Hell No Eviction

After another small victory, I was at the front line of a thousand people marching to NYC City Hall...

We were among the first to reach City Hall on Friday morning, marching up Broadway with a thousand of our closest friends behind us. Bonded to my left side was Christina, in her first hour occupying Wall Street, finding herself at the forefront of her very first protest march. We walked with elbows intertwined, and then locked again with whomever was to our left or right. A mass of so-called pampered hippie thugs united into a single, motivated consciousness, speaking with the voice of all societies’ ages and colors. We chanted long after our throats broke down, driven forward by the euphoric cascade still rippling out from Liberty Plaza. On the morning of October 14^th, you could siphon jubilation right out of thin air; the atmosphere had been brought to life with the shockwave of our prevailing energy.

As we approached the aging executive building’s spiked gates, riot control had already lined up on the property edge and black-shirts began to unload the orange kettling nets from the backs of screeching wagons which seemed to appear out of nowhere. Cops in black Kevlar armor stared us down while we danced passed, never holding their nightsticks more than a hand’s length away. When the march came to a stop, dead in the sights of one dark squadron, Christina coiled around my arm the way your stomach squeezes at the second after encountering a rabid animal in the lonely dark. I felt her heart racing; she knew the NYPD’s military branch wasn’t waiting there to offer private tours of the Mayor’s Office.

A city Councilman, standing with us on the sidewalks surrounding his own workplace, raised a clenched fist into the air and screamed, “Who’s Street?,” and across the world I bet you could have heard the People’s reply:

“OUR STREET!”

Ten blocks earlier, during Manhattan’s gray dawn �" an eerie product of the new Sun struggling to reach above the mountains of glass and limestone �" Liberty Plaza had erupted at the news of our small but significant victory. Mayor Bloomberg had rescinded his de facto eviction notice at the last minute, behind the questionable excuse that a few local officials made some ‘threatening’ phone calls. A more likely scenario is that with so many of us joined together, willing to stand so boldly against fear, our mere presence was simply too powerful to have been snidely brushed aside.

What you are unlikely to know from reading the cheap press is that I actually was in one of two simultaneous marches that left Liberty Plaza yesterday morning. Both were met with extreme intimidation, but only the one where violence broke out, precipitated by police aggression, has been plastered across the front page. The much larger rally that Christina and I were a part of ultimately remained non-violent, even after the crowd began getting frantic bits of information on what was happening to our brothers and sisters further downtown. Nowhere will the masses be able to read that during our return through the Canyon of Heroes, every MTA driver who went by blasted the horn for us, or that every construction crew we passed gave our effort a standing ovation.

The one percent are getting scared now, looking to further embed the false portrayal of the global Occupy movement as a wild hoodlum gang that is lazy, young and crazed with jealousy. After yesterday’s victory, they will begin to exert even more pressure to keep us divided amongst ourselves. Political, dis-informational and even violent means will increase, as was seen recently in Denver, Seattle and San Diego. We will have to keep rising to meet these tactics with even stronger resilience in the future.

The moldy upper crust of our bankrupt society is not beginning to fear us because of what they have learned over the past few days. They know the truth even better than we do, remember - they are the ones who rig this crooked game. But it is how much of the truth we have recently seen that is so frightening to some. The People are starting to understand that without a list of negotiable demands, a singular, corruptible slogan or the use of violent retaliation, we have the ability to start an entirely new game. All we have to do is make the decision to stand up, choose to let our presence be known and continue, peacefully, to Occupy everywhere. Everything that comes after is simply instinctual, a natural reclamation of the basic rights we have taken for granted for too many generations. We, the People, are again learning the most powerful human lesson: that when united, we can never be defeated.

Author's Note

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