Occupy Spring

I have a two hour break between Occupy Wall Street meetings (OWS) on what’s turned out to be yet another beautiful Spring day here in New York City, and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts. I realize that from the outside it may not be clear what’s going on. Where are our demands? What are we doing? And people certainly aren’t going to get any positive information about this movement from the mainstream media, so it’s up to people like me to get our story out in that small but fragmented way, to remind people that this movement is alive and well.

We just had our fourth Occupy Town Square (OTS) on Sunday. It also marked the first time that OTS had made it’s way outside of the borough of Manhattan. It was held at the lovely Forte Greene Park in Brooklyn. We had a wide array of local organizations, like Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) the Brooklyn Green Party, Health Care for the 99% and lots more. There were the usual array of teach-ins. C. T. Butler, co-founder of Food not Bombs, did a teach-in on Consensus. And the People’s Library was there with plenty of free books and literature for curious minds. Meanwhile the People’s Kitchen kept everybody fed. We even had a special appearance by the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. You can get a glimpse of OTS in the video I put together above. All in all it was a beautiful day with stimulating conversations, teach-ins, skill shares, and lots of singing and dancing.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Spring is here and there are a ton of amazing projects underway. It seems like just about everywhere I go now I end up stumbling upon some great group of people planning something amazing. I was actually coming to Union Square today for a meeting with the bike coalition and ended up stumbling upon some of my favorite media people cooking up ways to create some amazing videos.

It’s simply breathtaking how quickly new projects and ideas take form and come to life. The horizontal, directly democratic nature of OWS is at the heart of why this is such a dynamic movement, but you really can’t see that from the outside. But rest assured, the NYPD haven’t broken our spirits. Spring is here.

Join us on May Day when we show the 1% what a day without the 99% looks like.