On Sunday, I arrived at Liberty Park around 4:00 with another friend and her daughter who was eager to visit Occupy Wall Street. We dragged down my 800 pound djembe so that she could join the drum circle. I dropped them off there and went over to the other side of the park where I found members of #OccupyTheHood carrying on intense discussions.
While I have always found #occupywallstreet to be pretty diverse, it's also been pretty middle class. It's been missing the hard core, dedicated people from within the local community. Earnest, beautiful, charismatic & loving, I found myself signing up to be on an action committee. I'm not sure what this means although I'm not sure yet what any of this means.
An older couple from California stood next to me at one point. They looked as middle class as anything and you would think that they would be out of place, except that they were not the only ones that I saw. They came by a couple of days ago and realized that they had to be a part of this and came back.
Across the street a group of joyful Latin Americans were holding their own general assembly. I could only understand every other word that they said but I could see the joy in their faces as some of them smiled at me. So beautiful. Various groups were sitting around in circles talking.
Later a group of older Conservative Jewish men in white shirts and yarmulke's show up and bounce around a little bit at the drum circle.
It all overwhelms me so much, it makes me want to cry.
There are a couple of people that really did stink terribly. This is the first time that I'd really noticed this. I can't imagine having to sleep in the park next to someone smelling that bad. There was a very crunchy old guy with long hair who called out at one point as I passed by "Does anyone have any medical marijuana?" I saw him later talking about how he knew Abby Hoffman to another older guy talking about Zodiac with a young man asking about Aliens. I accidentally rolled my eyes a few times. If I ran things, these people wouldn't be here. Sometimes, I'm not as loving as I should be.
As I suspected, not many older people sleeping in the park. I ran into a woman doing outreach who drove all the way down from Cincinnati and sleeps in her car. She is here for the long run.
On the way home, we met a 43 year old Puerto Rican year old man on his way home from Coney Island. He used to work for the Parks Department. He got laid off two years ago and lives with his Mother. He can't get a job at McDonalds or the local grocery store because he has an associates degree and he's over-qualified - This means that they don't want to hire him because he is qualified for a better job and not likely to stay.
This is what it's all about.
He quoted some staggering figures about unemployment in New York City. I can't back them up, so I will not quote them. Unemployment rates in NYC are lower than the rest of the country but are not really reliable since many people are not on Unemployment. We just had massive layoffs in the department of education and Bank of America is letting go of 30,000 people. He said that he went to get food stamps and that it was massively crowded.
I don't know what will grow out of this movement but I do see things happening. I see groups forming and what I see, more than anything, is real hope and a real sense of purpose.
Small Side Note:
Speaking of Bank of America and massive layoffs, I've noticed a movement to get people to remove all of their money from banks and put it into credit unions all on October 31st.. Don't get me wrong here. I support credit unions. My son works for a credit union but am I the only one that thinks that a run on the banks would not the best thing for this country, for this city or for the 99%.? I doubt that enough people are going to be able to find a credit union that they are qualified to join by October 31st, so I'm not going to worry too much about it.
If there is a run on the banks, maybe you should make sure that you find a credit union large enough that it doesn't rely on a BANK because it's going to really suck for some of those credit unions when the banks go under!
On the other hand, if you are a Bank of America customer, you should probably get the hell out. A special date has been set up for this too. It's November 5th.