All morning I took breaks from my work to check the blog reports and live streaming coverage of  “shut down Wall Street” activities in the financial district. Though it was difficult to form a clear picture of what exactly was going on, I took particular satisfaction in hearing that crowds had dismantled the police barricades surrounding Zuccotti Park.

I arrived at the Borough Hall subway station in downtown Brooklyn shortly after 3 p.m. Publicity had said this location would be one of two Brooklyn hubs where people heading to the legal rally in Foley Square would converge, share some of the stories of the 99% (in the old days, this type of thing used to be known as a “speak out”), and then turn the subway trains themselves into mobile stages for dialogue and public education on our way in to the city. Descending the stairs and displaying my small BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF sign, I found just a handful of people who were there for the same reason I was. A reporter for a local Chinese language television station asked for an interview. His questions were all contrarian: had I heard that four policemen were injured during the morning’s action? What did that say about my contention that the police have been overreacting to the Occupy movement? In view of the small number of people who had congregated here, did I think today’s protest was a failure? I stood my ground, and just then someone came along to inform us that we were in the wrong spot; the main contingent was gathering upstairs in the park.

There I found a respectable-sized group, maybe 100 people, putting the People’s Mic to use, as a succession of Brooklynites told their stories. A young man was explaining how U.S. military intervention around the globe, and particularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries, has not only devastated societies and destroyed lives in those locations, but has created a situation of prejudice and bigotry in which “a youth in Brooklyn, who sees me on the subway train, may think it makes sense to pull off my turban.” He was followed by a young woman with what I took to be South Asian features who also decried the lethal effects of U.S. imperial behavior in direct, non-rhetorical language and said that there would be an action at Foley Square that would call people’s attention to the vast number of cases in which this country has unjustifiably intervened violently in other nations’ affairs. (I later saw the action: a long line of people stood, each with a sign displaying the name of a different U.S. target and the dates of intervention; over the mouths of these witnesses to atrocity, a sticker had been pasted–generally a U.S. flag, but in some cases the logo of a large corporation.) We then heard from other speakers, including Sergio, who spoke with such fist- waving rhetorical force it was almost a caricature–and yet there was power in his speech–about the need to put an end to the rule of corporations, and indeed to put an end to the rule of capital. Sergio might, I thought, be of Eastern European or Latino descent, and looked as though he would have done very well on a soapbox in Union Square in the 1930’s. We heard from Betty, an African American woman I’d guess is in her 60’s, also an apparently practiced public speaker, who told us about “the first struggle in which I was defeated” (community control of the education system); “the second struggle in which I was defeated” (equal rights for immigrants), and so forth…ending with the statement that she is not defeated “because you are here today.”

The announcer said that we were working with a “progressive stack,” meaning that marginalized voices get to speak first. (How do you determine at a glance whose voice is marginalized? I wondered cheekily–guessing it was probably by the same imperfect mechanism that I use to supply identity labels for the strangers I describe in this blog.) We heard from a young white woman with a baby on her hip, who said that she always looks for safety for her child when she enters a space, and the first thing she noticed today was that the cops weren’t wearing their name badges–she complained and now, we would notice, the name badges were in place. We heard from a tall young transwoman (possibly a woman of color–I didn’t want to guess) who spoke powerfully and at some length about the astronomical unemployment rates and police harassment experienced by transgender people, women in particular. She explained how unemployed transwomen are forced to turn to sex work as their sole means of earning money, and how the NYPD harasses them by charging them with “loitering for the purpose of prostitution” simply for being on the street. She said, “We were there at Stonewall–we threw the first bottle at the cops! And we’ve been there at Occupy Wall Street from the start.” And we heard from a young white guy whose name I didn’t catch, who said that he comes from the 1% and though he doesn’t make much money these days, he knows people with a lot of money, and he thinks they’re basically uncomfortable being so wealthy and some of them, at least, can be converted to our cause. “Brother, can you spare a dime?” said the older black man who was helping to MC, an ironic eyebrow raised. I heard a young Asian woman say to her older companion, “Mom, you should talk to them in Chinese and they’d have to repeat it!” I also heard her complaining about “this annoying Chinese reporter who tried to interview us.” So it wasn’t just me–he really was annoying.

We descended the stairs to the subway en masse. We boarded the #4 train and handed out cartoon leaflets telling the story of Edgar, a struggling member of the 99%, to our fellow passengers on the short ride to Brooklyn Bridge station, adjacent to Foley Square.