THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT - OCT. 18, 2011 "The Baby With the Bathwater"

THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT - OCT. 18, 2011

 "The Baby With the Bathwater"


      I had finished my speech the day before and spent that night and the next morning memorizing it (or so I thought, but more on that later).  I had my sign making materials in front of me, a large, white, poster board and magic markers.  Now all I had to do (again) was figure out what the hell I wanted to say.  I didn't want to repeat myself with "Join Us Save Our Republic" (though that still held true for me). Besides, it was time to ratchet up the message.  Even in the last two week the tone of these protests had changed into something more confrontational, more explosive (literally) and more global.
      I thought about making my sign something about the police.  Not in a "Fuck the Police" kinda way but something a bit more subtle.  My first idea was to put the average CEO salary (11.4 million/year) versus the average yearly salary of a cop (which is $56,000) and underneath both of those figures write something like, "Who Is More Important?" or "What's Wrong With This Picture?"  In my mind, as I've mentioned in previous journal entries is the idea that, historically, all successful revolutions eventual require the participation of both the police and the military.  There were more examples of the members of both these parties showing support of laten for in the last week or so, some Iraq War veterans had been causing quite a stir by joining in the demonstrations themselves much like their predecessors in the Vietnam era had done before them.  One video had even gone viral of one of these vets, a very, very, large black man clad in his military jacket with identifying accoutrements proving his legitimacy, heatedly berating a group of ten or so NYPD.  He dressed them down for fighting against their "own people" and how that wasn't "bravery" and if they wanted to fight people then they should join the military and go fight in the Middle East.  The cops were receiving the brow beating of their lives and didn't move a muscle to act against him but stood their in mute, embarrassed astonishment, shamed silence.  Powerful stuff.  Good for that soldier, thought I.
      So as I got to thinking again about my new sign and it's contents about CEO salaries vs. cop salaries, two tiny problems came to mind: first, it was a bit "wordy."   Like I've pointed out before, you've really only got a second at best for people to read and process what you've written, before they move on. Secondly, and also as I've mentioned  before, Ivy League professor Cornell West had gone to jail recently for protesting the cops' right to search any protester without probable cause (and I still had my, um, green medicine on me). My cop oriented sign might backfire and get me searched and then it would be off to jail for me for sure.
      I didn't mind letting go of the cop oriented sign idea because I wanted something more active anyway, something with more juice, something with more punch.  I started mulling over my speech in my head again and when I got to the end, that's when I figured out what I wanted.  My last words of my speech were "Rise up!"  RISE UP. Now, that was something I could literally and figuratively stand behind because that is my hope with all of this marching, chanting, blogging, YouTube-ing, etc.  I'm trying to get as many people involved in as many ways as possible from just simple awareness of a different point of view to (hopefully) actual involvement themselves.  I really believe that the current class war being waged by the super-rich against everyone else is actually a fight for the very tenets of our democracy, the inherent foundations of our country.  Plus, on a far less lofty note, I like the image of holding my sign high above my head while saying those words like Sally Fields with her "Union" sign in that movie NORMA RAE.
      I completed the sign with it's simple message of "RISE UP," rolled it up, took a puff (no, not the sign), and down to the streets of New York City to make my way to the Occupy Walls Street demonstration I went.  All along the way, I mumbled my speech over and over and I thought for a second that to everybody else I must've looked like some whacked out mental case who talked to himself.  Not that it mattered much here in The Big Apple.  Everybody is so wrapped up in themselves here (maybe even more so than Los Angeles and that's REALLY saying something) that you could walk down the street in a chicken mask and pink thong and nobody would even bat an eye.
     When I arrived at the park on Broadway and Liberty I was still overwhelmed by how much had changed since my first visit a couple of weeks before (and I thought it was busy then!).  This was nothing less than a human frenzy, a buzz saw-energy-refugee-camp centered in the busiest metropolis in the world.  Oh, the humanity!
     As I looked around I could see that the freak show contingent was again in full force that day.  Where should I begin?  Well, perhaps I should start by saying which freak WASN'T there.  If you read my last blog then you know all about my confrontation with that self-promoting tattoo face guy.  Strangely, he wasn't there at all.  (Had I gotten through to him?)
      But not to worry because instead of him there were plenty of new freaks, like the woman (yes, woman) dressed as, of all quixotic things, the Burger King himself, complete with a full beard, crown and robe.  I never really got what she was going for.  There was another guy dressed as Santa Claus in October.  I couldn't really catch his (snow)drift either.  Then there was a whole different class of freaks, the "arty freaks." There are a lot of artists and designer types in New York and they were definitely represented here as well.  In particular was this one fellow (who I'm guessing was a male but it was hard to tell by the costume) who was dressed in a stylized HazMat suit, a gas mask that completely hid his face, and topped off with a large, circular, Asian hat (like the kind you see those movies with farmers in rice paddies wearing).  This performer had also brought with him some dry ice or something that was creating this sickly, smoke effect around him as he he moved his long, black rubber gloved hands in an eerie fashion to some creepy instrumental music playing from an unseen boombox.  This was quite the spectacle.  I didn't really understand his gig either. Hopefully, he was protesting the amount of pollution in China and how off-the-charts-levels of smog and poison they pump into the sky and  the Earth. Or he could just be getting his freak on. At least he was entertaining for a few seconds.  That's more than could be said of the two well meaning, middle-aged, heavyset, hippy women, one with an acoustic guitar and the other with a tambourine-like something out of  Woodstock-who just kept playing "This land is your land, this land is my land," over and over again, ad infinitum.  I shit you not.
    Anyway, I knew I didn't want to stand next to any of these people.  I also knew that I didn't want to be at the opposite end of the park where the deafening calamity of the for-profit-drum-circle were bashing. I'd had enough of that the day before, thank you.
     I scanned the park for a spot and took a second to notice what a gorgeous Fall day it was in Manhattan, clear skies and a slightly brisk breeze married to a warmish (but never hot) sun.  Ahh, the American Autumn.  Outstanding.  I was also looking around for my online friends I had "e-met" after I responded to their congratulatory messages they'd sent after viewing my interview/debate with Victoria Jackson on YouTube.  I knew they were here somewhere but where?  There were thousands and thousands here and we hadn't really set up anything more specific than "I'll see you there." But where was "there" in this madness?  This was quite the kerfuffle. There were thousands here and they could be anywhere under this canopy of multi-colored tarps, this patchwork quilt of civil disobedience.  
     And where was this "soapbox" they'd mentioned to me? Or was it a non-specific type thing?  Meaning: there wasn't literally a soap box or any kind of box for that matter besides that which you made for yourself.  My question was answered when I heard a black woman's voice call out from the center of Zuccotti Park.
     "MIC CHECK!!"  She screamed.  Suddenly a couple of hundred people repeated her in unison.
     "MIC CHECK!!"  They screamed back.  They called this method of repetition "The People's Mic." This was how it was done here because in addition to humanitarian items like Port-o-Potties, no amplification of vocals were permitted by New York law.  That meant that no megaphones, no microphones with amps, nada, nothing, bupkiss were allowed.  The powers that be have learned from the rebellions of the past and have zeroed in on which tools, if taken away, hobble insurrections like this one.
     Seeing the woman speaking showed me the location of the proverbial 'soapbox.'  Well, that wasn't going to do at all, I thought.  For as I watched the black woman give her short speech (made overly long by the audience repeating not only every single line but sometimes merely phrases), when she finished, I noticed that not only was there that awful, polite smattering of applause, the kind one usually gets when one preaches to the choir, but that this "People's Mic" technique had pretty much rendered her speech instantly forgettable, as if it never happened.  The leader of the French Revolution, Robespierre himself, could've been ferociously orating here and because of the repetition and slow pacing of "The People's Mic" it still would've only elicited a similar, dismissively accordant, "Yeah, yeah..."  
      That wasn't enough for me.  I hadn't come hundreds of miles from Baltimore for that.  Not that I wanted applause, no, I wanted results.  I wanted recruitment.  I wanted cause and effect.  I wanted to launch verbal napalm directly into the hearts and minds of the NON-converts.  I know that may sound over-reaching  but if you are going to do something like this, what good then are half measures?  I've always been attracted to extremes anyway and in this instance, just to make the slightest of ripples you had to launch not pebbles into the pond but boulders.
      As I looked around I was glad to see that no one else was speechifying in the manner I intended. Oh, there were countless people holding signs but really, no one was saying a word.  This was good because it was going to be hard enough to be heard as it was when fighting against the ambient, urban, audio palette.  It seemed that where I was standing on Broadway and Liberty next to the stairway entrance to the park where I was planted was about as good as it was gonna get.
      I unfurled my sign and honestly, not five seconds after doing so, someone was already lining up to take a picture and then another and another.  I looked to my right and saw that I was actually standing a little too close  to the guy dressed as Santa Claus for my liking so I scooted over a bit next to a long table with pamphlets on it.  This hadn't been here when I was here two weeks ago.  Apparently, it was the general information table for the Occupy Wall Street movement.  It was a spot with lots of foot traffic all around it.  From the hundreds of people who were walking by just because it was another block in downtown New York, to the multitudes of the curious, to the Wall Street suits, to the Occupiers themselves walking in and out of the park, hell, even the tourist buses (the kind with open tops full of people) passing who had now made Zuccotti Park one of the sights to see in NYC had made this particular place in the park prime protest real estate for exposure to the hoi polloi. 
     It was now or never. 
     I had been memorizing my speech all night and rehearsing it all morning.  It timed somewhere between 3:30 and 4:00 minutes depending on the delivery.  When you speak loudly you almost have to speak very slowly because you have to take a lot of breaths and fill your lungs with enough air to really bellow.  I thought for about a half of a second about doing that silly, "Mic check!" thing but after seeing how the repetition while functional still robbed the speaker's words of momentum, cadence and ultimately, power, I decided to forgo all of that.  I wanted to do it a more traditional way. 
     I couldn't believe I was going to do this. I think that bespeaks of how much this movement meant to me, that if I, an admitted misanthrope with a touch of subsequent agoraphobia was going to speechify in front of a steady flux of multitudinous strangers, then you knew of the importance that I regarded all this.  What actually made this doable for me was the challenge, the actually getting in the trenches, the almost punk rock immediacy of it all, that's what compelled me onward.
     Unfortunately, I had counted my chickens before they hatched.  Because as I cleared my throat, made ready the use of all my theatre training and years of experience in voice projection as a singer in loud rock bands, I opened my mouth, ready to speak truth to power when...
     >gulp<
     Nothing came out.  I totally froze.  I suddenly couldn't remember a word.  I was too distracted by the million different things going on around me to concentrate.   And though during my mid-morning walk to the park I had my speech down pat, now, suddenly faced with the masses, I went up.  I couldn't remember a single word, not even the first.  Damn it.
      I pulled out my Iphone to look at my copy of my text that I had sent to myself for just such an occurrence.  I did this action behind my sign as surreptitiously as possible because I didn't want anyone to get a photo of me at an anti-corporate rally, holding my sign of rebellious encouragement with the ironic juxtaposition of holding a fucking Iphone.  Now I've explained in earlier journal entries why I feel the argument that the Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn't use such devices so I'll not go in to it again here except to say, Dear Reader, isn't it exceptional to be able to use the machines against their very makers?  I pulled up my speech, read it quietly once or twice, enough to get it back in my head.  I decided to keep the page open on my phone in my pocket for quick reference.  This was great except that the only drawback being that I couldn't then hand it to someone to shoot footage.  I did manage to get a fellow OWS protester to take a few, quick stills but no video.  I don't mean to say that I wasn't videoed because there were plenty of others recording me, just none using my phone.  I'd already posted the text of my speech online, that was the important part to me, personally owned footage of me actually saying it would just have to wait until the following week when I participated in the Occupy D.C. Demonstration (details in my next journal entry).
      I started to give my speech and this time, thankfully, the words just came pouring out. What I tried to keep in mind was that I wasn't trying to be an actor reciting some monologue, that this was a message that I, personally, wanted to get across just as surely as I would have as if in a conversation.  The first time I said it (yes, I did it more than once), I drew a small crowd but not much because I was still a bit hesitant.  Though there weren't many in that first crowd, those who were there were all holding video cameras and in this digital, information age you have no idea how far a reach this could actually have depending on where it was posted.
      I was emboldened when a middle-aged white guy with glasses and a moustache (think Ned Flanders from The Simpsons but with a smaller build) came up to me afterwards and said,
      "I want to thank you for what you are doing here.  I agreed with every word that you said.  I'm an ex-Pat living in Switzerland and I brought my son here because I wanted to see what was going on."  I looked to his side and there was a wide-eyed young boy of about twelve with long, blond hair who stood silently trying to take it all in.
     His Dad shook my hand as he walked away and I said, "Well, if I can reach just one guy..."  I didn't get to finish this thought because the guy heard me say this, spun around quickly and grabbed me by the arm though not in an aggressive way, mind you, more like, "Hey, I really want you to know I'm meaning what I say" kinda way.
     "No, it's not just 'one guy,'" he insisted, "What you are all doing here is going out all over the world.  This is real what you are doing." He held on to me and looked into my eyes for a long second until he was sure I got his point.  I did.
     "Thank you," I said, genuinely grateful.  He gave me a pat on the shoulder and disappeared into the crowded park with his Nordic son by his side.
       I stood there for awhile holding my sign like a silent sentry.  When I saw that is was all fresh, new faces (and ears) around me, I started the speech again, this time an even larger crowd stopped to listen.  I was growing in confidence, my flow and inflection was improving.  Speaking like that in front of people leaves you feeling somewhere between Teddy Roosevelt and a carnival barker.  The politics make it Teddy, that fact you don't have a rapt audience is the carnival barker part.  As I began talking, I noticed two guys in particular were hanging on my every word.  One was a silver haired older guy with a matching silver moustache who was carrying his bicycle and the other was a youngish, short,white guy with his black baseball hat turned backwards to compliment his matching black tracksuit.  When I finished this time, the white-haired guy with the moustache and bicycle approached me.
      "Where does it go from here?" He asked me.
      "Well, we have to get the numbers.  Eventually you get so many people together that they have to make reforms," I replied. 
      "Not without violence," he responded.
      "Completely without violence," I countered.  (What was his angle?)  "Civil disobedience," I continued, "Just like Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
      "Martin Luther King, Jr. WAS violent," the white-haired guy said which really set off an alarm for me.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was violent?  What it really felt like was this guy was wanting to play the devil's advocate and couldn't because he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.
      "No, man, Dr. King was about non-violent demonstration.  You need to check that again.  Dr. King was about civil disobedience," I explained.  Checkmated and revealed in his ignorance, the white-haired guy nodded his head as if to be following what I was saying.  There was then an awkward silence as he just sort of lifted his bike again and slinked away.
      By now, a whole new crowd had formed and I began my speech again.  As I got to the part where I proclaim that 'we are not anarchists,' some ginger fuck dressed in all black walked by me with with a similarly dressed friend.
      "Hey, man, I'm an anarchist." I ignored him and just continued until he said to me in an even louder tone, "Hey, man, I'm an anarchist," he repeated, dickishly.  My first inclination was to turn to the guy and say, "Really? So once we have anarchy and somebody steals all your shit and rapes your sister at gunpoint, who are you going to call?  There are no law enforcement officers because in an anarchists' world there are no laws.  The same would go for prisons which would then have to be emptied because again, if there are no laws, then there are no laws to break."  Fucking idiot.  These misinformed "anarchists" think that being one just means being against the status quo, wearing all black and smashing Starbucks' windows.  This guy was just being a douche.  I turned to him for a split second.
      "Good for you," I said staring him in the eye with a "you really wanna take this farther?" look.  He got the hint, he and his friend moved on and I resumed what I'd come to do which wasn't suffering fools like these gladly.  I continued my speech and at the end of my last line, I saw that I had drawn a nice size crowd of about fifty or so pairs of new ears and I was just about to wrap up with my "big finish"  RISE UP line when the hip hop kid in the black track suit I mentioned earlier, the one who had been listening to me go through my piece so intently multiple times with the white-haired guy, suddenly leapt in front of me to be in front of all the cameras that were aimed at me and he says to them in total non sequitur,
      "It's OK, folks, because everyone knows that the Tea Party is owned by the Koch brothers."
      WTF?
      This was just this guy being jealous of the attention that I was getting and thought that he'd steal my thunder, so to speak.  And although, I agreed with what he had to say what he had just done was damn rude.  If you've got something to say, hey, this park is big enough for everybody but don't just cherry pick photo-ops with pedantic one-liners that he probably heard someone else saying.  I let it go.
       I noticed that the two guys at the Occupy Wall Street information table were looking at me.  One was a younger, white guy with glasses and the other was an older, hippy-type white guy with long, silver hair.
       "Hey guys," I said.  "Sorry if you've had to hear my stump speech a few times," I laughed, my voice starting to grow hoarse from yelling multiple times over the beeps and the white noise interference of the living city. The younger guy with glasses said,
       "It's OK. You've drowned us out a few times [from speaking at our table], but you've been on message, so it's cool."
       "Yeah, great speech," the older guy opined.  "I've been seeing a lot of people video you.  That's definitely gonna be all over YouTube." 
       "You want some water?" asked the younger OWS guy with glasses as he offered me his thermos.  Now ordinarily I NEVER drink after anyone else for obvious germ-awareness reasons but this was more than just a swig for a parched throat.  This was a loving cup.  It meant that he recognized me as a brother of the revolution and in this inclusion we looked out for one another even in the simplest of gestures like a drink of tap water shared from a thermos for a raspy throat.
       I took a quick break and checked my speech text again on my phone.  I kept forgetting a phrase here and there or rearranging parts.  I just wanted to really get it right.  Hello, OCD.  I cleaned my throat and began again and once more a crowd formed and video cameras were thrust in my face while other shutterbugs jockeyed for position all around me.  I got to the end, I was just about to give my finishing line when...
      "Hey, folks! It's cool because the Koch brothers control the Tea Party."
      MOTHERFUCKER!
       It was that same asshole shining my gig again.  Dear Reader, believe me when I tell you that I soooo did NOT want to get into a fight, but this individual was REALLY pushing my buttons.   Before I could say anything to that tracksuit kid, two guys came and stood right next to me.   One had a video camera and the other had an acoustic guitar.  They were standing uncomfortably close to me because they wanted the spot I was standing in because you could see the park's crowd behind this spot.  The guy with the acoustic guitar suddenly turned with his back to the park and the guy with the camera said,
      "OK, go!"
      The guy with the acoustic started strumming and singing this peppy, little ditty about the protest that sounded a little Bob Dylan-ish, "Johnny's in the basement mixin' up the medicine, I'm on the pavement talkin' about the government..." only not nearly as good.  Here was another Woodstock wannabe.  What year was this?  Just because something was cool and spoke to it's time forty years ago doesn't necessarily mean that it will be pertinent again.  I was waiting for them to finish because I didn't want to screw up their shoot but they ran through it like five times. That made me feel not so bad about the number of times the OWS information table guys had to hear me versus hearing this dated, throwback nonsense over and over. So I decided to just move. 
      I started walking to the other side of the park on the corner of Liberty and Broadway, nearly where the day before, I had gotten to that spat with tattoo face, the self-promoter. The irony was not lost on me.  Next to me was standing this white guy about college aged wearing a green, army jacket although I didn't get the impression he was a military guy, more like he'd picked the jacket up at a surplus store or thrift clothes shop.  He was holding a sign against the bank bail-outs.  Another even younger, white guy came and stood next to my right.  He was just the barest wisp of a thin twink with longish hair that he kept moving out of his face.  His sign read: I'm just trying to love the 100%" 
      Bitch, please.
      I mean, yeah, I agree in the broadest sense with his sentiment but we as a society are wayyy beyond that point of all of us of all classes joining hands and singing fucking Kumbaya together, not while the one percent are stealing our country dollar by billion dollars.  You can't make the super-rich stop their acts of wanton greed at all costs by simply "loving them."  Even Jesus threw the tables of the money changers in the Temple.   I wanted to tell the hippy twink, "Go tell the one percent how much you 'love' them. You know what they'll say? 'Aww, that's sweet.  Now gimme the rest of your fuckin' money! And your Granny's social security, too!"
     I started up my speech again from my new park spot and this time I drew the biggest crowd yet.   So much so that the police had to come and tell people not to block the sidewalk.  I don't know if I had timed it just perfect but it seemed like the largest lunchtime shift of the day had let out and the most people yet, who were going in both directions, suddenly stopped to hear what I had to say.  And just at that precise second, one of the fully loaded tour buses had to stop right in front of me because of congested traffic.  I was barely out of my first line of speaking and now there were people gathering even from behind me to see what was going one.  There were cameras everywhere.  This easily matched in numbers the two or three hundred I would've spoken to if I'd opted for speaking inside the park.  But this was so much better, more active, more productive, and not only was I suddenly speaking in the round but the fifty plus on top of the stopped tour bus who were all leaning over and also recording gave me a sort of balcony audience as well.  It was like everything came together at once.   This was it and it was the best it would be all that day.  The congested traffic even gave me the added benefit of making the traffic noise a barest minimum and for the next three or four minutes while I orated, in the heart of protestville in downtown Manhattan, I swore you could've heard a proverbial pin drop as I had the ear of all.  I even spotted in the crowd one of the actors from one of my favorite TV shows, BREAKING BAD who was dressed all in white and craning his neck to see.
      As I spoke, the crowd cheered and jeered in all the right spots in almost verbal choreography and when I by repeating, "Rise up!" they began chanting "Rise up!" with me and the tourist bus cheered as they finally pulled away.  If I'd had a genuine Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech moment, that was it.
      When I finished, a woman and her cameraman who had been shooting me came up and asked my name, I didn't want to be rude so I said,
      "My name is [S] Fitzgerald. but I really only would like to be known as one of the 99 percent." She asked me a few questions then they asked a few of the kid next to me in the green, army jacket.  When they asked him his name, he parroted my response and said, "Yeah, like he said, I just want to be known as one of the 99 percent."  I felt proud.   They asked us both if we could foresee a militant wing of this movement forming.
    I said, "No, this is a peaceful protest.  The only way something like that would happen would be if they did something first, like if they kill a protester."  I thought of that moment when recently I heard in the news that not one but two Iraq-war-veterans-turned-protesters had been put in the hospital by cops in riot gear, I think sometimes that it won't be much longer, unfortunately, until that dark threshold is crossed.  The kid in the army jacket agreed. As the woman walked away, I heard a voice from behind me say,
      "Hey, man, great job. You really know your stuff."    I turned behind me to see a guy who looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo except with a full beard and wearing one of those knit hats that guys with long dreadlocks wear.  He had been standing really close to my back, listening both to my speech and my interview afterwards.
     "Thanks, man.," I said and shook his hand.
      "Just..." he continued, "If I can give you some pointers..." He offered.
      Um, what? We're in the middle of protest pandemonium, barely restrained chaos, and he wants to give me notes??  Who the fuck was this Gertrude Stein of Zuccotti Park?
       "Yeah, just try to keep it positive," he told me though I hadn't agreed at all to hearing out his "pointers" yet.  I thought what I was saying was very positive if you were in agreement with me.  Was he referring to the part where I said that if you thought living as a slave to the one percent was preferable to dying for the dream of America of our Founding Fathers then you were the worst kind of traitor: complacent and apathetic?  Was that what had gotten his panties in a bunch?  Well, tough shit, dude.  I imagined for a second this guy being around the members of the American Revolution of the 1700's.
      "Um, guys, do we really have to say, 'Give me liberty or give me death?' Can't we... you know... keep it positive?"   Then it dawned on me.  This guy was from the Occupy Wall Street inner circle and was basically telling me to tone it down.  My immediate reaction was to turn to him and say,
      "Hey, man, you exercise your right to free speech the way you want to and I'll exercise mine the way I want to. Capiche?"
      It was really bugging me that OWS actually had their own version of thought police to keep people in line. But who asked them?  Then I remembered that line from George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM again, "All animals are equal (but some animals are more equal than others).  Bullshit.
      Now don't get me wrong.  I can see the need for keeping an eye out.  There have been some anti-Semitic lone crazies who've been caught espousing their racist filth at this rally and giving a skeptical eye to the whole movement itself.  Bur free speech is free speech.  This is a big tent.  And to protect the best, unfortunately you must defend the worst.  I may personally be revolted and sickened by what garbage comes out of some peoples' mouths but we must defend to the death their right to say it or we do not possess a truly free society.  I didn't end up answering the OWS guy.  My fifteen years spent living in Los Angeles taught me useful tools in situations like this.  I know how to "freeze out" people I don't want anything to do with.  Shaggy of OWS got this message pretty quickly because picking up on that I wasn't being receptive to his critique, he quickly said,
     "But you're a really great speaker, man.  You really know your shit," he repeated.  I said nothing, freeze out being in full effect.  He got wise and disappeared.
      I started up my speech again and who do I see in the crowd again?  That motherfucking guy in the black tracksuit who kept interrupting me before.  He'd followed me over to the other side of the park. He was standing in the back, closest to the street, leaning against the police barricade.  A smartly-dressed middle-aged white woman with dark features (think Jersey) was standing near him against the barricade as well.  Both were listening intently. 
     As I was speaking, it caught my eye that the tracksuit guy was now trying to chat up the smartly dressed woman who kept politely nodding at him but she was trying to pay attention to what I was saying.  It soon became clear to him that she wasn't going to give him the time of day.  When I reached the end, another small group of photographers and documentarians were shooting me when...
      "It's cool folks, because the Tea Party is owned by the Koch brothers!"
       Dick!  He did it again!
       You could see the frustration on the on the faces of the people doing the recording and hear their audible groans as this guy had just ruined their whole shot. He may not have had tattoos on his face or been wearing a gas mask, but this tracksuit guy was just as guilty of being a useless attention whore.  Here was somebody else who had nothing really to add but was trying to steal all he could.  I had enough. I tapped him on the shoulder.  He turned around and I immediately smelled alcohol all over him.
       "Hey, man," I said sternly, "Get your own thing."
       "Huh?" he asked dumbfounded.   The kid in the army jacket next to me had seen what tracksuit guy had just done and was in agreement with me.
        "That's like the third time you've done that to me.  Get your own thing, man." I repeated.  He tried to step up to me in a confrontational manner but it was comical.  Now I'm not even what you would call a large man but I stood a full head taller than this twerp.
        "Man, I'll push you in that hole!" he threatened.  Hole? What hole?  What the fuck was he talking about?  I figured out he must've meant the pit of protesters behind me as from where I was standing, you descended the steps to enter the part of the park that was below street level.
        I lowered my sign ready to drop it if shit was gonna go down.  It seemed that was the first time that he actually saw the fact that I was twice his size.  He changed his tune real quick.
       "Yeah, well," he stammered.  "I'll go because you can't handle that I'm so much more awesome than you."  He actually said that.  God, his breath wreaked.  Whatever, dude.  Like Motley Crue once sang, "Don't go away mad, just go away."  And away he went, mercifully, never to be seen again, at least not by my eyes.  The kid in the army jacket shook his head and looked at me like, "What the fuck was THAT guy's deal?"  There was a rampart just to the left of us where people were standing up on.  Someone got down and a space opened up.  The kid in the army jacket was closest but he offered it to me.  Respect. That was cool of him.  I climbed on up to the much better vantage point and as soon as I got up there I realized...  Holy shit!  This was the exact spot that tattoo face had stood the day before.  Again, this point was not lost on me.  In my opinion, this was THE best spot to protest in the park. If Zuccotti was a monopoly game, this was Boardwalk AND Park Place.  I was determined to put it to better use than that shameless self-promoter from the day before.
      I gave the speech from this higher up position.  It was easier to address people from up there but this area came with it's own problems.  Now I admit, I was inspired to speak in this manner with the sign from the Ron Paul guy I'd seen doing the same thing on YouTube (albeit with a much different message) but I hadn't seen anyone actually doing that at the park neither today nor any of the other days I had been there previously demonstrating.   Now when I put my version together, I also took from that Ron Paul guy the idea of the confidence of preparation.  People may disagree with you but you have to know what you are talking about, in your mind you have to believe what you are saying and have it make sense wholeheartedly, to be compelling.  I had thought about what I wanted to say for a long time, I had done research, I had arranged ideas, I had memorized.  There was very little ad hoc about what I was doing.
      Unfortunately, after I gave my speech from my new loftier vantage point, this delivery style suddenly caught fire around me.  It seemed like where previously there had been five or six guys up there with me silently holding their signs but it after hearing my recitation, they suddenly found their tongues and began loudly um, 'orating' themselves, if it could be called as such.  And oh, Dear Reader, what a cavalcade of crap came out of their mouths.   It was like they had suddenly realized, "Wow, you can do that?"  They suddenly took child-like joy in the finding of their own voices. And rude!  They had no respect for me or even for each other speaking.  Somebody would start speaking and then somebody else would just start shouting over the top of them til the whole thing sounded like an unintelligible mess, the shoutfest equivalent of the drum circle dissonance. And what were these bon mots, these nuggets of wisdom they decided just had to be heard?
      Well there was the middle-aged long haired, mustachioed Latino man who was standing street level directly in front of us.  He was holding a sign that said something about Obama sold us out to the corporations.  (So much for the myth that all the protesters at Occupy Wall Street were pro Obama.)  I had observed this particular guy being asked once or twice by the police to keep the sidewalk clear.  So after that, all this budding Juan Adams had to say (at top voice and in a thick Latin accent) to all passersby was basically a mockery of what the officers had just said to him which was (in a sarcastic tone),
      "Nothing to see here, folks!  [Mayor] Bloomberg wants the sidewalk clear.  Keep moving.  Nothing to see here.  Just a bunch of hipsters..."  Now to him, I'm sure he thought his sarcasm and defiance was clear but in actuality he only ended up doing the work of the cops for them.  Because most of the people he encountered responded by doing exactly what he was telling them to do which was "keep moving."  Nobody was staying to listen to anybody now.  If there were actually any of the rumored FBI agents here, this guy would've gotten my vote as his spiel would've been both covert and effective. 
      Next was a short, older man with white hair peaking out from under his ball cap and white moustache who suddenly felt the urge to tell every passerby at full voice that,
      "The next war they'll be coming for your kids, folks!"  People don't respond to sound-bite-shock-blurbs like this.  All they hear is "threat to my kids, what?" and they want to get out of that situation as quickly as possible which they would then be encouraged to do by the large, Latino man, "Keep it moving!"  But I must've been interrupted by the short guy yelling this at least four or five times.
      Then there was the guy who replaced the Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo-OWS-overseer-guy who was standing behind me.  He was a rough n' tumble sort clad all in denim.  If 'grizzled,' had a poster child then it was this guy.  I was surprised when out of nowhere, he'd jump up beside me and, reading from a piece of paper, he'd yell (so quickly that I'm sure no one understood a word he said),
      "Guesswhatfolks?  ThomasJeffersonisonOURside. Hesaid, 'Iseenogreaterstandingarmy asgreatathreattoourcountryasbanks!'"
      What?  Now this was a great point to bring up, but completely lost in his delivery.  I turned to look at him and seemed to be looking to me for approval.
      "Man, you got me all fired up!" He said.  (He'd listened to me say my piece a few times).  I mean, yes, I was glad to be encouraging people to escalate their level of participation but good God, man, put some prep time into what you were doing.  I did take note from this guy who was reading from his piece of paper, that I'd been correct in my assessment that this type of downward delivery into a piece of paper to a passing crowd was the equivalent of pissing in the wind, utterly useless.  His heart was in the right place, but I could see that I wasn't going to be able to continue communicating from this position. My voice was nearly completely gone by this point anyway.
      I was able to give my speech one last time in completion and when I was done, the smartly dressed woman who'd I'd noticed earlier with the black tracksuit guy (yep, she was still there), came sauntering up to me with all the swagger of a girl interested in meeting a guy at a bar. 
     "Hi," she said to me demurely, not really sure of herself and where she wanted to take this.
     "I've been listening to you and I agree with most of what you've been saying, but OK, what happens next?"  This seemed to be the general question of the day.  Great, you're here. Great, you've got our attention. Great, we agree with you. Now what?  What was funny was the different ways this question was posed to me throughout the day.  This woman, for example, the way she was asking me was not so much like a reporter but more like we were sharing an after-work cocktail at some swanky happy hour.  I answered her (with as much voice as I could still muster) the same answer I gave everyone else,
      "Well, it's all about numbers.  If we can get an overwhelming participation from people who feel the same, then the powers that be will have to recognize us and institute reform.  But it's all about recruitment at this point." 
      In response, she just sort of drifted off mulling over my words.  I had answered her question and she now seemed to be waiting for me to ask her to coffee or something to discuss it further.  But, no, I was here for a definite purpose and my head just wasn't in that frame of mind. 
      "Thank you," she said, awkwardly with a smile and she slowly drifted back into the flowing river of people and disappeared.  I didn't have long to think about what had happened because then, the Granddaddy of the all the new bellowers, a very rotund, middle-aged white man wearing denim overalls, white hillbilly hat, horn-rimmed glasses and a red handkerchief tied around his face (like he was about to go rob a stagecoach) started up next to me.  It was funny to see him try to yell through his handkerchief, presumably to hide his identity, until he eventually just pulled it down altogether in frustration.
       This particular guy would start off his pronouncements with "Hergy! Hergy! (a play off of Hear Ye, Hear Ye, I imagined).  Then he would unleash with,
      "Michelle Bachman, Eric 'the Crook' Canter, and John Boehner have made you all their bitch!"
      Wow, that was some knowledge smackdown there, bro.  The grizzled guy behind me thought that what the large, country-dressed man had said was the funniest thing in the world.  Me? Not so much.  It was too simplistic, too broad of a stroke.  He went on further.
      "Hergy!  Hergy! I drove 300 miles to here from Syracuse to tell you that the GOP has made you all their BITCH!"  Again, more hysterical laughter came from behind me where the Grizzled Guy was just eating it up.   Mr. Hergy Hergy was getting on my nerves.  His sign was bigger than he was and it kept spilling over on me and he was screaming right into my left ear whenever he turned in my direction.  He was also the worst one as far as interrupting other speakers with another yell of "Hergy! Hergy!"
       So between myself, the Latino man moving everyone along, the "They're coming for your kids!' guy, the mush-mouthed Grizzled Guy, and Mr. Hergy Hergy, ours was the noisiest ten feet on the block.  Now mind you, nobody was doing anything like this (speaking at the passersby), at least not these guys, until I started mine.  I had reminded them of their voices and now they were rendering me moot with them.  Mr. Hergy turned to me and asked,
       "Hey, what's the name of the that guy on Fox the tall, skinny doofus?"
       "Steve Ducey from Fox and Friends?"  I answered.
       "No, the one that's on at night." He added.
        "Bill O'Reilly?"  I offered.
        "That's him," then he turned excitedly back to the steady train of passersby and exclaimed, "Bill O'Reilly has mad you...."  (Wait for it..) "....HIS BITCH!"
       Oy, vey.
       "I've seen you before.  Were you that guy in that YouTube video with that airhead, Victoria Jackson?"  Mr. Hergy surprisingly asked me.  I was thankful that was the reason he had recognized me as I wasn't really interested in having a conversation about my previous profession in this particular medium.
        "Yeah, that was me," I smiled politely.  We started to chat a bit and I told him that this was probably my last time I was coming to this particular occupy chapter.  When he asked why, I gave my reasons, the attention whores, the for-profit drum circle, the begging for beer money guy, the in-fighting over money allocation.  We agreed on some points.  Why weren't the Occupy Wall Street movement using those donations to feed and clothe the poor?  Or at the very least the money should just be used to protest. Period.  Everything else should be about logistical support of keeping the protest going country-wide.  Keep it simple and universally replicable.  Utopian societies don't pop up in one month.  The message needs to coalesce around breaking the multinationals grip on our sovereign government.  All the other wildly varying issues can be solved once we the people, not we the corporations, have our representation restored.  Polls show that 54% of Americans support Occupy Wall Street not because it has the answers but because it asks the right questions and insists that the current political leaders provide the answers because that is what they were elected and paid to do. Mr. Hergy and I also agreed that trying to form some kind of functioning mini-society here at the park by the people living here was simply and quickly devolving into endless Animal Farm/Lord of the Flies analogies with the whole world watching.   That's not to say that this exercise was a failure.  What was important was that we not become distracted or discouraged by the inner workings of the movement's dissent and debate, after all, this is the essence of a democracy, sharing one's voice whether in solidarity or dissidence. Further, yes, this movement may be involving and taken advantage by a lot of homeless people but who is to say that they don't have just as much a legitimate reason to be there as anyone else?  Perhaps these unfortunates who have fallen through the cracks of society are the ones with the most at stake. 
      "I wouldn't let all the crap get you down," Mr. Hergy Hergy said.  "That's all gonna be here just because the press is here and there's nothing you can do about that.  But we need you here."  
      I couldn't believe it but I was actually moved by Mr. Hergy Hergy.  He was right, why throw the baby out with the bathwater?   Another point occurred to me: that the only reason I was able to come back two weeks after my first visit and protest again was because all of these other characters had, for whatever reason, stayed there.  Without their daily participation, I wouldn't have had a demonstration to return to.  Sometimes you really do have to tolerate the bad and focus on the common good.  I shook his hand and stepped off the rampart.  My voice had enough.  I couldn't or wouldn't compete with these other guys for volume.  I wasn't quite ready to leave yet.  I just didn't want to speechify anymore and I needed a change of scenery.
       I walked around the block and found myself back at the circular benches where I'd sat the day before, at the opposite end of the park, next to the overbearing drum circle.  On one of the benches stood an older white guy who was wearing a stars and stripes hat a la Uncle Sam.  Much like the others I observed that day he wore mostly denim and was also mustachioed.  He was also wearing black wayfarer style shades and held a sign which lambasted former President Bill Clinton for repealing the "Glass-Steagall" act which was once in place to prevent banks from doing exactly what they'd done to require billions in taxpayer bail outs.  This guy was really hamming it up for those taking pictures.  He was holding his sign in a manner so that with his right hand he actually held the sign and with his left he was giving his own sign the finger (presumably directed at Clinton but to what end besides the obvious I know not). Then every time he saw that someone was about to take a picture of him he'd stick his tongue out and strike a pose.
      Give me a fucking break, man.  It made me wonder.  There was a section of the park that been set aside to collect signs that people had made, used and then left behind for others to use, a protest sign graveyard, if you will, where basically anyone could pick any discarded sign and hold it.  I was beginning to suspect that that was what was going on here.  Maybe I was guilty of judging a book by it's cover but this guy just looked and acted too goofy to know what the hell a policy wonk issue like Glass-Steagall was about.  But there was a spot next to him up on the circular bench so there I went.  At my feet someone had placed a Halloween pumpkin which had written on it, "The Great Pumpkin Loves You."  Jeebus.  And then wouldn't you know it.  No sooner had I climbed up when the damn drum circle started up again. 
      Shit.
      So I stood there for an hour.  It was rush hour now and the foot traffic passed me seemed to swell to maximum occupancy.  As I stood there and saw the multitudes striding by I wondered why they weren't standing up here next to me.  How bad do things have to get before people finally wake up?  For a moment, I had a vision of those unconcerned as the walking dead, living zombies oblivious to all save their own endless quest for brraaaainnnnnsssss!   Only they didn't need brains to eat but brains for which to think.  I stood there for about an hour next to goofball until my legs started to hurt and I knew I needed to get going to catch my return bus home to Baltimore.  But what I saw during that hour made me want to leave even if my legs had been completely refreshed.
      From where I stood I had a pretty good vantage point of the drummers and could see how they just weren't even paying attention to each other, just independently bashing away.  On the opposite side of the drum circle, away from me there was a very skinny girl in her thirties on a raised rampart with a hula hoop.  Yes, a fucking hula hoop which she expertly enacted several difficult dance oriented moves with said child's toy. 
      Then I saw about six white people, five men and one woman, all dressed in black with the words of a porn website professionally printed on the front of their shirts.  They each held identical signs which "The only cheaters worse than Wall Street are the ones on [xxxwebsite].com".  Had it really come to this?  Media had chummed the waters and now every attention whore in town from hula hoopers to porn site promoters were now swarming in like sharks for a bite.
      The Glass-Steagall Uncle Sam guy jumped down after awhile and in his place came an older, heavyset white guy wearing a "Vietnam Vet" baseball hat.  Now where the Glass Steagall guy had been standing, to his right there was a small statue of a man sitting on the circular bench with an open briefcase.  This new Vietnam Vet guy sat next to the statue and very deliberately put his arm around it and with his free hand, raised a coffee cup to his face as if he and the statue guy were old buddies and he just froze like that.  Why? Because he was just another attention whore trying to be cutesy for the cameras.  Because he knew that people would take his picture while he did this stupid thing.  And they did.  One after the other focused their lenses on him while he sat completely motionless save for an idiotic grin on his face.  No sign, no message, no nothing, just looking to get his picture taken.   I tried not to pay any attention and just focus on what I was there to do as I was finishing up.  I got a lot of thumbs up and power to the people fist raising gestures in solidarity by people walking by but the attention vampires were getting me down.
      I looked over to my right and saw all the porn website party crashers were now standing in a group together on the outside of the park.  I'd like to think that at some point they'd grown a conscience and realized how ridiculous it was what they were doing.  I hoped that somehow inside they had realized that the issues being raised by this demonstration applied to them as well and maybe it should mean more than having a laugh and promoting a porn website at it's expense.  Whatever it was you could tell that their hearts had changed and they looked downright uncomfortable continuing their misguided promotion.  They left soon after not having been there more than thirty minutes.
      The drum circle eventually (and gratefully) stopped.  I was glad because in addition to hurting my ears they had drawn a crowd of individual 'protesters' who it seemed were trying to outdo each other with freaky dances and wild facial expressions to garner more focus from the small crowd of looky-loos who'd paused to catch the sideshow.  To me, it was an absurd, spectacle of pointlessness. 
      Ah, but there was a point. MONEY!
      "MIC CHECK!" screamed a thin, black male drummer in the center of the drum circle, presumably one of the leaders.  "MIC CHECK!" The rest of the drummers responded. 
      "We are Pulse!" said the leader.  "We are Pulse!" answered the drummers.  WTF?  They'd given themselves an identity beyond that of the 99%?   They were abusing the so-called "People's Mic?"  Yep, they sure were because the next thing out of the leader's mouth was requests for tips from the onlookers.  I knew from my earlier reading that they intended to keep every penny that was put into the donation buckets being passed around and not to contribute any of it to the cause. 
      This was bullshit.  This was for profit.  This was about these talentless assholes using the movement for their own financial gain.  Granted, it probably wasn't much, but nobody else was making pocket money off of this.  Why should they?  Besides, whoever said that a political demonstration needed a fucking drum circle anyway? 
      The Glass Steagall guy returned, struck his pose and out popped his tongue again.
      Jesus.  I'd had enough. 
      I asked Glass Steagall guy where the nearest subway entrance was and as he told me I noticed that he didn't have a single tooth in his mouth.  This guy had to be a homeless guy who had just grabbed a sign.  I mean, come on, he doesn't have any teeth in his head and I'm supposed to believe he knows anything about Glass-Steagall?  Horseshit.  It was time for me to exit.
      I tried to keep everything that I had discussed with Mr. Hergy Hergy about in mind, the whole not throwing the baby out with the bathwater but what I couldn't figure out was this:  was this a revolution of the intellectual left being crashed by the homeless, the disaffected youth and the attention whores or was it THEIR revolution being crashed by the lefty intellectuals.  Politics does indeed like the saying goes makes for strange bedfellows.
     I was determined that if I were to attend another protest it would be in Washington D.C.  That was where REAL change had to happen anyway.  Wall Street was as a good place to start and to base out of and I definitely wanted it to keep going, I just didn't feel like I was fitting in there.  I wanted more politics and less hey-world-look-at-me bullshit.
      As I caught the bus home to Baltimore, my head was spinning.  My experiences had been so wildly different from time to time that I was wondering about the identity of the movement and fearful of it's growing pains.  As Shakespeare wrote in MACBETH, "Such welcome and unwelcome things at once, 'tis hard to reconcile."  Had I really accomplished anything with this investment of time, energy, and money?  Or was I just pissing in the wind? 
     The next morning I awoke to find an e-mail from an old college friend telling me to "Wake up! You're on the front page of the Huffingtonpost.com website."  What? 
      I checked it out and there I was, holding my sign.  Unfortunately, there was nothing about my speech, just me and my "RISE UP" message.  That was OK, maybe that was enough.  Huffingtonpost.com has not only a national readership but one that was worldwide.  That's how far the reach of the message had possibly attained.  As I've said over and over, recruitment was my main goal.  Seeing the results of my hard work gave me another little glow that maybe, just maybe someone somewhere would see that and be encouraged to get involved.  And that's really all that I or anyone else can do. I was happy.  I still haven't seen any of the footage of the hundreds of video cameras I saw trained on me that day but that's OK, too. I know the text. It's not important that I hear it, it's just comforting to know that somewhere out there in the internets, the message is out there to be heard.  But the whole experience had left me with an unsatisfied feeling, an itch I couldn't scratch and in my head I was already formulating plans to participate in OCCUPY D.C. 
     Would I find what I was looking for there?

***Find out in my next blog entry when I attend the OCCUPY D.C. demonstration.


 

THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT. Oct 17, 2011 "Money Changes Everything"

October 17, 2011

      I bought another ticket, this time on the Peter Pan Bus.  At 30 dollars, the cost of a roundtrip bus trip from Baltimore to New York is amazingly inexpensive for this day and age.  A fact that was not lost on others as I was watching REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHR, and a Democratic politician from Florida, Alan Grayson, had made the point that the reason why the Occupy Wall Street movement was growing was because it was the one of the last things that people could still do.  With the economy in the tank and the voice of the individual drowned out more and more by the sound of the corporate pigs gorging themselves at the money-trough, the one thing that people could still do, financially and physically, was to get on a damn bus and just be fucking present.  I agreed with his point and served as a living example.
      I had been out late the night before and had to be up by 5:45 a.m. that morning to pack, shower and make the bus.  I was really dragging my ass when I climbed up the bus steps and plopped my butt in the cushy seat.  There were barely any other passengers around me this time.  I tried to get some sleep but kept getting hot and waking up.  Too late I realized that I was sitting on the side of the bus where the sun was shining through.  I thought of shifting everything to an empty seat on the other side but it would've been too much a bother to gather all my things around me and from the overhead bin. Plus, I had a speech to write.  And if I'm honest, my nervousness about giving said speech right in the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, smack dab amongst the human plurality was what was really keeping me awake.
     On my way up, I started reading the latest news on the Occupy movement from the web.  I had mixed feelings about what I read.  First of all I found out that this leftist movement had been given $350,000 in donations from people off of the web and such.  This concerned me because when you take a grassroots, equality-over-all, movement full of disenfranchised poor people and you suddenly infuse it with six figures in cash (it's now at a half of a million dollars at the time of this writing) well, let's just say that could prove disastrous. 
     The second thing I read about proved my point and was even more disturbing.  Apparently the Occupiers have been having daily general assemblies which are run like a pure Democracy in that everyone gets a vote and everyone's vote is equal.  This is great in concept but there's a saying that goes "paralysis through analysis," meaning you can discuss things ad nauseum to the point where nothing ever gets done which it seemed was happening.  Also, apparently someone in the drum circle had a $5000 hand-made drum stolen (who brings something like that to a demonstration anyway?) and for that and other replacement percussion instruments, they wanted $8000 from the new fund. The drummers further asserted that since they had been giving half of their tips (they were getting tips?) they were receiving from passersby to the Occupy fund, they felt like they were owed.  Apparently the general assembly disagreed, rightfully so, thinking the $8000 was too much and as a result there had been a near violent confrontation between the leaders of the drum circle and those opposing the pay out.  Apparently the drummers were now making income from the demonstration.  Now how much money this actually turns out to be is probably a pittance but it is the idea that this is not a for profit endeavor.  As a result of this monetary rejection, the drummers had meted out there own version of financial justice by now taking ALL of their tip money instead of sharing with the Occupy cause even though without the demonstration they wouldn't be making a dime.   Still, even with the stipend to the percussionists resolved, what WAS going to happen with all that loot?   Who decided who got to do what with it ultimately?  It reminded me of George Orwell's Animal Farm, where after the animals overthrow the abusive farmer, they make a rule that says, "All animals are equal." When the evil pigs take over the farm, they make an amendment to that rule that says, "All animals are equal (but some animals are more equal than others.)
     Like Cyndi Lauper once sang, “Money changes everything.”
     This was unsettling news. Of course the conservatives leaving comments were having a field day with these new wrinkles, drawing Lord of the Flies parallels and doomsday prophecies for the movement and everything else.  Well, I would see for myself, soon enough, I thought.  I still had a speech to write.
     I flipped through my notes, things I'd culled from articles, websites, comments and anywhere else I could get information that spoke to me.   It was interesting how the parts that I wanted to use, the things I would want to say just jumped right out at me, like gold nuggets shining among lumps of coal.  I scribbled furiously in my notepad on the three plus hour ride to NYC (and scribbling was exactly what it looked like given that I was hand-writing on a speeding, constantly shaking bus). 
      As I was collating all the pertinent pieces I realized there was no way in hell I was going to be able to have this memorized by that day.  On the flip side of that, I also knew that I didn't want to read it from my book or anything as an alternative.  I thought that would just suck all the power out of the delivery.  A person standing there with a sign speaking words that are coming out of their head and their heart is much more effective than standing there and reading from a piece of paper.  If you are constantly sending your focus to the piece of paper it costs you in your connection to your live audience.  And in a demonstration atmosphere, any slip of concentration and you lost the fickle attentions of your potential listeners.  No, I definitely wanted to have it memorized.  I was a little disappointed but the speechifying would just have to wait til the next day.  I wasn't even going to have a sign this first day back.  I made up my mind that I was just going to use this day to participate by attendance and just observe and finish my text.
      The people mover pulled into the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the middle of Times Square and I surprised myself by eschewing the expensive cab ride this time and heading instead to the crowded, filthy tunnels of the subway.  (Did you hear my slight agoraphobia just kick in there?)  I wandered around cluelessly for awhile inside the underground maze like a lost child in a mall looking for their Mommy.  I was still a little tired and kinda out of it and I had all these political ideas running through my head and not really paying attention to what I should've been like stairwell labels and maps and shit. I came across a very skinny, black, female cop who I guess had the subway as her "beat" and I hesitated asking her where the information booth was because I had a little "Sour Diesel" vegetation deeply tucked and wrapped in my bag.  Plus, not a week earlier, Princeton Professor Cornell West had been arrested for demonstrating against the policy that police had a right to search any protester without any probable cause.  This could well happen to me and I could go straight to jail for possession.  Or at the very least maybe this police officer would give me crappy directions on purpose.  I bit the bullet and asked her.
     "Where do you wanna go?" She asked me back.  Damn.  She was cutting out the middle man. I had only asked her where the information or ticket booth was but she knew the system well enough to give me an answer herself.  This would've been great but the last thing I wanted to reveal to a police officer, just as soon as I got off the three hour bus, was, "Hey, Cops! I'm an Occupy Wall Street protester! I've come to raise a fuss in your city!"
     "The World Trade Center," I said. I knew from my last trip that Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street movement, was based is just a few blocks away from Ground Zero.  I was all happy with myself that I'd circumvented revealing to her that I had any association with the movement (not that I was ashamed, I was just trying to get where I wanted to go without any hassle from "the fuzz."  But she kicked me right in the proverbial balls with her next question:
      "You goin' to the protest?"  
      Damn, she was good.  Was it that obvious?  Why couldn't I have just been a tourist wanting to see Ground Zero?  I froze. I couldn't think fast enough on my feet to weigh whether or not I wanted to admit this to her and merely blurted out meekly,
       "Uhh, yeah."  There it was, out of the bag.  She knew what I was (an anti-establishment protestor) and why I was there (to go practice civil disobedience) and I was sure that I was going to be spread eagle against the wall right away.  There was a lifetime that I lived in the fraction of the second between my last response and from when she began to speak again.  I was convinced a full cavity search was imminent.
       "You need to go over there first and get your ticket. Then you can go downstairs and take the train on the left and it will take you downtown."  Wow.  Sometimes my neurosis really is just all in my head. 
        Thank God for GPS technology because I unknowingly got off the subway a stop or two before I should have and had to walk for a bit.  It's funny how similar it looks when you hold your smartphone in front of you to find your way on the GPS application to what it looks like when we envision some storybook explorer pushing on through a hostile environment with an old compass.  
      When I finally made it to the park I almost didn't recognize it.  So much had changed in the week or two since I had been here last that it didn't match what I remembered in my mind's eye.  Gone was the complete perimeter of cheap food trucks that had once surrounded the park.  They were still there, just not in the so-many-they-are-packed-together-too-close-to-even-slip-a-credit-card-through siege engines type way. Gone too, was any open space within the park itself which was now more akin to a human antfarm.  Even the area where I had stood during my interview/debate with Victoria Jackson was now completely inaccessible because large, plastic, storage bins were now stacked there. There were now only neatly carved walkways that took you, like little streets, through the multi-colored, tarp city.  The amount of people who were actually living here now had easily quadrupled since my last participation.  There were a lot more tables with information pamphlets from everything to anti-corporations to "meat is murder".  As I passed one of the tables, I noticed a young, skinny, short-haired, blond, white guy sitting there with a small box which he had written on it in magic marker, "Beer Donation Fund."  It had a couple of coins in it. 
      This was distressing.  It was bad enough that there were so many issues being pushed here that it really did convolute the central message of getting corporate money out of politics and gave the naysayers ammunition in their argument that the protesters "didn't have a message."  Just the opposite, there were too many messages.  I don't know if that's good or not.  There were a lot of issues that people are legitimately pissed off about.  But does it dilute the focus?  And I wanted to stick that "Beer Donation Fund" box right up that idiot's ass.  Wouldn't Fox News just love to get a shot of that.  People just thinking they are being cute, just thinking about themselves and not thinking that they are undercutting the entire intellectual argument because they want free money to get loaded.  I wanted to tell this guy, "When people see this, they may chuckle, but they aren't laughing with you, they are laughing at you."  I turned a corner and what I saw next infuriated me further. There were two older, large, black women who were selling hand-made "I am the 99%" buttons for two dollars apiece and as I walked by I heard one of them laugh and actually say something about how "capitalism had been good to them."  The movement now had merchandise.   Good grief.
     I had barely been there an hour and already I wanted to start flipping shit over like Jesus with the money-changers in the Temple in Jerusalem. 
      As I walked by other tables, I noticed that there was now also a kitchen area, a library, a first aid tent, and there were several pockets or cliques of what I only assumed were the Occupiers who actually lived here every night.  For the most part, they were in their twenties or early thirties, wore lots of layers and basically looked like what you'd see at a large summer music festival.  There was one guy who looked a bit older, he had a shaved head, grizzled visage, and had a short, stocky, fireplug physique.  He was in the center of the city block sized park and the reason I noticed him was because every once in awhile he let out a very long, very load groan.  Why was he doing this?  I had no idea.  It seemed like something to get attention to me. 
      I made my way through the park and noticed something else that was really different from the last time I was there.  The police presence had been cut down to about an eighth of what I had seen before when the movement was just beginning.  The cops who were there were mainly standing around together looking extremely bored.  I guess the two weeks that had passed had proven that this protest was what it always had said that it was, non-violent and that cops just weren't necessary.   This was in such a stark contrast to what I had previously experienced here police-wise, when it seemed like every cop in the NYPD was there standing shoulder to shoulder, a giant, steel-blue ribbon that encircled the entire block like a Christmas present (a ribbon that was ready to tighten at any instant).  Maybe all that overtime money for the police hours got too expensive for the city to pay or maybe Mayor Bloomberg had warned them to back off in light of the police brutality examples that had occurred here and at other Occupy chapters across the country, but for whatever reason, it was a startling difference.  In fact the only thing extra I saw in the way of law enforcement that day was that the large, red modern art sculpture near the Broadway end of the park was completely fenced in because one of the protesters had climbed it. 
      I explored the park until I ended up at the opposite end, near Liberty Street.  There was a small, circle of benches where I found a place to sit.  This area had been turned into a multi-religious "altar" of sorts, or at least that's how it was labeled. Someone was burning incense here and there were lots of tchotchkes of various peacenik nature like a photo of John Lennon, little blocks that spelled out "PEACE," different baubles and signs set about.  It kind of reminded me of that scene in Pink Floyd's THE WALL where the central character, who has lost his mind, has destroyed his hotel room and taken all of the broken pieces and constructed a model airport with cigarettes and bottles set to look like airplanes and whatnot. It had that kind of a feel, meticulously put together out of shiny junk that would otherwise have been thrown away.  I gave them an "A" for effort.  The thought behind it was nice. Artistically, however, it was decidedly pedestrian.        
      Tons and tons of looky-loos and passersby ambled past like people at a zoo gawking at and photographing all the weird, exotic protest beasts from the safety of their side of the police barricades.  As soon as I sat down it seemed, I heard a long, loud groan from behind me and to the left at the top of the steps. Fuck, it was that short, grizzled, fireplug guy again, the one from the center of the park.  I got a better look at him and his worn out appearance told me that he was definitely somebody who was camping here nightly.  When he had moaned this last time, me, those sitting around me and those in the crowd of passersby in front of us, all turned to see what that God awful noise was that sounded like a dying moose.
     "Behollllld!!" He then bellowed (to no one in particular but loud enough for all to hear) as he made a grand sweeping gesture with his hands as if to say to the staring crowd, "Look at this whole park!"  To which then, everyone pretty much just turned back around and got back to whatever the hell it was they were doing before he had gracelessly commandeered our attention.  He didn't like not having that attention anymore. And as we all kind of ignored him, he got angry.   
      "You think you know me! You think you know what I'm about!  You don't even know yourselves!" he shouted in a voice dripping with contempt, again, not to anyone in particular.  Someone in the passerby crowd said something that I couldn't really hear and that (thankfully) caught his attention and he confrontationally marched up to that particular person and they began going at it. Over what, I had no idea and again, was thankful for my ignorance.   His dust up wasn't going to help sway undecideds who may have come to see what was going on.  For them, what was the difference between this experience and just getting into it with a crazy, homeless person?  In the past couple of days, I have read where the Occupy Wall Street volunteers who were working in the kitchen were complaining because they had to work 12 hour days just to keep up with the influx of homeless people and ex-cons who were crashing the demonstration.  I wonder now if this little, fireplug asshole was one of those guys referenced by the kitchen staff.
      Suddenly, next to me on the steps, the drum circle began clanging away in cacophony of dissonance.  There was no beat, no groove. There was just spectacle.  And it was surprising how much people were paying attention to this display.  The drum circle members looked like the guys who do that sort of thing everywhere from Phish concerts to Venice Beach, California,  more dreads, beards, only to be broken up by the occasional oddity like the very large white guy I saw pounding away while sporting a Guy Fawkes mask.  I didn't mind that they were drumming, I minded that they sucked.  There wasn't even unity here in sound! It was just a bunch of people thumping away individually and brought together only because it was in collective numbers that they garnered the audience necessary to serve their own needs.  I wondered if this wasn't a microcosm of the whole damn thing.   I tried to tune them out as I pulled out my notes and thought I'd finish putting together my speech. 
      It was the lunch hour and as I was writing, I noticed that I was sitting next to a large, black man who was dressed in the fluorescent orange and tan uniform of someone who was a city employee.  He had a white construction hat on and he'd wrapped a cloth around his head underneath so it kinda hung out the back and covered his neck.  He also wore black wraparound sunglasses and a full beard and mustache.   He saw me writing.
     "Are you putting truth to paper, brother?" He asked me.  Now, I didn't mind this interruption, interaction with like-minded folks and the exchange of ideas was the more enjoyable aspect of this whole experience my last time here.
     "Yeah, I'm working on something about all this." I replied.  "I'm Steve, man, what's your name?" I reached out my hand to shake his and he just looked at it for a second like he was debating whether or not he wanted to commit to actually shaking it.   
      "I'm Lord Ultron," he said and gave me a quick shake with his hand.  He hadn't been debating whether or not to shake my hand at all, I was convinced he was just trying to think of what name he wanted to give me.
       Uhhh, what? 
      "'Lord Ultron?'", I asked.
       "Yeah," he said, nodding his head.  Whatever.  I can understand not wanting to give out too much information about yourself at this kind of event. I mean, for all he knew I could've been the undercover FBI and maybe he didn't want to lose his city job or whatever but just say that then.  Or just call yourself "John" or something if you don't want to give your real name.  But how I could take him seriously and have anything kind of intellectual conversation with him if right off the bat he was going to create this character/mask that I was going to have to address him as rather than finding any kind of real, common ground.  We started to speak a bit but I realized quickly that this was going nowhere fast because all of a sudden he started rapping.  It would have been one thing if he was free-styling about the demonstration, I could've gotten into that. But he told me his rap was from a ten year old Mos Def record.  Now, I have nothing against Mos Def and truth be told some of the things I heard in this rap I liked. But this wasn't a conversation, this was one sided, this was a performance and I had suddenly become an unwilling, captive audience.  I tried to politely to end the conversation or at least get back to what I was working on, but then, even though I was no longer talking to him or engaging with him, he was still rapping at me.  He'd pause for a bit and then start rapping again.  I gave him bemused nods, trying to be nice, but I really wanted him to take the hint that filibustering me, even in rap form, is rude after awhile and not really something I was interested in continuing.  He eventually got the message and as the drum circle intensity increased and he finished his submarine sandwich, "Lord Ultron" stood up and moved nearer to the drums and started to bop his head up and down, to what beat, I have no idea, because there really wasn't any one discernable.  This left a spot on the bench next to me. 
     I continued arranging my speech notes in the order I wanted to have them in while quietly observing the goings-ons around me.  There was the young couple of an unwashed girl (presumably one of the actual Zuccotti Park campers) with long, brunette hair and a young, clean cut guy in a wayfarer sunglasses who had the most bizarre conversation about how he refused to debate anyone who didn't agree with him that he "just walked away."  I thought that was an impolite tactic at best and a cowardly one at worst. They ended up leaving to get a cup of coffee.  There was the woman in between the bench circle who was trying to sleep with a sleeping bag over her head.  Many pictures were taken of her by people walking by.
      Then, as I was finishing arranging my text, I was suddenly surrounded by about three kids in their twenties who looked like they had just stepped out of the Spin Doctors or some other kind of hippy, guitar band.  These guys were suddenly kinda crowding around.  It was obvious that they wanted the bench that I was sitting on and were trying to make me uncomfortable to the point of leaving.  Of course, you know me, Dear Reader, that wasn't about to happen.  Oh, sure, I'll scoot over and make room but share and share alike, right?  Besides, I was here first.  I had no choice but to overhear their conversation and it turned out that they were indeed a band and that they had come to play here at the demonstration but had not anticipated the very loud drum circle that would make it impossible to be heard.  Somebody asked them if they had written any songs about the protest and they said that they hadn't.  Great, here was another group of people that had nothing to do with the politics of what was going on here, they were just using the demonstration for their own gains.  They decided that they were going to wait out the drum circle but actually ended up splitting after only a few minutes. I guess if it wasn't about them they weren't interested.  Hmm, a definite theme was beginning to form here.
      I stayed for a little while longer.  I walked around the entire perimeter of the block twice just to take it all in and read all the signs. I even broke down and bought myself a gyro from one of the trucks (I couldn't bring myself to eat the food set out by Occupy Wall Street for we protesters because I felt like if I could afford my own lunch, I should do that and let somebody who can't have the free stuff).  By the way, something else I learned in this trip in New York: there is no safe place to stand. There are so many people walking every which way in New York City that no matter how much out of the way you think you are standing, eventually, someone will see you and want to occupy the space you where you are standing.  For example, when I got my gyro, I was nearly standing behind the food truck and between a police barricade where I didn't see a soul and thought I could eat in semi-peace, but damn, wouldn't you know it that it seemed like where before, there had been literally no one around, people seemed to see where I was and the little cubbyhole I'd discovered and were now making a direct bee-line towards me.  Is it any reason I am such a confirmed misanthrope? 
     Anyway, that was enough for me for Day One of my return.  I had finished writing my speech, I was happy with it and I had participated there that day by showing up.  The next day I decided I would return in full force AND with a brand new sign! 
      I had a moment of terror as I left the park as I thought I had lost my wallet.  That distinct terror that screams through every pore in your body when you suddenly realize that all of your identifications, money, cards, etc. were now gone, poured over me like sizzling, acid butter that sent my OCD in severe overdrive. I remembered the rumors that I'd heard about pickpockets targeting the protest and wondered if I'd been victimized. I wondered if I had dropped it when paying for my gyro that was now burning in my nauseous stomach.  I rifled through all of my pockets.  I was really beating myself up for having put myself in this position in the first place to have lost such a thing.  What was I doing here?  I'm forty-one. All this shit is for the younger generation, right?    When suddenly I found my wallet in the very last pocket I had left to check. 
     WHEW!
      I wasn't as big of an asshole as I thought.  The thing about something like this is after you get through it and all is well that ends well, the rest of your day is fucking gravy after that.  No matter what happens, it's okay because hey, at least I didn't lose my fucking wallet.  Nothing can bother you after that, well, almost nothing.
      As I was leaving the park, I found myself back up by Broadway.  There was a little wall that protesters were standing on.  I look up at one guy and I recognized him immediately from a comic bit that they had done on The Daily Show.  This particular white guy who was probably in his late 50's had his face completely tattooed like one of those native people of New Zealand.  On his head he wore some kind of flag headband and every single piece of clothing he wore seemed like it was chosen for its garishness to get attention.  He was holding a sign which I won't say here what it said because I'm not trying to promote the guy but suffice it to say his entire sign was his name and vague reasons why he was such a bad ass. I'll give you an example; one of his reasons on his sign was that he personal did not recognize borders.  Whoop-de-fucking-doo.  It seemed like this guy had staked out the best spot in the park as far as visibility to the public went and like so many others I saw that day, he was here participating not because of any cause other than selfish, self promotion.  As I saw people taking his picture my blood began to boil. I had just had enough of this crass self fellatio.  I walked up to him and said loud enough for all around us to hear...
      "Hey, man, why don't you put something that has to do with the cause on your sign.  You're just promoting yourself!"  The guy looked surprised.
     "I like promoting myself. It's my favorite topic," he snarked.  No shit, asshole.  This really set me off.
     "You undermine the entire cause with this bullshit," I snapped.  A small crowd had started to gather to see what all the fuss was about, including the police, who were very intently observing but not interfering.
      "Read the sign!" The guy snapped back.
      "I did read it.  You're just talking about yourself.  This isn't about YOU!  It's about the message of the movement!" I yelled back and he just looked forward stymied.
      "You're exactly right. I completely agree with you," said an older, well-dressed man of color probably in his early 60's.  "People see him and they take pictures and they think he represents this."  This new guy was exactly right.  Like I said, I had recognized the guy myself from The Daily Show.  He was here for personal attention and his plan was working perfectly.  A few Asian people came up to see what was going on and then aimed their cameras at Tattoo Face and I said to them, "Don't take his picture. That's what he wants. He doesn't haven anything to do with this."  They just kind of looked at me.  I walked away in disgust never really knowing if they had finished taking his picture or not. They probably did.  I stood on the park's corner on Broadway with the police still watching me intently. I gathered my things and looked back.  Tattoo Face was gone.  I don't know if I had gotten through to him or the added police presence bothered him or whatever, I was just glad that I called him on his bullshit and maybe did my part to "clean up the trash" here a bit at Zuccotti Park.  Now, I don't begrudge this guy his free speech, I wasn't saying he couldn't say it, but I have free speech, too.  And I used my right to tell him what a jerk I thought he was for co-opting the cause for himself.  He wasn't, by far, the first person I saw doing the same thing that day, and little did I know, he was also going to be far from the last as I would unfortunately encounter this trip.
      I made my way out of the park clutching the final draft of my speech, determined to return the next day and bring some REAL politically-focused activism back to this circus armed only with the truth, with this, my speech:

      Our democracy has been corporate raided by the super rich. They are walking away with fortunes, record profits but are they re-investing in America with these profits? No! Instead they're taking these trillions of dollars and investing in manufacturing in foreign countries. There's your so-called "job creators" right there. The only jobs they are creating are for children in sweatshops in China. Why aren't we questioning THEIR patriotism?
     We are losing everything and they get bail outs? They get tax breaks? Whoever said that the 1% got to be a protected class? We paid for the bail outs. We paid for the wars and still they cut our wages, they steal our pensions and they break our unions. Now they want to take our social security. Now they want to take our Medicare. Now they want to take our Medicaid. They even want to take away benefits for our veterans. They want to repeal financial regulations that were put into place to protect us. They want to repeal environmental regulations so they can maximize profits while polluting the air that we breathe and poisoning the water that we drink.
      We are sick and tired of being servants for the one percent!
      We must end outsourcing our military to fight in wars that enrich the war profiteers who sleep in multi-million dollar mansions while our soldiers die.
      We must end so called "dark markets" and derivatives.
      We need to make transparent the actions of the Fed.
      We need to make transparent banks and their holdings and lending.
      We need to make transparent SuperPacs and 527 groups.
      We need to make transparent lobbyists and their meeting with our political leaders.
      We need to make student loans dischargeable if you have to declare bankruptcy.
      Bank of America just moved 53 trillion dollars in derivatives from its holding company to its subsidiary. Its subsidiary has one trillion dollars in customer deposits that are guaranteed by the FDIC, that's you and me. That means if anyone of those new derivatives go up, we're all on the hook for another fucking trillion dollars!
      Are you going to support another bail out?
      They want to complain about the cost of cleaning Zuccotti Park but the cost of cleaning this park is next to nothing when compared to how much it will cost to finally clean up Wall St.
      We must get corporate money out of our politics. We must break the chokehold multinationals have over our sovereign government.
      We are not anarchists. We just want a government that serves we the people not we the corporations.       
      We just want a government that does not see the world as a power playground. We're not getting any of that right now and we're never going to get it as long as the one percent are in charge.
      They have created global, economic de-stabilization for one goal: so the richest men control the world.
      These are evil men!
      And if you think that living as a servant to the one percent is preferable to dying for the America our       Founding Fathers envisioned then you are the worst kind of traitor: complacent and apathetic.
      This is our time. This is our fight. And it is a fight to the death because the alternative is unacceptable!
      Fuck the super rich. Power, power, to the 99 percent! Rise up!