Generation Occupy: Reawakening American Democracy by Michael Levitin

Author:Michael Levitin [Levitin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, Political Process, Political Advocacy, Commentary & Opinion, history, United States, 21st Century
ISBN: 9781640094505
Google: UsIXEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-09-14T23:37:04.668520+00:00

NEW YORK IS OAKLAND, OAKLAND IS NEW YORK

OCTOBER 26, 2011

THE NIGHT AFTER POLICE IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, SHOT THE Iraq War veteran and Occupy Oakland protester Scott Olsen, hospitalizing him with a fractured skull from the lead-filled beanbag fired at his head, activists three thousand miles away on Wall Street broke through their own barrier of fear in the face of mounting suppression.

What had happened in Oakland—where police in the pre-dawn hours tore down Occupy’s encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza and the next evening launched a violent assault, injuring scores and turning the East Bay Area city into an overnight war zone—marked perhaps the most egregious display of state repression against the overwhelmingly peaceful movement. A decade before the George Floyd protests, we weren’t used to seeing police firing rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades and tear gas at nonviolent American protesters. But the incident was by no means isolated. Later, in November, eighteen big-city mayors working closely with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security staged a coordinated crackdown, employing heavy force to clear Occupy camps nationwide. Police continued to unconstitutionally and in many cases brutally suppress Americans’ right to protest. Before it was over, by spring of 2012, some seven thousand people would be arrested as lawsuits filed across the country charged police with unlawful conduct and violating civil liberties.

Yet the October night after Olsen was shot, protesters at Zuccotti Park responded in the only way that might have then seemed imaginable: they turned outrage into courage and took over New York City’s streets. Faced with a moment that demanded solidarity, Occupy Wall Street reconstituted itself as a revolt that reverberated from coast to coast, finding liberation in the new chant: “New York is Oakland, Oakland is New York!” The breakthrough happened shortly after nine when a large crowd of protesters who were being corralled on sidewalks by police escorts made a circle around city hall and, in a decisive instant, lost their fear. First several, then dozens of people burst through police lines, and within moments a mass of hundreds overflowed Broadway, unimpeded by the law. The New York artery belonged to them now, and the call “Whose streets? Our streets!” rang out as cheers and chants and the staccato cadence of drums echoed through lower Manhattan. Traffic stalled, taxis sat bumper to bumper as the throng swept up the avenue and protesters weaved and dodged through lanes of immobilized vehicles. Drivers looked out in silence from behind their windshields, some with their windows rolled down in the autumn heat, letting in the smells and sounds of rebellion.

For hours that night we felt we owned the city streets, overrunning police lines that hurriedly assembled to block our path, and making off with their orange kettle nets as souvenirs. Some people were beaten and arrested in the process, but we marched with a sense of triumph. The violent assault on protesters in Oakland had aroused masses of supporters, undaunted by threats, refortified in their defiance. Occupy had issued a direct challenge

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