Occupy did not impress me at first. Although I’d often marched against the Iraq war, in the intervening years I had only occasionally attended protests. My friends considered it an embarrassing hobby, akin to going to dog shows, so I usually went alone, stood around awkwardly with my fellow weirdos, and eventually left. I protested the way an agnostic attends church: it would probably accomplish nothing, but one ought to do it anyway, on the chance it might matter. The first day of the Occupy action struck me in this same vein. That night, when I dropped off tarps at Zuccotti, I saw the same desultory drum circle and empty info table that marked every other futile protest scene. Tahrir Square this was not.
Still, I kept coming back. At first, it was just a few punks in sleeping bags, but within a week, Zuccotti Park was transforming itself into the locus for something bigger than any seasoned activist, let alone a jaded one, expected. All sorts of people—from grandmothers to Iraq war vets to junkies to disaffected finance workers, many having never participated in a protest before—started to arrive. The chants give a hint as to why. “Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” was an anguished cry of dejection at the 2008 bailout, while the jubilant assertion of “We are the 99 percent” welcomed everyone except the ultrarich. Each day, hundreds of people marched out of the square shouting these words—to be kettled, clubbed, and pepper-sprayed by the New York police. Every police attack was filmed on camera phones and uploaded to social media, where they served as an advertisement to bring more people to Zuccotti Park.
The park had quickly evolved into another island in the long archipelago of world protest—it too had the clinic, the library, the kitchen, and the media tent with its tangle of wires. Not only that, but it was inspiring other Occupy encampments to spring up across the country and on other continents. Activists from its forebears in Egypt and Spain came visiting. Famous writers delivered open-air lectures. Punks gave out hand-rolled cigarettes.
Above all, Occupy was participatory. Anyone could join, just by turning up. There were assemblies where, because of a ban on amplification in the park, the audience repeated back each of the speaker’s phrases (a technique known as “the People’s Mic”). But because of the unwieldly nature of decision-making at these endless, open meetings, far more was accomplished by smaller groups of people acting on their own initiative.