The incursions seemed timed to prevent a repeat of the big march and picket at the Stock Exchange that had begun around that time the day before. But if that was the case, the police needn’t have bothered; Tuesday’s march was planned for 9:00, and I looked at my cell phone as it started and saw that the time was 9:00 on the dot. I don’t recall, before or since, Occupiers ever doing anything quite so punctually.
As if in retaliation for the march, cops were back on the plaza again an hour later. This time the excuse was the tarp that had been laid over sensitive media equipment. By then it was raining, and nearly all the Occupiers’ possessions had been collected under tarps, plastic bags, and unassembled tents. But the media area was what interested the police. A group of officers approached the tarp, and the officer in charge gave orders through a megaphone that it should be removed. An Occupier climbed on top of it, banging a drumstick against a pan lid. He was grabbed, but slipped away, and began drumming again. Then, several officers took him to the ground. While he was being cuffed and beaten, he cried out, “I can’t breathe!” and called for his inhaler.
Another, Jason Ahmadi, then stepped up to hold the tarp in his place. Jason had already been arrested the day before for writing “Love” on the sidewalk, just after a woman had been arrested for sidewalk chalking as well. This time, going limp, he was pulled off the tarp by police officers, dragged, cuffed, and then dragged more across the plaza and the sidewalk on his back, with his hands trapped in plastic cuffs between the sidewalk and his back. By the end of it, they were discolored and bloody.
One other guy close to me was grabbed too, and the cops pushed his face into a flower bed while he was cuffed. As a woman was taken away to a police van, a man ran after her shouting that he loved her. She, like several other female protesters that week, was taken not just to jail but to a psychiatric evaluation, as if on suspicion of hysteria.
Officers finally removed the tarp from the media equipment, exposing it to the rain, and left the plaza with other tarps, tents, and trash bags still in place. There was a standoff on the edge of the sidewalk as protesters chanted, shouted, and stood silently before the police, who at last received the order to withdraw.
There were seven arrests that morning, in three incursions. Each of them, for the Occupiers, was a new trial. They warned each other of the next incursion with steady tom-tom beats and other loud noises. Some offered acts of dignified resistance, while others yelled angrily, or sang chants, or simply watched. At the end of the last incident, a group convened to discuss deescalation techniques.
By late morning in Liberty Square, under a light drizzle, there was a feeling of drifting, of lost cohesion. The holdouts tried to find things to do, like hold signs, or play music in their underwear for the police, or defiantly recline on tarps, or arrange for the next meal. There was serious talk about abandoning the plaza, about other places to go in the area: south to Battery Park or west to the Irish Hunger Memorial. Maybe that was the fear talking, or maybe it was undercover cops, or maybe it was sensible. But once again inertia carried the day. The occupation did what it did best: it stayed.
The Command Post truck pulled away at 11:42 and was replaced by vans full of officers on each of the four sides of the plaza. People whispered about whether a dispersal was imminent but then changed the subject and carried on with their business.
When a group of Danish students stopped to watch the underwear musicians, a bearded Occupier from Massachusetts took the opportunity to tell them about what was happening in the plaza. He did so while teaching them the people’s mic—slowly, one phrase at a time, in rhythmic call-and-response, like he was reciting a fairy tale. “We are out here.” (Repeat.) “Because we’ve had enough.” (Repeat.) He talked about the bailouts, and the banks, and the General Assembly. After the morning the occupation had had, he told me, he had to remind himself of why his friends had been hurt and arrested and why he was still there.
The police vans drove away at 12:03, leaving the usual handful of officers and cars and the mobile observation tower on the northwest side. An hour later, in time for the General Assembly meeting, the whole place felt different. The rain had stopped, and there were perhaps three times as many people, with new faces as well as familiar ones. The sidewalk along Broadway was full of Occupiers holding signs again, and the GA process was gearing up. Videos of the morning’s action were spreading on YouTube. I talked with a man from Washington Heights—on the far north end of Manhattan—who had come for the first time after learning about the occupation on the Internet. People seemed happy, and eager, and curious. The next morning, this little secret of a place was the cover story of the tabloid newspaper Metro, with pictures of the arrests.
Getting arrested, on purpose or otherwise, was new to a lot of these people, but not to Jason Ahmadi. Just days before the occupation he’d arrived in New York from a homeless, vagabonding life in the Bay Area, where over the years he was involved in tree sits, banner drops, Food Not Bombs groups, and hunger strikes—that is, after he got over playing lots of video games in college at Berkeley. He came to New York for a War Resisters League meeting and decided to stick around for the occupation. The city made him crazy, though, and he could take it for only so long at a time before he had to get out to swim in a lake somewhere.
He once authored a typewriter-and-handwriting zine, Arlo’s Cooking Corner, a practical, scientific, and philosophical guide to wrapping heated pots in blankets for long periods of time. “i love experimenting,” it says in type at the outset of the section on baking. “it is how i grow as an individual.” Hand-written on the back cover: “figure it out yourself.”
Jason had wild, dark hair and wore colorful secondhand sweaters. In ordinary conversation he was all over the place with his moods and convictions, but when talking to the press or facilitating a meeting, there was hardly anyone more sure with words. His skill as a slow cooker expressed itself in a contentious room, which he could let simmer as the hidden consensus slowly started to express itself, but then pluck out whatever nonsense might fall in and mess up the process.
While Jason was in police custody, I felt a special urge to keep an eye on his white poster-board sign to keep it from falling into a puddle or getting thrown out. This became my mission. “The world has enough for everyone’s NEED but not for everyone’s GREED,” it said, in the words of Gandhi. NEED was in blue, GREED was in pink, and the rest was in black. A couple of times, when I felt tired of reporting or talking to people or worrying about the cops, I held that sign myself on Broadway, in a row with all the other sign holders, watching the reactions of the people passing by with a dull expression on my face. Doing so would send me into a kind of trance, a bliss, although tinged by journalistic guilt. Yet what was not objective about holding a message so damning and elegant and true, which nobody can really deny? Maybe reporters should do this more often.
In the center of Liberty Square at any given time, a dozen or so people were huddled around computers in the media area, pushing out tweets, blog posts, and the (theoretically) twenty-four-hour streaming video—soon to sprout into many copycat channels. They could edit and post clips of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until the clips went viral. The Internet, in its own way, was becoming occupied by this movement. But for outsiders looking to understand even the basic facts about what was actually going on—before September 17 and after—the Internet was as much a source of confusion as anything else. Reporters would come looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. The everpresent WikiLeaks truck—marked “Mobile Information Collection Unit,” and with a bed inside for the artist who drove it—led some to wonder whether Julian Assange himself might miraculously appear. Reporters were briefly disappointed to find none of the above.
Because of the General Assembly’s early hiccups in setting up a website during the planning process, the occupation’s online presence was left to the whims of improvisation. A transgender Internet security expert, Justine Tunney, registered the OccupyWallSt.org web domain anonymously on July 14 and started assembling a team to populate it. The site became the main clearinghouse for information about the occupation’s progress, and soon it was getting as many as fifty thousand visitors per day. That first week at Liberty Square, as I looked over Justine’s shoulder at a laptop