At the Occupy Wall Street protest tonight.
If you do not know about Occupy Wall Street you NEED to!
go to: www.occupywallstreet.org now!
Occupy Wall Street is a long-term protest taking place in Liberty Plaza (aka Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan). It’s hard to explain. After reading about it Steven and I headed down tonight (he spent part of the day there while i worked aswell) to see what it was all about. I had been up since 5:45AM assisting on my feet at a shoot, but I found once we arrived I forgot about being tired. There are some organized, intelligent folk running this occupation. There is a kitchen center with ample food to feed the people staying in the park or spending their days there, a med center for the injured, a legal center working with lawyers and the aclu to get a motion in place to allow tents in the park, the legal center also deals with teaching the protestors what their rights are, and documenting/aiding those who have been arrested, and they are organizing tons of marches, bike recycling sessions, and evening activities for all. In the evening, there is a generally assembly, which after a bit of time there Steven and I knew we wanted to stick around for. We all worked on the writing of a document stating our principals as a group, and the process was wholly democratic and the rough draft from a previous general assembly we worked from is definitely really promising.
But what is possibly most striking about it, is that while doing all these things, there is not only this great sense of action in the air, but a very warm community as well. During general assembly people circled around with bags of fruit and almonds for all to enjoy, people from around the world have donated food money, and ben and jerrys just tonight donated 4 cases of icecream, which we all enjoyed while discussing our list of principals.
There is really something happening in lower manhattan, and anyone who can get to New York really ought to come down and stand with us because the time for action is here!
