly hair and a clean-shaven face. He filmed me for a long bit then asked me,
         "So why are you here?" His question caught me off guard. I figured I'd be talking to people that day, but I wasn't really expecting people to try to have a conversation while I was actually still wearing the immovable mask.
         "Get corporate money out of politics," I blurted out, the first thing that came to my head.
         "That's it?" he smirked. No, that was not "it" at all, smart ass, I thought. I was just giving him a quick answer. With his snotty response, it was almost like he was trying to "out-protester" me (as ridiculous at that sounds). OK, "Ace," if you wanted it, here it was and I went on to recite to him the entirety of my mini speech and after awhile when he realized that he'd been wrong in his assumption of me and that he had made a total ass out of himself earlier he then got all hissy with me suddenly and snipped,
          "You don't have to tell me, Dude. I've been with Occupy Wall Street since the beginning."
I didn't say anything else. I just ignored him after that and went back to projecting the message. If that guy was somebody who was so insecure that he needed to get into a silly "I'm more of an Occupier than YOU!" pissing match with a guy in a Guy Fawkes mask, then I figured that the problem was with him and not really worth pursuing any further. It reminded me of when I was growing up and everyone in the punk rock community constantly called into question everyone else's "punk rock credentials" as an attempt at an insult. Pointless.
         Another guy came up to me, an Hispanic kid, all dressed in black with a Black Sabbath hoodie. He saw me and his eyes widened. He marched straight up to me. I think to him, seeing me dressed in all black with a mask and a rebellious sign must have reminded him of one of those Ozzfest heavy metal bands like Slipknot or that other rap/metal band named "Insane Clown Posse" whose fans named "Juggalos" all paint their faces as demented black/white clowns. He strode up to me with an air of "OK, I'm here. I'm with you. Now what?" He wasn't the only one who came up to me that day and gave me that vibe.
         Several people who were also wearing Guy Fawkes masks (including girls) all seemed to find their way to me during the day and stand next to me in solidarity, almost like they were looking for the next action. I never knew quite what to say to those other fellow Guy Fawkes (with whom I was already obviously in complete agreement). I mean, first of all, it was incredible difficult to speak through that mask and what exactly did one protester in a Guy Fawkes mask say in muffled tones to another in the same?
         "Hey, man, dig the mask. Are you a Guy Fawkes, an Anon, or a V?"
         Seemed a bit weird. Often times the other Guy Fawkes masked Occupiers would speak to me and I wouldn't really respond, not verbally anyway. One protester wearing one came up and stood next to me wanting me to notice him as if there was an assumed friendship between us because we were both Occupiers wearing the same mask. I just nodded, "Hello," but when I followed it up with nothing verbally, he reached into his pocket and silently gave me a handmade Occupy Boston pin. I still said nothing but only nodded again in mute appreciation. I don't know, maybe it was my self-confessed misanthropic tendencies but in my mind I felt like I didn't want to spoil the effect, lessen the illusion, or foil the forceful effectiveness of the mask through glib, muffled platitudes. I respected the silence of the image. The solemnity. In this mute manner, identity sacrifice was complete and therein laid the romance and the power of the emblem. AND it was completely accessible and egalitarian! Anyone could wear the mask, anyone could be the hero, because the hero was potentially everyone. Everyone there at least. Everyone on the side of freedom. Now I suppose that with my sign espousing the reader to "RISE UP" meant that there were some protesters here who were really ready to grab the proverbial pitchfork and torch and march right on over Capitol Hill. But this was not the time for that. We were numbering in the thousands strong but we didn't have actionable numbers like that (yet). For something like that you needed Tahrir-Square-Arab-Spring figures and that kind of step was nothing to be taken lightly (as the poor Arab Spring demonstrators have been learning in the Middle East). So, no I wasn't issuing a call for an actual, immediate uprising, but one of the heart, a call of participation and outreach. I had bigger plans in mind then some half-cocked, premature fruitless, bloody "Beer Hall Putsch."   But I had no such aspirations, this image and sign I had put together was in very broad strokes specifically for shock value, media branding and mass diffusion of message to the masses. What was the saying? That a picture was worth a thousand words? And as Friederic Neitzche said, “A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
          Some college-aged girls who looked like they were from Iota Eta Pi sorority walked by in their tight, hipster clothes; their long, shiny, well-cared for hair and their designer framed aviator styled sunglasses. Upon looking at me they all stopped in their tracks and took photos. Then one by one they came up for an individual shot like I was Mickey Mouse at fucking Disney World or something. This happened quite a bit actually, not just from these girls. Lots of folks were coming up and having their friends take pictures of them with me. I hadn't really counted on this either. It almost seemed as if they were taking a picture with V from V for Vendetta at Madame Troussaud's Wax Museum or more appropriately like I was one of those guys who dressed up like Jack Sparrow and charged tourists for picture taking tips in front of Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. However, I thought of these pictures being posted on Facebook pages everywhere which would get the message out more and that made it all right in my mind to have my picture taken in this manner. I wasn't there for self-aggrandizing. That's another beauty of wearing the mask, I couldn't be accused of egotism if I was completely taking myself out of the equation.
         This was a fact iterated by a photographer who walked up close to me while changing a lens on his camera and said, "You know, the funny thing is, your image is going to be everywhere but no one will know that it's you."
         "It's not my image," I corrected him. "It's everybody's..." He just sort of smiled and wondered away. Another dark featured, older, small framed, rock n roll guy with short, curly hair and various bracelets and rings videoed me for a long time and then came up to me and said,
          "Congratulations, you're going to be in a music video."
          Um, OK, I thought. This was something I also hadn't considered: people re-purposing what I was doing for THEIR own ends. I guessed in the long run again all that really mattered was that the image/message got out and that was happening, just in ways I hadn't previously imagined or expected.
         In the two or three hours I stood there I was made acutely aware that it was very difficult to breathe in the damn mask. I made a point to later cut some air holes in the nose portion but when I finally took it off I saw that the mask already had them and it was still hard to get enough oxygen in the damn thing! Plus, there was a bit of wind that day that was blowing and kept knocking off my hoodie and bending my well-worn, veteran sign of three different Occupy chapters.    Everything blew this way and that until I had to turn away on more than one occasion just to readjust everything. The view from the mask's eyeholes, by the way, reminded me of the extended one-shot-point-of-view beginning of the Michael Meyers-serial killer-horror-movie Halloween.
         Once put back together, I turned to see a group of about ten college aged, clean-cut guys walk by all wearing ties, dress shirts and dockers. They looked like they all belonged to the Young Republicans Club. They were obviously very out of place and stuck out like sore thumbs. They were walking slowly around together like a pack of laughing hyenas making fun of the all the protesters they were seeing,
         "I demand the right to play bongo drums!" one of them shouted, mockingly to lound, condescending laughter from the rest.
         What was funny though was as they passed me, they stopped laughing immediately like someone had suddenly scratched off a playing record. They looked at me like they had just seen Hannibal from Silence of the Lambs for the first time. They went from complete jovial, superior assholeness to complete shock overload in a single heartbeat. It just completely short circuited their right wing wiring to see someone dressed like this, presenting this message. They not only couldn't relate but I could see they were deciding amongst themselves that maybe coming there and making fun of the Occupiers wasn't such a good idea after all. Just at that precise moment, one of the organizers of Occupy Congress, a large framed, younger guy with thick, black curly, messy hair and matching beard with a friendly smile and a plaid, flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows, walked by me with a giant, clear, plastic bag in his hands as he collected refuse (so much for the lie that we Occupiers left behind messes).
         "Hey, man" he greeted me warmly. I nodded "hello" in return.
         "Got any trash?" he asked.
         "Yeah, right over there," I spoke loudly through the mask and motioned my head towards the group of Young Republican assholes, loud enough for them to hear. The Occupy Congress guy gave a start at first as I don't really think that he was expecting a response but that quickly turned into a chuckle as he realized to whom I was referring and what I was suggesting.
         "No doubt," he laughed and ambled away. I turned back to the Young Republicans but they had slipped away as well which I thought odd being that they could disappear so quickly when there had been so many of them. I guess they knew to get while the getting was still good.
          I looked out across the lawn and past all of the protesters I could see the inspiring Washington Monument off in the distance. I was a big fan of the monuments of D.C and I was just drinking it in when some fellow walked by me wearing some sort of weird Captain America costume that he had fashioned with an American Flag as a cape and those dreadful, large "spacers" in his ears. He gave me a knowing nod as if we were both kindred spirits being that we were both wearing masks. But I couldn't have felt more different from him. His thing was pointless, Da Da -ism, just another attention whore. I was going for recognizable Occupy branding symbolism, not freakshow for freakshow sake. Around him I saw a swarm of people milling and all of them were holding "For Sale" signs and I read one that had inscribed under "For Sale" as "The Future."
         Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds bringing out its yellow luminescence and warm embrace. The aging hippie with the large upside down American flag stood next to me. Why an upside down U.S. flag? Apparently, in old maritime tradition, if an American seafaring vessel was somehow mechanically or otherwise in distress, they would fly this flag in this inverted position to signal that they were in trouble. People were beginning to take pictures of both of us standing together when out of the blue, this tall, blond, skinny kid wearing a tight jean jacket and a studded punk rock belt came and stood next to us.
         "I have one, too!" he shouted and began waving HIS own upside down U.S. flag. There the three of us stood in the brilliant sunbeams, purposeful, meaningful, spectacle. This moment was captured beautifully in the Official Video of the Occupy Congress at the 0:22 mark. Behind us, I could hear the front line of protesters about fifteen feet away from me engaging the police, either through reasoning or through taunts. The cops who had obviously been told/trained not to respond to us only looked back in stoic silence. I had been standing in this one spot for the better part of two or three hours so I decided to take a little walk.
         I covered myself well even though someone suggested to me that with today's infrared technology that could read the heat signature off your face that a mask wasn't going to be much use against the sophisticated facial recognition software of the Capitol Police and that sounded about right. If that sounds paranoid to you it is because you just aren't aware of the current technology available to the authorities.  Welcome to the Big Brother state George Orwell predicted in his novel, 1984.   I made my way for the very front of the front line, right where the police were standing guard. I slowly walked the entire perimeter closest to the Capitol building and just took in the dread circus of it all. There were so many police and so much firepower in armaments that it really was just a what-the-hell-was-going-on-here-kinda-moment? This was America? Why were the elected representatives of our country so afraid of its citizenry that they felt the need to call in enough hired guns to kill every single man, woman and child many times over at this Constitutionally guaranteed, legally permitted demonstration? To see multitudes of police (that we paid taxes for) standing on the government steps with assault rifles primed at the ready against its own citizenry was not a sight I ever expected to see in my lifetime and I thought it was a truly horrible and horrifying thing to see of our supposed Democracy of by the people and for the people.
         As I got to the end of the perimeter there was a fit, older, white guy who was bald with neatly trimmed hair on the sides and casually dressed in jeans and a warm jacket who, like many others was busy filming away and snapping pictures. He trained his cameras on me for a bit.
"They are organizing a whole platoon of cops behind you, I'm getting them over your shoulder," he said to me. I turned to look and sure enough, many new boys in blue had just filed out of the Capitol building and had begun organizing themselves into neat little columns and rows. The shutterbug brought up a tiny pad and pen and asked my name.
         "Um, I just want to be known as one of the 99 percent," I replied to which he laughed in response which I felt was more out of the unexpectedness of my answer and less any sort of derision on his part.
         "I'm shooting for USA Today, we just usually ask for names. What brings you here?" He asked me and waited for my answer with his pen at the ready.
         "We have to get corporate money out of our politics. Campaign finance reform. Public Financing Only for the political campaigns. Term limits. We need to end the wars, tax the rich." I rattled off, trying to stay on message. In response, the USA Today guy was scribbling my answers furiously away in his little book.
         "That's all great," he said. "Nice to talk to somebody who says something instead of "Fuck the Police!" You sure I can't use your name?"
           I started to think it over because of what he had said about his other less-than-favorable anti-cop quotes he had been getting ready and I thought that to only publish that would reflect poorly on the Occupy movement.  I was still concerned about anonymity but as I have already mentioned, I blog Occupy, I YouTube Occupy, I've been to several rallies sans mask already, if there was any kind of government list, I was sure that I was already on it.  So I went ahead and gave the guy my name.
         "Thanks," he said, writing it down. He gave me a nod and then resumed his filming of the goings ons. As I walked away I wondered about the wisdom of my decision. I mean, what if that guy was with the government. I just willingly gave him my identity. If that was a government trick it was simple, elegant and effective (except for the simple matter of I care more about my Freedom of Speech than getting on any governmental Nixon-esque "Enemies List."
         I started to walk back down the line when out in the distance I heard a loud roar rise up away from us towards the streets. The call had been sounded. It was time to march in Washington D.C and to bring the message of Occupy to its ears with direct, palpable activism! It felt really amazing to be marching with my fellow Occupiers en masse again. This, THIS, was the energy and participation that I had remembered from the beginning last fall (The American Autumn) in New York City. There was a feeling of brotherhood, of causal commonality, of good will and true solidarity. So many times when I had been standing at some of these Occupy chapters by myself with my sign as The Lone Nut and sometimes while standing out there I almost felt like some time traveller from the future trying desperately to warn everyone of the coming days when corporations completely ran our country and the world without even any veil or pretense of democracy.  So to be marching in a line of like-minded citizens ten people thick and stretching so far in front and back of me that I couldn't see the end nor the beginning made me swell with good emotions.
         We marched at first to the congressional offices. As we climbed the steps to the entrance we were greeted by a phalanx of guards who were freaking the fuck out, completely overwhelmed. A lot of the Occupy Congress participants were from out of state and had come to D.C. with the intentions of also seeing their elected, regional leaders. We were told by an Occupier there that if we wanted to get into the building we had to form a line and there was a 'no sign' rule inside the building, they had to be left outside. About a hundred protesters formed in a line to go through and as I understood there were a couple dozen who actually did get to see their elected representatives from their particular states.
         We chanted and we cheered and we roared on these steps and before too long a loud ruckus rose up again and drums began beating signifying that we were to be on the move once more. The cops hovered around our procession of patriots which was now counting probably somewhere around a thousand strong, maybe more. The cops were racing ahead of us cutting off traffic in all directions for blocks around us as we marched through historic streets chanting "We! Are! The 99 Percent!"
          We stopped again in front of the Rayburn House Office Building which provided workspace for the House of Representatives. There seemed to be a sudden influx of people taking video of us and my mind went immediately to wondering if these were more undercover cops like some protesters had identified earlier. The way the entrance to this building was set up was that there was a ramp on either side which led to a second outdoor, upper level. As we converged upon the entrance, a third of the protesters ran up the left flank, a third ran up the right until they both converged at the center and the final third of us filled in the street level.  When  the synchronicity of the moment collided with the coming together of the three parts, cheers broke out into a stadium level volume rising up and out over the high whines of the motorcycle cop sirens as the police quickly pulled around and cordoned us off on all sides.
          "They're boxing us in just like the Brooklyn Bridge!" somebody yelled out, referencing the incident in New York last year where the police lured several hundred Occupiers onto the sealed-off bridge then closed ranks behind them, trapping and arresting all within (even journalists!). I wasn't so sure that was what was exactly happening so I stood my ground. From behind my "RISE UP" sign and my Guy Fawkes mask, I took in the pandemonium all around me, the endless photographers, videographers, police, protesters, passing businessmen, local D.C. residents, all of them bouncing all over the place. It was like getting stuck in one of those pachinko machines that had suddenly released a million tiny, silver balls. The drums, the chants, the whistles, the police sirens, the revving motorcycle engines, the horns beeping and the heckling were all in full tilt mode- total, beautiful, cacophonous noise, marvelous music of the sweet symphony of Occupy. I noticed that there were some heated exchanges happening between some of the cops and some of the Occupiers. One Occupier had crossed Independence Avenus and was nearly struck by a cop's motorcycle. That cop got pissed and swerved closer by him to give the protester a quick shove in response. More and more cops on foot who were wearing reflective vests began lining up in front of us forming a loose fluorescent yellow band which reminded me of crime scene tape. A bunch of cops arrived and raced up one side of the ramp and began clearing people off of the stairwell and the top level. What was funny was the cops only went up one side of the ramp to the second level so that meant that as people were coming down the other side with the cops closely behind them, the Occupiers upon reaching street level,  simply went back up again on the other side, only to be chased closely behind by the D.C.P.D. It was like watching one of those old Keystone Cops black and white slapstick comedy movies. Eventually the cops figured it out, went up both sides simultaneously (Duh!) and the Occupiers started hopping over the railing to the deck below to avoid capture. I turned back towards the street and saw that the police line now stretched halfway down the block, well away from where we were. I saw the guy who had been freaked out by the idea that we were about to be "trapped like the Brooklyn Bridge" had went up to one of the cops.
         "Yo! What if I want to get out! I need to get back to the Capitol!" the tall, middle-aged, African American man shouted.
         "Nobody's stoppin' ya" the smaller, Italian looking cop shot back then looked quickly away.
         "You blockin' us!" said the man, pacing back and forth like a caged tiger, obviously agitated .
         "You can go that way," explained the cop motioning South, "You just can't cross the street."
With that the tall, middle-aged black man walked down the street in the direction the officer had indicated. I lost sight of him when I was jostled from my position on the steps in front by some Occupiers  who were still climbing down from the second floor and jumping to and fro to avoid the reach of the cops. Things were getting bad. Was that guy smart in getting the hell outta Dodge? It had taken me several hours to get to D.C. from North Carolina and I didn't really like the idea of getting thrown in a jail after only a few hours here.  So when I got jostled a second time, this time with even more force, I figured I'd had about enough of that. Besides, if you've read my previous webjournals (and you should!) then you know how I felt about crowds. I walked the same route I had seen the tall, middle-aged African American man go and once I had cleared the cops and the crowd, I rolled up my sign and took off my mask to take a break for a few.
         The cool, winter wind felt remarkable against the balmy skin of my face after having had that bit of plastic over it for the past three or four hours. It had been a little strange in the middle of winter, albeit a mild one, sweating inside a mask. I came to love it, though, occasionally tasting the salt on the inside of the mask with the tip of my tongue. (I know, gross, right?) But the icy, D.C. breeze refreshed me and as I headed back to the Capitol grassy knoll by myself, I felt a rumbling in my stomach and figured I'd lighten some of my heavy backpack by taking in some of the food and water I had brought.
         Lunchtime!
         I made my way back to the Capitol lawn about a block and a half away then sat on the small, concrete wall, on the Southwest perimeter of the park. Next to me there was a large, green roll of temporary fencing lying on the ground ready for use in case the police wanted to round up we Occupiers. I set my black backpack on it because the grounds were still a bit muddy. When I looked up, my blood ran cold. There was a thin, goateed, African American male cop with a drug sniffing K9 unit at his heels. My thoughts immediately went to my half-smoked bowl that was wrapped up two or three times and buried deep within my bag. The dog was sniffing the air wildly. For a half of a second that seemed to last an eternity, it seemed as if the dog caught a whiff of something coming from my general direction. Here we go, I thought. Then just as suddenly, with a quick turn of his nose, the detective pooch was already happily sniffing in a different vector altogether and trotting off and away.
         Whew.
         I started to dig out my goodies from my bag. I gobbled down all of my protein bars and pretzels and guzzled it all down with a couple of my small water "pods." While I was chowing down I was checking out what was going on at the small stage the Occupy Congress organizers had erected in the middle of the Capitol lawn. There were still about two hundred people including myself here on the mall while the rest of the Occupy crowd were either in line to see their Representatives or still demonstrating up a storm at the Rayburn House. Those of who were lef were so spread out over such a large space of the Capitol mall that it left the immediate area around the stage nearly completely bare. The speakers and performers who went up there were pretty much by themselves with half of a football field of emptiness all around them. But still, I heard a white guy perform with his acoustic who had a voice that sounded very much like Michael Stipe from the group R.E.M. and he sang an original Occupy song which took the Occupy slogan, "Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out" as its chorus and it actually turned out to be a catchy little refrain that I can still hum (though I can't remember a lick of the rest of it). There was another bearded guy who stood up and tried to teach us all about some energy based - chakra- transcendentalism which he felt very passionately about but sounded a bit odd when echoing out from loud, megaphone amplification like some Shiatsu fascist. This got me to thinking about that half-smoked bowl left in my bag. And with a quick check for that pesky Sheriff Scooby Doo, I ducked my head down and using the large, green roll of totalitarian police fencing as cover, I quickly blazed up what was left of my sweet, sweet green on the West lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Fuck yeah! I packed the glass deep back in the bag. Nothing like a good smoke after a meal.   People were beginning to return to the park from their various meetings and marchings in the area and I was ready to get back to work. I reached down for my Guy Fawkes mask taking in the last of the cool breeze on my face because I knew what a stifling I was about return to. As I was lifting the mask back to my visage, I heard a tumult in the far distance and turned to see nearly a thousand people marching en masse back to the Capitol from the Rayburn House. The sun setting in the West, just barely and occasionally breaking through like a sleepy eyelid, creating flashes of brilliant, golden hour backdrop behind the marchers as the populist spirit lifted every voice even from afar. I decided I would walk from where I was sitting on the Southwestern wall of the park up to the Northern end and rejoin the demonstration at the entrance at the First Street loop.
         What I did next along the way turned out to be a life changing moment for me.
          For as I neared the entrance I noticed that though most of the Occupiers had left the park, the Capitol police, in over-anticipation for whatever may come that evening, had swelled their numbers considerably. What was interesting to me here was that there were a lot of female police around suddenly who were kinda small in stature. Now I had no problems at all with women serving in the police or military but in this instance, if the authorities were truly worried that there would be an over-rush of protesters, whereas a male officer could rely much more on his size and strength, a female officer would have to resort to greater, if not lethal force much sooner. To wit: if some Occupier jumped over a fence, a regular size guy cop would be much less apt to go right for the stun gun or the pepper spray or God forbid, the bullets, because the male cop could give the protester a strong shove (not that I'm condoning that) while the much smaller female officer might think of a different, more damaging response first. Capiche? 
        Yet here were cops and cops and cops of all colors, shapes, sexes and sizes. Walking amongst them was another cop, an older one who had rank over the rest who was pacing the outside of the new, fuller line telling them where to close up ranks and where to fill in gaps. Behind these cops further up towards the Capitol, there was yet another line of blue and then positioned all over the U.S. Capitol itself stood yet more at the ready.  It looked as if Marshall Law had been imposed or if the government itself were under siege by its own citizenry. Crazy.
         Now I've said before in this webjournal that I don't have any real problem with police. I come from a family where my Father and two of my Uncles were police officers. I knew that they were just regular people. BUT. As I have quoted here before, as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" That was exactly what I felt was going on with the police. They didn't understand us because their salaries depended on them NOT understanding us. We were there fighting for the disappearing middle class and the poor and because these police already had a good job, they were defending the one percent (who owned our political leaders through campaign donations) because that was who was signing their cop paychecks (in the most immediate and direct sense, if not figurative because they were paid by all of our tax dollars). I've also mentioned here before that every successful revolution eventually and historically evolved to the point where the armed forces of a country (see police, military) refused to act upon their own people. This meant that we needed the support of the police eventually. I decided to take a little detour from the entrance. There was still a thin cadre of Occupiers engaging the frontline cops. Gone were the loud hecklers from earlier but left behind were the reasoners, the ones who were preaching truth, facts and figures to the police, trying to win them over that way. There was even a few girls who it seemed to me were actually flirting with a couple of the cops. It was getting darker now. The sun was gone and dark blues, the dangerous dark blues, the kind that obscured vison and hid things from view, blanketed D.C..   Only the dimmest of light prevailed and it was in this twilight atmosphere that I took my sign, held it in front of me and ever so slowly walked the entire length of the line between the Occupiers and the cops who were standing at the ready. I was completely stoned and I was walking slowly by each cop wearing my grinning Guy Fawkes mask, black hoodie over my head, holding my "RISE UP" protest sign in front of me, right in front of them. They stared at me going by in fixed, tense positions like a group of cats ready to pounce. I could only imagine what must've been going through their heads as some figure swathed in all black and a Guy Fawkes mask came out of the almost darkness looking exactly what they would like for us to look -dehumanized and just a little bit scary - just enough to justify an over-reaction of violence. Through the thin darkness I was still close enough to see the concerned alertness in their eyes as they looked me up and down, searching me with their eyes for anything suspicious, quickly reading my sign and then looking away lest any of their fellow officers catch them reading. Many of the officers were African American. "RISE UP" was a very prominent slogan during the Civil Rights Movement as well. I wondered what the African American officers were thinking now that they were on the other side of that. I wanted the police, black and white, to see the sign because I wanted them to wonder: Is he telling US to 'Rise Up'? Or is he showing us what he is telling everyone else to do AGAINST us?   What was the answer?
         Both.
         I stayed at each cop a long time, overly long, uncomfortably, confrontationaly long, and I stood just as still as a corpse each time, letting the power of the mask, the meaning behind the sign and the uncertainty of it all, be MY assault weapon. I could almost read their thoughts: What the fuck was THIS guy up to? To tell the truth I was kinda asking that of myself.  What was I up to?  This was certainly ASKING for it. It didn't matter to me.  The message was more important. They could only arrest the person underneath the mask, they couldn't arrest the idea.   And ideas were bulletproof. My heart was racing. Between being stoned, nervous, and nearly hyperventilating under the mask the only other thing I felt was  complete exhilaration. I believed with all my heart that we Occupiers were the ones who were correct. Our Democracy was being stolen by the super rich right out from under our noses and thank God there were people who saw this and who were trying to do whatever we could together about it.  Maybe it was the weed but in those long, long moments where I stood in front of those Capitol Hill cops in this way, with this mask, and this sign, I felt like V, Batman, The Joker, Jesus, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Superman, Evil Knievel, Pan, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain and every other hero (and anti-hero) from any comic book, TV show or Film I had ever been exposed to growing up all rolled into one. One of the things I got to do in my Forrest Gump like life was when I toured as a guitar player with punk rock inventor Dee Dee Ramone. Suffice it to say, on the road with a rock and roll legend meant that I saw quite a lot of outre things in my life. But for all of those experiences, standing there like that in front of the battalions of blue, that was the most rebellious, punk rock and roll thing I have ever done in my life. (Note Dear Reader, this is the point where psychoanalysts could fairly accuse me of delusions of grandeur or empowerment issues or just plain lunacy but hey, don't knock it 'til ya try it. Justified, validated righteousness plus flirtation with Patriotic martyrdom can be quite exhilarating.) And the greatest thing about this?  ANYONE could do it. Old, young, black, white, fat, thin.  Anyone could wear the mask. Anyone could hold the sign. Anyone could feel this way. Everyone SHOULD feel this way.
         Be the freedom fighter yourself.
         Now honestly probably it was only the fact that my hands could clearly be seen on both sides of my sign that saved me. If they had been tucked inside my jacket pockets or in my backpack I think things would've went quite differently for your loyal and humble narrator with those fine public servants, o my brothers. The various reactions of the different officers to me was very interesting. I stopped in front of one very large, bald white mook of a cop who bobbed his head in time with his gum chewing in a very macho fashion. I stood extra long in front of him. After awhile he became uncomfortable and he and the cops to his left and right began talking about me amongst themselves.
         "I liked "V for Vendetta." He said, referring to my mask. The other cops agreed with him like  they were smart ass cop Siskel and Eberts.
         "That was a good movie." The big, white, bald, mook cop said sarcastically amongst his cow-like chewing. His co-officers agreed. I thought of responding,
       Oh yeah? Remember how that movie ended, assholes? Where the citizenry dressed like "V" over ran the military? (HELLO!)   I thought that but I didn't say it because he was just looking for a reaction, an out from my uncomfortable staring, from my uncomfortable stillness in front of him, and if I were to respond, all the power of the image would have been rendered instantly moot because of the personalization
         Every once in awhile, that older cop that ranked higher than the rest, the one who was walking up and down the perimeter of the line, would come and purposefully move a subordinate cop that I was standing in front of to try to defuse any tension or confrontation that might be building between the two of us. After one such shuffling, I found myself standing in front of two short, middle-aged, African American, female cops. Again my mind went back to the repurposed Civil Rights message of my sign, "RISE UP," and how it particularly applied to them because of their race. After a long while, the shorter of the two African, American female cops said to the other,
         "He tellin' me to 'Rise Up' but my feet hurt so bad I don't even wanna be standin' up." Her fellow female officer laughed with her. It was a dumb joke but it was their coping mechanism for the odd, tense situation I was creating. It was obvious that the police had all received training or at least been briefed not to engage the protesters on any conversational level but I think we Occupiers gave them something to think about it, a story that they went home and shared and in this manner, our message spread further. I wasn't begrudging the police a right to earn a living but they, too, were part of the ninety-nine percent. They couldn't just turn a blind eye to what was happening because they were getting a good paycheck not to care. I'm going to skip ahead here for a minute because it is pertinent. There was a very passionately and professionally put together video made of our January 17, 2012 Occupy Congress event which was posted on YouTube and at the 7:26 mark one white guy motorcycle cop douche pulls up to another motorcycle cop, an African American older man and they are both all amazed at the numbers of Occupiers marching through the streets of D.C. and the white motorcycle cop turns and says,
         "This is Democracy?  It SUCKS! I don't like it!"
         In response, the African American male motorcycle cop laughs maniacally. They were both obviously over-adrenalized. You couldn't make this stuff up. Or if we did, who would believe us?  Yet there it was captured on video. Check out the link for yourself. That was what we were up against. I have been taking umbrage on message boards and the like lately wherever I saw Occupiers getting too buddy-buddy with the cops. This anti-democracy cop (let's call him what he was, a totalitarian pig) this supposed centurion and upholder of the law in the capital of the United States of America was caught on film announcing his disapproval of DEMOCRACY and received no rebuke from his fellow officer. Does anyone really doubt that we were living in an Orwellian police state but most of us were too distracted by Real Housewives of GoFuckYourself to notice? These cops didn't give a shit about constitutional rights or one percent versus ninety-nine percent.  They didn't get it.   The truth was that most cops were the guys who were assholes in high school. They had jobs, they had homes, they had every reason except for principal to maintain the corrupt status quo. That was how it worked. Whoever played along with the corrupt system got rewarded. Conversely, if you saw what was going on, if you saw the the horror and responded in kind with objection and protest, then you were sidelined and marginalized because the herd despises free thinking, non-conformists. The cops couldn't and wouldn't relate to the causes of Occupy and they sure as shit didn't want any part of what I was doing- being a masked guy, all dressed in black, holding a rebellion sign standing directly in front of them with a sign telling them to "RISE UP."
        Now, if I wanted to know what effect the dehumanization of the mask had on the Occupier in relation to a psycho cop, well, Dear Reader, your loyal and humble narrator found out the answer. I made my way down to the very end of the police line and there was a very large, African American male cop. 
        A lot of these cops were wearing these black full face masks which I'm sure they were wearing supposedly because of the cold but make not mistake about it they were wearing them to hide their faces because of all the filming that was going on and all the Occupiers who were capturing their every move on video. The large, aggro cop in front of me was wearing such a face-covering mask.  Suddenly you had two guys-myself and the large, African American cop standing at the ready opposite of me, and we were both wearing masks and staring at one another.  The difference being?  One of us who was wearing a mask also had a gun and a whole lot of buddies with guns and the other guy with a mask only had his right to Free Speech and all of his buddies who felt the same. Just as Oscar Wilde had said about "Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth," this cop's mask had similarly freed him and made his intentions obvious. He had seen me standing in front of the two, African American female cops before him and I think that it had pissed him off that I stood the way I did in front of them. Either that or he wanted to show me something back, or at the very least... he wanted me to know that he was ready for me. I could tell that because of my mask and the all black Occupier outfit, this angry cop did not see a human in front of him at all. To him I was a cartoon, a video game opponent, a faceless drone to take out for bonus points and I could tell if given the slightest justification he would really love to beat the living shit out of me. I could see it in his eyes. He was just waiting for me to give him an excuse, anything. It was in this moment that I was so glad that the image on the Guy Fawkes mask was that of the untouchably satisfied, smiling face. There was no way this cop could win a staring competition pissing contest against the un-changing grinning visage of Guy Fawkes. Oh, how this angry, angry cop wanted to just reach out and rip my mask right off my face so bad, to show me that I wasn't as untouchable as I may have thought.
         "Shoot coward, you kill only a man, " I thought.
         As I look back upon this moment now, I think two things. The first, oddly enough, and for what reason I know not why, but when I think about this confrontation with that large, seething, African American cop, the quote from Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory (of all things!) comes to my mind, when Gene Wilder says, "We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams."
The second thing I think about when I remember this moment (and here was where my life changing moment came in that I spoke of early), what epiphany I suddenly had was the most obvious thing of all: that no matter how Keith-Richards-Middle-Finger-With-a-Skull-Ring cool it was it was to confront the cops like that, it was also incredibly risky, and unbelievably stupid. I still had my pipe on me. If any of those cops had pulled me out I would've been busted and then what? It's one thing to get arrested for the cause, for a point. It's quite another to get busted for paraphernalia. For all of my protesting, I have never been arrested. I'm a firm believer in he who demonstrates and doesn't get incarcerated, is free to demonstrate again the next day. Plus what would that have meant to the media? If the right wing got a hold of an arrest at Occupy for anything to do with marijuana and you'd never hear then end of it. I decided that was stupid and selfish of me and I swore right then that I would never again take anything like that to another Occupy event. I want to be pure of purpose at the demonstrations because the cause was worth it and deserved it.
         As I waited near the entrance for the mass of crowd to return I could see where organizers were handing out free pizza for everyone and setting up a mass dinner as well. That was one of the things I loved about the left. There was that safety net of caring, not just globally, or nationally, but on an individual level, for each and every person.
         I saw a group of young, white, long haired musician types enter the park carrying their instruments and heading towards the small stage. There was something strange about them, they didn't quite fit in. They were wearing clothes that looked expensive and new. They were accompanied by a couple of white, middle-aged, douchebags in suit jackets who had receding hairlines with the remaining locks dyed black. These older guys who I assumed were the band's Managers kept looking around, in fact all of them seemed really nervous. They set up and began to play to about fifteen or so people around them and musically they were really, really bad, just  overly earnest and very predictable and pedestrian. I saw some of the people around the stage laughing at them and walk away. As these Occupiers who left the stage came closer to me, I could hear them saying something about the lyrics they guy was singing were right wing. Apparently what had happened, I later learned, was that this lame, right wing band had taken advantage of the free sign up for the small stage and had clandestinely gotten a slot to perform and to espouse their Republican bullshit at the Occupy event.  The few who remained around the stage were probably either their friends that they had brought or people who just weren't paying any real attention. I checked out the band's website later and they were completely sucking their own dicks bragging about how they had "Occupied Occupy" and claimed that they had performed for substantially inflated numbers when the truth was that they played for a handful, got laughed at, and just pretty much sucked and bombed. I don't want to mention their band name here because I don't want to hype them but they were just a bunch of fucktards. I couldn't stand to listen to them so I decided to see how close the returning demonstrators were to the park.
         I exited the lawn and saw the large procession of Occupiers turning East from 7th St. onto Madison back towards the Capitol lawn. I started walking towards them and rejoined them at the plaza in front of the National Gallery of Art. My break had been nice but it was nice to rejoin everyone.
We marched back to the park entrance and stopped there. Motorcycle cops suddenly swarmed the area in the streets behind us completely closing off the loop at Pennsylvania and First. The white, tall, skinny hippy/punk with the studded belt like mine who had waved his upside down American flag next to me on the Capitol Hill earlier in the day had climbed up one of the structures that stood on either side of the lawn entrance. There was another protester next to me on the ground who had brought a large "Occupy" flag. The white, tall, skinny hippy/punk on top of the structure asked him for his flag and once it was passed up, he waved it high above his head. (Apparently waving revolution flags was that guy's "thing" that day.) I had seen something similar to this image on the Tahrir Square coverage on the TV news last year. On the other side of the entrance, on another symmetrical structure opposite the tall, skinny, hippy/punk, a young, clean cut, African American student sat astride and above the crowd, drinking it all in.
         "Mic check!" he screamed with his hands cupped around his mouth to form a manual bullhorn for extra amplification of his voice.
         "Mic check!" Some in the crowd responded.
         "MIC CHECK!" he screamed even louder.
         "MIC CHECK!!" The crowd answered nearly in unison (except for myself). As I have mentioned before, unless it's for logistical or emergency purposes to spread information, I detest the "People's Mic" conceit. I will march, I will chant, I will stand in solidarity but the idea of repeating someone else's opinion blindly was anathema to me.
         "First of all!" the young, perched, African American yelled to the crowd below.
         "FIRST OF ALL!" the crowd responded.
         "I want to know..."
         "I WANT TO KNOW..."
         "Can everybody see me?"  What the fuck.  He got stole the focus and interrupted the goodwill momentum of the crowd to ask if people could "see" him?
         "Can everybody see me" repeated a third of the crowd, another third yelled, "Yes!" and another third just rolled their eyes.
         Then... where he should've said something of note instead he froze and said nothing.   Wereyoufuckingkiddingme? He had just used the vaunted "Occupy People's Mic" to get the attention and focus on himself and now that he had it, he had nothing to say? Attention whore. People were looking at each other and huffing and puffing at this waste of time. This was EXACTLY why I didn't participate in all that ridiculous call and response.  The time-waster quickly realized that the crowd was turning on him and he was losing them so he grabbed a friend of his, another young African American male, whom he had pulled up on to the high entrance structure with him and again he yelled,
         "Mic check!" But there was a feeling among the crowd that they weren't going to give him their attention again as he tried in vain to give the floor to his friend.
         With the joie de vivre of the moment squandered on that fool, the crowd made their way through the entrance and back on to the West lawn of the U.S. Capitol.   Over at the small stage things were starting to pick up. The douchebag, right wing band of would be saboteurs were gone and as people were beginning to filter back most either headed straight for the food line or over to mill around the stage. Up there reading at the microphone currently was a young, slightly built Amer-Asian woman wearing a headband that gave her mouse ears (yep, mouse ears). She read poetry that was the stuff of overly simplistic elementary school homework assignments that included Occupy slogans and were delivered with all the panache that staring down into a piece of paper could muster. Her heart was in the right place and she was certainly earnest but, God bless her, her poetry was just awful. The "Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out" solo, white guy with the acoustic guitar played again this time with much more gusto to the swelling crowd in front of him and I was glad because he had a neat voice and his song was catchy.
         One of the Occupy Congress organizers also came up to the microphone to speak. Behind me, there were three, very large, very drunk, white, homeless guys wrapped in blankets. They all had very long hair and beards and this, added to their large stature and drunken nature, made me think of them like a Falstaff or like some Viking trio. They were making a big scene of themselves in the back of the stage crowd. They were yelling basic, banal, slurred slogans like,
         "Fuck the gub'ment!"
         "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer!"
         The young, white, college aged guy with thick curly black hair and matching beard from Occupy Congress who was at the mic at the small stage desperately trying to be heard reminding everyone to pick up their trash was being blown away by the loud, drunken, homeless, yelling Vikings.
         "FUCK THE GUB'MENT!"
          "...so please pick up your trash, everyone, thank you..." said the defeated Occupy Congress guy.
         Suddenly another large, drunken guy took to the small stage, grabbed the microphone away from the Occupy Congress guy and slurred into the microphone a stream-of-consciousness-word association-thirty -second-free-form-rant, riffing off the Occupy Congress guy's word, "trash."
"Hey, everybody, throw away your trash, 'cause we ain't got no cash, politicians cause a rash, where's my stash..." I couldn't really make out everything he was saying because it was an unintelligible, garbled mess but in it's own way, it was better than then young, Amer-Asian woman's scripted prose before him.
         "HEY WHERE'S WHIZZY?" shouted the loudest of the drunken, homeless Vikings behind me.
         'Whizzy'? Who the fuck was that?
         "There's Whizzy!" shouted another homeless, drunken Viking who pointed at the stage. Now it all made sense. The intoxicated, would-be, verbal Miles Davis at the microphone on stage was kin to the Vikings.
         "HAHAHAHA!" The drunken, homeless Vikings burst out into uproarious, gut-busting laughter to see one of their own getting politely escorted off of the stage by other male members of Occupy Congress. As "Whizzy" came back to their Viking fold, high fives went up all around. Well, done, Whizzy, mission accomplished.
         The word went around that soon, at 6:00 p.m. we were going to march again. This time to the Supreme Court! I was walking around a bit and marvelling at the sense of community coming into play as people were all doing their part to provide food and just as importantly, to clean everything up. While I was watching, a young, blond white boy who looked to be maybe 11 or 12 came up to me (while I was still wearing the mask) and asked where he should give some loaves of bread that someone had drove by and dropped off.   The young boy looked completely lost. It was interesting to me that out of all the people there, the one person he felt most comfortable with walking up to out of the blue, was the guy in the mask. He probably had seen the V for Vendetta movie on cable.  It reminded me of a story I saw last year of a little boy who got separated from his father at ComiCon, the large, annual comics and movies convention in San Diego.  Who did the lost lad approach to rescue him? Two people dressed as comic book heroes, The Flash and Wonder Woman, people whom he recognized who were familiar. The same thing applied here.
         "The food table is over there," I said to him muffled through the mask. He took his full, little armfuls of donated bounty and walked away into the darkness. I didn't have to wait too much longer before I heard screamed repeatedly,
         "March!" "March!" "Marrrrrcchhh!" The cries seemed to be going up all around. The large mass of humanity bottlenecked at the gate and formed a snake of patriots (Don't Tread On Me?) It seemed like everyone who had made the trip for this specific purpose had finally all arrived. It was at this time that we were at our peak in numbers and the procession we formed was at least ten Occupiers thick (more in places) and spilled over three D.C. city blocks.
         At first I found myself marching somewhere deep in the ranks of the first third of the human column. Next to me were members of another band that I presume had played at the small stage. They were all carrying their instruments and were intermittently drumming and strumming. One of them, a tall, thin, bearded guy with medium length brown hair and glasses (who kinda looked like Trey Anastasio from that band Phish), dressed in a button down beige shirt, tan corduroys and, brown "desert boots," was carrying what appeared to be a small guitar or maybe even a ukulele. He was really feeling the spirit of the march. I mean REALLY feeling it. He and his band mates began a chant together that went something like,
         "Ah! Ah-ti! Ah ti ka si ka la!"
         I'm only sure about that first "Ah! Ah-ti!" part, the rest is my best guess as to what I remember. It seemed pretty obvious that it was a revolutionary slogan in a different language. Encampanadas from Spain? Or the Arab Spring in the Middle East perhaps? I couldn't really hear well enough amidst all of the other chanting, the Occupier cheers and whistles, and of course, the ever-present motorcycle engines and sirens of our ubiquitous and constant police escort. Anyway, after chanting this foreign slogan for a moment, the rest of the guys in his band stopped but the tall, thin, bearded guy with medium length brown hair and glasses grabbed his ukulele in one hand then bent down low on one knee with his other and with his fist fully clenched and shaking in the air (almost like Tiger Woods after a hole in one)  he shouted with as much revolutionary fervor and volume as he could muster,
         "AH! AH - TI! AH TI KA SI KA LAAA!!" There was really something going on here. So much of existing in this modern world was about dealing with people whom you feel just wanted to take the country backwards. We had to read their ignorant right wing rantings on our social media, we had to read their racist and homophobic posts on various message boards and YouTube threads where anonymity of the internet provides corporation-over-people-conservatives the necessary masks of their own to reveal what horrible, inhuman monsters they really were.
         Our first stop was something no one planned but ended up being a very beautiful, symbolic moment. At this particular instant we happened upon the Newseum Building. Now what was remarkable about the front of this building was that on its face embossed in very large letters was written The First Amendment to the United States Constitution. When we Occupiers saw this next to us on the wall we stopped and in a beautifully spontaneously moment we began reciting the golden words on the building's front.
         "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances!"
         A-fucking-men. 
        And here we were. The living embodiment of American citizens exercising our Constitutionally guaranteed right to peaceably assemble and to petition our government for a redress of our grievances. We were exactly what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote that. True patriots. This moment was also captured beautifully in the Official J17 Occupy Congress video at the 8:43 mark.
         When we finished reading and started to walk again, I joined the very beginning of the procession this time. Actually I was just a little ahead of the procession with about ten or fifteen other people who were of similar intent., including one fellow who was actually wearing a tent over himself. Yes, a tent.  Now, if you have read my previous journal entries then you know that I was not the best person in the world equipped to dealing with being submerged in the teeming plurality of a crowd. Being up front now solved that plus I could see just how far ahead of us the Capitol Hill cops were now using their squad cars to cordon off traffic, blocks and blocks ahead of us, nearly as far as thee I could see. I heard a voice call in my direction,
         "Hey, Guy Fawkes, RISE UP!" I turned towards the voice and saw that it was another guy, a large guy swathed in green camouflage from head to toe whom I'd seen earlier because he, too, was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. As I turned towards him, there was a flash of light. He had taken my picture and then gave me the fist skyward power to the people gesture. I would later see this poor guy in a YouTube video getting tasered and arrested by the cops at Occupy D.C.
         When we arrived at the grand steps of the United States Supreme Court it seemed like a levee broke and out poured a deluge of Occupiers. Within sixty seconds every available space on, in and around the vast expanse of white stairs and columns filled completely with joyous revolutionaries, chanting slogans, cheering and celebrating our solidarity. I took a spot near the bottom of the steps and who should come up next to me? The little, Amer-Asian woman from the stage, the one with the bad poetry and headband that gave her mouse ears. She walked up and stood next to me and rolled her bike (?) in front of us. A quick sidenote: I would later spot this young woman in the Official Video (4:03 mark) riding her bike while the rest of us walked in the March. Now I ask you, Dear Reader, barring a physical impediment like say, an injury or a physical condition, who the fuck rides a bike during a demonstration MARCH?
         When we had chanted all we could and cheered our heart's content, we realized collectively that we had places yet to go and everyone tumbled down the steps nearly at once like so much water trickling quickly down a stony brook. I moved one leg forward and heard
         KERRASHH!
         Unbeknownst to me, the little Amer-Asian girl with the headband that gave her mouse ears had parked her bike not only in front of herself but in front of me as well. So as I took one step, over the bike went with a hard boom to the concrete and left me feeling like somewhat of an inadvertent asshole. I reached down and began lifting her bike back up and some short, older, heavyset white guy with thinning, black hair and glasses, dressed in a tweed coat and carrying an expensive looking camera swooped in and picked up the bike off the ground (and out of my hands) in a way that almost suggested like he was rescuing her from me or something. 
         Whatever. Stupid bike. Stupid mouse ear headband.
         With another great roar, we were all off again. A new call went up and around!
          "To the White House!" "The White House!" And off we went.
          As we were making out trek to the White House we passed the Occupy Camp at Freedom Plaza.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There were still lots of people milling around INSIDE THE CAMP!  They had never joined up with us.  What the fuck were they still doing there?  Why weren't they marching with us?  This REALLY pissed me off.  During my visits to the vaious camps, it was my experience that they were half populated by opportunistic, homeless people who took no interest in Occupy nor the political process itself, one quarter Bonnaroo kids who were living there for the free rent and food and to hear the sound of their own voices arguing at the General Assemblies, and only a quarter of the tent populations were actual intellectual activists who were doing really crazy things like, y'know, organizing  and voting (something I actually had an argument about with the Bonnaroo kids who considered voting "too establishment" and thus stupidly and successfully decided to off their own noses to spite their faces by withdrawing from the suffrage process altogether.  Personally, I was sick of the camps.  The masses equated the Occupy movement solely with these camps and that just wasn't the truth anymore.  Because here we were, two thousand Patriots strong, marching the streets of D.C. and I'd wager that less than ten percent of us marching were the ones who camped.  The Occupy brand had outgrown these camps in my opinion. I realized that they(the encamapanadas) were necessary for the initial Big Bang of the movement but when I saw the evictions with all the garbage and all the dead rats and the damage done to the parks, they became indefensible.  These camps should've been run like tight ships as to not have given the right wing any ammo.  Plus, I never backed the idea that someone could take over a park that was paid for by all taxpayers to be shared by all and claim a spot for a sole individual purpose for themselves indefinitely in that free, common area.  Seeing the way a large number of campers at Freedom Plaza were not participating in our march that night made my blood boil.   I was glad they were being evicted.  We needed real actionable activism NOT people getting free rent and food for claiming to be revolutionaries while in their sleeping bags. It was time to move on, these campers could either join Occupy 2.0 or they could be left behind and become irrelevant.  The choice was theirs.
         When we marchers arrived at the black, wrought iron gate that surrounded the gleaming mansion of the people set beyond the lush green lawn and fountain, several Occupiers climbed up to stand on the tiny ledge in front of the fence. At first a lone, older African American cop tried to keep people from climbing up there but soon too many had climbed and when another cop who had been following us said something in his ear, the older, African American White House cop gave up on us altogether.
As the rest of the procession caught up with us and the area in front of the White House became more and more crushingly dense with people and it felt more and more like being in the first few rows at a heavy metal concert in general admission seating in front of the stage, I, too, decided to climb up and out of the crown onto the small ledge for the illusion of freedom and breathing space it gave me from the press of all that flesh. So there I stood on the ledge in front of the White House, the home of the most powerful man in the world, with my Guy Fawkes mask and my "RISE UP" sign. Looking out over the sea of humanity reminded me of my days touring as a guitar player with Dee Dee Ramone of the Ramones back in the late 90's. Only this time I didn't have a guitar in my hand. Out in the crowd there were signs, chants, there were even some puppeteers who had brought large puppets like one of The Statue of Liberty that took three people to operate. (see it and me here at 9:27 mark).
         As I was standing there, I felt someone trying to sort of muscle past my legs to see through the fence to the White house. I didn't think of it at first but as the pushing became more insistent, I started to take notice. It was obvious that this person wanted to be where I was standing. I had something similar happen to me at when I marched with Occupy Wall Street in New York back in October of last year. Very annoying. Now the ledge that I was standing on, the one in front of the fence, was built on like a forty-five degree downward slope, presumably to discourage people from doing exactly what we were doing, standing on it. So this wasn't a comfortable perch to begin with and in fact it took a constant effort of the plantar flexors of the legs and feet just to stay put. Finally this asshole shoving on me gave me another hard push and this time I looked down to see what the hell was going on. I saw this really, pasty, goateed, white guy of about average height and build, probably in his early thirties, wearing a long, dark coat. He wore a cabbie hat that covered his bald head and behind him was a middle aged white woman with long, dark unkempt, curly hair who was right up behind so close in a way which suggested to me that they were obviously together.
         "Hey, man, you're almost knocking me off up here," I said to him, muffled through the mask while I gave him a strong nudge off of me with my leg that he was pressed hard against. Here we go again, I thought. Why was it whenever I went to one of these things there was always that time when I felt like I could choke a bitch?  Neither the guy nor his girlfriend responded to my comment, they just backed up a bit and continued to look with laser-like focus at the White House.
          Before this could be resolved or taken any further, darkness suddenly became day. In a blinding flash, the White House security had turned on their gigantic flood lights. It was suddenly bright enough to be noon outside. But just like they could see us, so could we now also see them and I couldn't believe what I was seeing -that all along the White House and even on the roof itself were more police armed with assault rifles. I know they had to prepare for anything but did they really expect that the scenario may occur where the two thousand plus concerned citizens present would rush the fence and they would have to open fire, riddling every single human being here with flesh shredding, life-ending bullets? Wasn't this all a bit much?  What were they so afraid of?
        Now full disclosure, I was an Obama supporter but there were exceptions I definitely had about his presidency.  He was the President at this time and the President deserved to be demonstrated.  Turned out that he had been somewhere in D.C. with the First Lady while we were doing our thing there but 'm sure that he was de-briefed that we were there. And even though he was a leader that I ultimately supported, ANY President needed to be concerned when there were two thousand angry citizens at the very doorsteps of the White House.  I mean, think about that for a second, how many times historically could that be said to have actually had happened in the past in the United States?   Two thousand angry protesters at the White House?  Sounds pretty historically significant to me.
       On the opposite side of the fence, coming towards me, I saw two White House cops walking by. It didn't seem at the time like they were doing much of anything besides patroling the perimeter.  As they passed, I suddenly felt the push again of the couple below me, this time much stronger. I will be honest, Dear Reader, by now my impulse was to bring a fucking flying elbow down on top of this jerk's bald head. But before I could do anything, someone yelled,
         "TEAR GAS!!"
         I looked on to the lawn almost directly in front of me and under a small tree there was something that looked like an oblong stick of dynamite, one end of which was sparking and hissing flame and belching forth a small billow of steady, grey smoke. Suddenly everyone started screaming and covering their mouths and running away in fear. I stayed there looking for a long second because something wasn't right. I'd seen teargas canisters plenty on the news, this didn't seem like that. This smoke was a different color and the volume of smoke coming out of it wasn't enough and the canister itself wasn't a canister at all but it was more of a flaming stick, almost like a flare. Then I caught a whiff.   There was no irritant at all.  This was no tear gas. 
          It was the awful stench of a stink bomb. I looked down to see if there was a place I could clear out of there and jump down and I noticed that interestingly enough, the couple who had been at my feet, the ones who had been so insistent on getting past me to the iron fence, were suddenly nowhere to be found. Now later in the press it was highly publicized that members of Occupy Wall Street threw stink bombs at the White House but I wasn't so sure that's how it went down..
         Well, I was there. I mean, I was RIGHT there. And I didnt' see any of US throw anything. But if it WAS one of us, my money was on the couple who were at my feet.  However, even though the distance the stink bomb was from the fence was certainly within throwing distance  I'm not so sure it was an Occupier who threw this ONE stink bomb (there were not multiple) at all. Remember the two cops that I mentioned had passed directly in front of me? They could just have easily have surreptitiously dropped it as they walked by. There was even a report that someone said it "popped out of the ground." Now if this were any other place on Earth that would sound ridiculous but we were talking about the White House here which is probably the most well-defended place on Earth. Who would put it past the White House security forces to have such benign, anti-crowd, counter-measures? Anyway, with the crowd scrambling around to and from and people yelling in terror and the police closing in, I jumped down and stood amidst the impressive, revolutionary circus of it all, absorbing the energy, trying to remember everything I was seeing for your later perusal here, Dear Reader.
         Eventually things settled down and everyone was just kind of milling. I will be honest, by that time I was exhausted. It had been a full day and I had given everything I had. The stench of the stink bomb still hung heavy in the air like a truckload of rotten eggs had spilled all over the plaza. It was time for me to go home. I was very pleased with what we had accomplished together on this day. The January 17, 2012 Occupy Congress event had been an amazing kick off to the new year. Local chapters from Oakland to D.C. were alive and well and the first national gathering of the beginning months had been off to an auspicious start. I later took the long bus ride home with a smile on my face and a full heart, already looking towards the next one.

        Speaking of, the next big event is scheduled for March 30, 2012 once again in Washington, D.C. and I hope to see you there!


EPILOGUE: I later saw my image, the Guy Fawkes Occupier with the "RISE UP" sign in front of the Capitol building, the Rayburn Building, everywhere plastered all over the net.  However, the image that ended up defining the day involved a different guy in a Guy Fawkes mask, who wore a green, full camouflage outfit with the Capitol in the background and another Occupier to the side holding up one of those "For Sale" signs I had mentioned all in one shot. I admit that was better than what I had put together, more people, more information, more kinetic energy. The most important thing was that the image, the branding and thus the message of Occupy got out further.


To be continued...