Nightfall, Liberty Plaza

Get a job? I see plenty of work being done in Lower Manhattan...

I’m remembering a few nights ago, when one of those sweeping, raining thunders shadow-boxed with Liberty Plaza just as the evening’s General Assembly was getting started.  These assemblies are twice-daily public forums that serve to work on the overall agenda, discuss new ideas, streamline the greater messages and to allow the dozen or so individual work groups and stations operating in the park to report back on the day’s events or needs. Most importantly, this is the Peoples’ opportunity to be heard by the thousand or more who participate daily, a chance for anyone to lend their ideas or fears as to the direction the movement is taking. With every General Assembly you attend comes a cascading jolt of inspiration, felt from balls to bone, an overwhelming confirmation of faith that this place is in fact a unique quirk of time for us to be alive, together and so united in pursuit of life’s highest common denominators.

To the irrelevant dismay of major mass media, we understand that the situation the Ninety-Nine percent face, whether all of us acknowledge it yet or not, is as equally complex as it is dire. Wall Street may be at the symbolic heart of the problem, but their sinister damage has seeped into every aspect of modern life, with no easy way to untangle from this continuous disaster. Our messages can not be boiled down to a convenient cable news sound-bite because they reach deeper into the human being than the farce of information that HD televisions often misconstrue as journalism channels. What the Occupation is accomplishing with every new assembly it spawns, in spite of the subversive outside demands placed upon it, is the discovery of an unbound alternative to the obvious and oppressive status quo. We are engaging in one hell of a kaleidoscopic discussion here, and our dedication to forging an inclusive process burns hotter than the chaffed impatience of million dollar-per-second ad w****s pulling off twenty-four hour suck shifts.

As the night’s Assembly wound down into its continuously working sub-groups, just before ten o’clock or so, my mind racing with revolutionary musings and with the kitchen now offering spicy chili over wild rice, I grabbed a plate and scouted a calm spot behind the medic station from where I could watch the late-night crowd collect its’ vibe. At this point in the evening, most of the light comes from either camera flashes or the odd blue glow that radiates from the media centers’ laptop computers. Between fat kamikaze globs of rain, people seemed to be moving in that trippy, slow-strobe kind of motion that ghosts use to haunt around in modern horror flicks. The morphing collective of house musicians, off on the north end of the plaza, lays down a back-beat lullaby equal to the excitement of another jubilant day and as some Occupiers began to organize their sleeping bags, I stretched out atop the marble retaining wall to collect the evening’s thoughts.

From over the other side of the wall, my concentration was broken as I overheard a few ‘suits’ walking by, bemoaning that the protesters should just go ‘get a job’. This is the same hollow comment that cowards have espoused towards every social movement, since before women won the right to vote or before our children were emancipated from workshop enslavement earlier in the past century. Seeing this movement progress so much further every single day fosters an amazing appreciation for the hard work that is being done here, the sort of structured components to this rally that always go unnoticed by the cynical press corp. For instance, when you are injured, there is a team of medics on stand-by with first aid and it is their job to heal you. If you are arrested, or don’t know what to do when the police release you back into the streets, a professional legal team makes it their job to defend you, and when the thousands who come to work in Liberty Plaza need food or comfort, there are jobs for that, too. There are sanitation jobs, laundry jobs, accounting jobs, outreach jobs and any other position you can imagine necessary to establish a permanent Occupation like the one currently overtaking the nation.

Moreover, there is this: When a free society becomes so obscenely marginalized by a false and feckless leadership, barely surviving only because they value corporate favors over public trust, it becomes the duty of that public to reject such a revolting system and work peacefully to conceive a replacement. Forming a new, truer Republic is all of our job now and just because our work is not compensated with blood money or lucrative political office, does not make the value of what we are doing with our lives any less vital to America.

This is what we are working for, every single second, with every single free breath left in our bodies. We will succeed in this endeavor, if only because we know that the road this oligarchy is driving us down, drunkenly ahead at full speed, ends with yet another collapsed bridge. We accept the position as the working world’s revolutionaries for the sake of our common future and shall continue to make Occupation our profession until we are victorious, when the fusion of dissent is no longer required to inspire a downtrodden global community into critical action.

When you come visit Liberty Plaza, here in New York or in spirit from whatever city you happen to be living in, you too will understand the importance of our mission and raise your hand with only one question burning through your lips.

‘Where the hell do I apply?’

Author's Note

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