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On October 19th, in a column in The New York Post, Michael Goodwin referred to Occupy Wall Street as "a destructive cult" and as "hooligans." Mr. Goodwin has apparently never taken the time to visit Zucotti Park. Actually, it's one of the friendliest, most polite crowds I've ever seen.
Although Mayor Bloomberg has threatened a crackdown, there was very little uniformed NYPD presence around the Park this afternoon, much less than when I'd been there previously.
There was already a huge crowd, estimated at 20,000, at Times Square, the NYC location of one of a number of global rallies taking place yesterday, when I arrived at 5:00 p.m.; there was little room to move around to take photos. NYPD herded us onto the Broadway sidewalk for several blocks in an attempt to segregate us, not only from traffic, but also from the tourists and theater goers. Most of the police were fairly relaxed and just doing their job trying to maintain order and moving people along, but there were some who were obviously seeking confrontations and arrests, as in "Sir, I said OFF!!" when I had only paused for a second to snap a photo of the crowd.
When I arrived at Washington Square Park at noon, I was initially disappointed because there seemed more old timers from my generation than there were students. But while waiting for the marchers, who finally arrived at 1:30, I did discuss with one NYU student, a member of the Workers Party, whether or not Che Guevara was a Trotskyite (I felt that he certainly was since he had been executed in Bolivia while fighting for global revolution) and talked at length with a New School student and her bf about the futility of the American Dream. That gave me hope that there were at least some students questioning the status quo.
There's no question that Brookfield Properties' strategic reversal on the eviction of Zucotti Park gave tremendous momentum to the Occupy Wall Street movement. After the initial angry realization that the park could be closed down and cleared by NYPD at any time, there was not only a sense of victory but also a sudden awareness of powerful political forces arrayed on the protesters' side that had brought pressure to bear on the landlord.
The photos shown here were taken on Columbus Day at the same time as those in the previous post.
When we went to protests in my college days in the 1960's, we shared simple goals -- to end the war in Vietnam and to procure full civil rights for all Americans. The protest on Wall Street has no such straightforward agenda. There's a feeling of betrayal and a clearcut understanding of the corporate greed that led to the current collapse, but there aren't any solutions being put forth. The boards of directors, the CEO's, the brokers -- none of them are being held accountable for the damage they knowingly inflicted, not only on this country, but on European economies as well.
