Dear Comrade,

You suggested that those of us who leafleted with USLAW at Zuccotti Park write up our impressions. Here are mine:

It was such a joyful event, full of a sense of openness and discovery as the huge numbers of marchers streamed past the edge of the park at Broadway and Liberty. In advance of the marchers’ arrival, some of us from USLAW had been circulating with leaflets inside the park for about half an hour, and ended up standing with our lollipop signs facing the sidewalk on Broadway, where we got a lot of attention from amateur photographers and several journalist interviews. The response to the leaflets was excellent, with many people thanking us or coming up from behind to request a copy. That was the beginning of the openness–people here actually wanted to know what we were about! I had the sense that many of the people in the park when we arrived were visitors as opposed to longer-term occupiers, but again, that’s part of the openness–there’s no obvious distinction. When the marchers started streaming in around 5:30 or a little later, it was amazing to see the mixtures of people and groups. While union “contingents” were visible at times, there was no sense of a disciplined “labor event” but rather of a great walking (sometimes dancing) festival of protest. I have images of the huge number of “Ban Fracking” signs, of the innumerable hand-made signs, many lettered on cardboard, one of my favorites being, “Occupy Today, Expropriate Tomorrow.” I remember the gaunt young white man in a T shirt with a message about vampire banks, and how he mugged for the cell phone photos of a couple of delighted young women of color–he was portraying the hapless individual having his blood drained by the financial industry. I see the large contingent of people in red headbands with flying banners and a sign saying that the Filipino community supports Occupy Wall Street. Once things finally slowed down and a drumming circle got going, some cute boys behind me started chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous, don’t fuck with us!” to vary the chants of “How do we fix the deficit–end the war and tax the rich,” and “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street.” It felt like People’s Education and the dancing revolution all rolled into one. I saw my 80-something neighbor marching with his congregation from Judson Church. And, yes, I saw plenty of union signs and T shirts, and the Verizon workers marching purposefully with signs about Verizon’s greed. The nurses. Several people told me about a 32BJ rally scheduled for the following Wednesday. I was so moved by the huge numbers of young people–enough to make me conclude that the walkout organizing at both college and (probably) high school level had been a massive success. I was thrilled that the crowd was much more racially diverse than what I’d observed days earlier in Zuccotti Park–although still not as diverse overall as the population of this city.

I felt foreboding for two reasons. One was that there kept popping into my mind (though I tried to suppress it) the memory of the massive anti-war demonstrations preceding the Iraq invasion in 2003. That was the last time I remembered a similar feeling of People Power welling up so powerfully that surely it would have to make a difference. (Not.) The second was that as I was leaving a little before 8 pm, after watching people arrive nonstop  for almost two hours, I got channeled into the crowd moving south on Broadway. There, at the eastern edge of the park, I could suddenly see the police lines that had been nowhere in evidence for most of the afternoon. They’d set up the familiar metal barricades blocking off the sidewalk bordering Zuccotti Park from Broadway, and the crowd was packed and being urged along by the cops. It felt like we were herd animals being driven into a chute. Some of the people around me were chanting “something, something, fuck the police,” and while I didn’t blame them at all, I decided to take another route. It was the inevitable reminder of the actual structures that contain us and are waiting to pounce on our efforts to create an opening in which to learn from/make power with each other.

Sometimes, we get a little help from the universe–or accidents of zoning. I heard on WNYC this evening that supposedly Zuccotti Park is about the only place in the city where the police don’t have the authority to evict protesters. This is so because the “park” was created by developers of a nearby highrise as an “offset” to allow them to get a zoning variance and the covenant establishing it says that it has to be open to the public at all times (unlike city parks, which can be closed at a certain hour). Maybe God is a member of the 99% after all!