Written by Susan VanDerzee   

I admit it. This wasn’t my first demonstration. My husband and I went to Washington, DC in November 1969 to protest the Vietnam War – along with approximately 500,000 other people. Much later, I stood roadside on the Durham Green in March 2003 protesting then-President George W. Bush’s plan to invade Iraq. That demonstration called forth about two dozen local residents.

Wednesday, October 5, I took the train with friend and former Middlefielder Gloria Earls to Liberty Plaza near Wall Street to support the Occupy Wall Street continuing demonstration. We had no idea what we would find, how many people would be present, or who these people might be (except for former Coginchaug graduates Jon Good and Matt Lehet, whom we had made plans to meet and interview).

We found ourselves there, accidentally, on a day of great excitement – a legal march from the plaza to City Hall Park. We also found ourselves in a remarkably safe and welcoming space. The participants in Occupy Wall Street had formed themselves into an efficient and compassionate community over the 18 days they had occupied Zucotti Park, renamed Liberty Plaza. There is a food concession—free food handed out to demonstrators by other demonstrators who volunteer for kitchen detail and wear rubber gloves and hats per Health Department specifications. There is a medical detail, also “staffed” by volunteers with medical skills. There is an Arts and Creativity station where visitors and demonstrators are invited to create signs (with free materials including old pizza boxes and jars of paint) and write a paragraph about their own concerns and passions. There is an information “desk” and a media section and a place to register to share your music, though music is also freely shared, along with food, stories, signs and water. There is a recycling shopping cart and many trash baskets, emptied when necessary by demonstrator-volunteers wielding brooms and dustpans. And, for this reporter, best of all there was an actual “occupation” printed newspaper!

And there were upwards of 20,000 demonstrators, according to reports, though I have no way of knowing if that is accurate. There certainly weren’t any less than 20,000, and on this day, there were lots of “mainstream media” press, folks who had largely ignored the protest in the very heart of the media world until 700 protestors were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last weekend. Somehow, thousands of people creating an instant protest community virtually on the doorstep of the World Trade Center was not news before then. In the U.S., you had to be very tech savvy indeed to know there was/is a demonstration going on.

After basking (and “basking” is the correct word) in the warmth and feeling of community in the plaza for several hours, we finally caught up with Jon Good, who has been meeting since July as part of an amorphous group planning the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. When asked if this made him a leader, Jon replied, “This doesn’t belong to any one person or group. This is real people reacting to a system run by the super-rich that has betrayed the rest of us (the 99 percent). It’s not a political choice between Democrats and Republicans. There are lots of better choices, and as this unfolds, we’ll begin to see them, and they won’t belong to any one of us but to all of us.”

This lack of need to see into the future, to have “goals” as defined by pundits across the political spectrum, seems no real hindrance to those who are actually part of the demonstration, for the short or the long term. This is something different. This is the active creation of community. In fact, all of the folks we talked to was completely OK with the diversity of expression – from the two women from Pennsylvania who had come to NYC with boxes of free sandwiches assembled in their own kitchens, to the Unitarian intern from Tennessee who was told by his church to “Go ahead and raise a little ruckus,” to those who had goals of peace or environmentalism foremost on their minds.

“Can’t you see how all of these concerns spring from the same thing? We need to take care of each other and take care of the planet,” one woman said.

And one thing the demonstrators seemed to agree on, no matter what their particular area of primary concern is, was the unhealthy affects of mixing money and government and the need for fairness in the economic system. Jon, who has a job and works at it daily, in between attending the Occupation, explained: “I was sent to buy 30 iPads the other day that were to be distributed to the already-millionaire executives on the top floor. The company pays many lawyers to make sure they don’t have to pay taxes. That stuff is just not right.”

“We’re told lies to keep us in check, to set us against each other,” he continued. “I have a degree in neurobiology and I’m working at a minimum wage job in front of a computer in the most expensive city in the U.S. and I’m lucky. What about the people who don’t have supportive families or a great education? What happens to them?”

Jon further pointed out that the group had been trying for 18 days to get a sound permit to allow people to set up a sound system to communicate, “the longest anyone has ever been denied a sound permit in NYC,” he said. Then he pointed with pride to the system that had been developed to deal with the lack of a sound system in a park with hundreds to thousands of demonstrators at any particular time. They employ what’s known as a “mic check,” where someone, anyone actually, can stand up as a speaker and exhort those around him/her to repeat phrases in unison so that everybody can hear what is being said.

I had seen this method on streaming live video from the demonstration before I went, but it’s very interesting to actually see it working. And work it does; the march went forward with instructions from a planner disseminated over the mic check system. It also works to quell rumors and inform people where and when certain activities are occurring. As a metaphor, the concept is striking. Gathered in many ways by 21st century technology over the Internet, the group once gathered was sufficiently resilient to come up with a way to communicate solely through that most ancient of instruments – the human voice.

This was a different kind demonstration than the ones I had attended before, demonstrations with one simple aim – end the Vietnam War, don’t start the Iraq War. Indeed, that has been one of the criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration – there is no one with “the answers” and no single demand that could be met and then everyone would go home happy. Instead, the occupiers – and Gloria and I consider ourselves among them now – answer that seemingly simple question in many ways. What they, what we, really want – from young students to grandparents, employed and unemployed, of all genders and every racial hue – is a revolution, and they’re living that revolution on the ground. Meaningful work, people and corporations paying their fair share of taxes, taking care of the Earth and everyone and everything on it, an end to exploitation and discrimination of all kinds, separating money from politics, an end to militarism and the military-industrial complex – those are some of the goals. In short, Occupy Wall Street is a template for the future in all its dizzying complexity, diversity and promise.