I didn’t set out to document the Occupy Wall Street movement coast to coast, but I easily could have. Its supporters have been active virtually everywhere we’ve traveled so far, including, most recently, Washington D.C.
The encampment across the street from the National Theater near the Washington Mall and a more extensive one in McPherson Square off K Street have so far been confrontation-free, relatively speaking, thanks partly to a tolerant approach adopted by the district’s police.
Which raises an obvious question:
If somewhere as security-sensitive as our nation’s capital can take a live-and-let-live approach toward protesters exercising their free-speech rights, why can’t much smaller potatoes like Oakland or Denver? Or even larger ones like New York City?
I’d just spent most of the previous day in New York, and I can report that the Occupy Wall Street folks in Lower Manhattan were just an infinitesimally tiny part of the sprawling spectacle that is always New York City. You could easily miss them. But if you found them, it was just more of New York being New York, where social order is always a little bit chaotic and freedom of expression is the order of the day.
(For an alternative — FoxNews-free — glimpse at the Occupy Wall Street movement in general and the protests in New York in particular, take a look at Matt Taibi’s reporting in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110.)
So two nights later — after we left the city to continue our travels south — I was as surprised as anyone to hear that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had ordered his police to roust the activists from their sleep and remove their tents. The protests can go on, he said. Just not the camping. As if no one ever sleeps on a park bench or a subway grate in New York City.
And to what end? Does anyone really think that citizens outraged by the growing income disparity between rich and poor in America will now simply disperse and go away? I really don’t think so. They didn’t go away in the Arab Spring, and my guess is they’re not going to go away here.
Travels with Harley 