Before I occupied Wall Street, Wall Street occupied me.
Something About Occupy: (With a Primer)
There are few answers to be found here. For a while now, I’ve been setting out to write about the much discussed Occupy Wall St. movement. I have written here and there little bits, no more than notes, about my impressions of it at any given moment. I have cautiously spied local iterations of the group, half-heartily observing it from a block or so away — not interested in engaging with it here on a street level. I have discussed it with friends, some who see it as a force for good, others who see it as the reaction of entitled youth or just entitled do-nothings. I myself have seen it in various lights: as well-intentioned but ultimately unimportant; as the next great movement of the left; as desperately doomed to fail, ill-conceived.
I have read every other article from my favorite writers, journalists, and politicians, attempting to triangulate my position a bit better. A part of me figured my uncharacteristic lack of defined opinion was simply due to having not read enough about it. Yet, the more I read, the more I tried to impose some order on this movement, the more my opinions shifted their legs.
And then I realized something: the problem wasn’t my inability to find the solid ground of an opinion; it was the ground itself quaking. The cacophonous rattling and shouting from directions left and right was sending my mind reeling. I have never experienced a real earthquake but what was happening now seems reminiscent of the stories from those who have lived through them; that ominous onset of the rumble slowly gaining power, resonating through the ground, the walls around you, a sense of panic that there is nowhere you can run to find the steady safety of solid ground — I ran regardless.
New York Magazine: 2012=1968?
In 2008, Barack Obama lit a fire among young activists. Next year, Occupy Wall Street could consume him.
NYPD is now using "sound cannons" on Occupy Wall St. protesters...
Scott Stuckey, Vice President for Business Development at the LRAD Corporation (the group who makes these devices) said that “if someone does find it too loud and they have two free hands they can cover their ears” to dampen the sound.
This is what it has come to folks.
My one meaningful thought on Occupy Wall St. #OWS
How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see to it that you are never cheated again. Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divided States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.
—Henry David Thoreau. Civil Disobedience.
Action from principle. What is that action going to be?
That’s what I keep coming back to.
Poland's Walesa backs Wall Street protesters
The 68-year-old Walesa said the global economic crisis has made people aware that “we need to change, reform the capitalist system” because we need “more justice, more people’s interests, and less money for money’s sake.”
Wall Street Actually Occupied (Briefly)
