The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (57 page)

Within a week there were two thousand people in Zuccotti Park. The occupiers renamed
it Liberty Square, after Tahrir Square in Cairo. That second Saturday, they marched
up Broadway to Union Square chanting
“All day, all week, Occupy Wall Street!”
and
“We—are—the ninety-nine percent!”
Nelini danced and jumped and led the chants, a dervish running on an emotional surge,
and then things turned crazy, with marchers blocking traffic and cops making scores
of arrests, and she had never seen anything like it before, friends of hers being
hauled away, and suddenly she started crying. A white-shirted officer squirted four
women in the face with pepper spray, and when Nelini and some others realized that
the video was going viral over YouTube while they were still marching, they rushed
back to the park and held a quick press conference. “We’re here to be nonviolent,”
she told the assembled cameras, and that night her mom happened to watch it on New
York 1 and called her.

“I saw you down there—what are you doing?”

“I’ve been here for a week, Mom.”

The park, the video, and the brand fused and suddenly the media became obsessed with
Occupy Wall Street, the name was all over the blogs and tweets. Singers, actors, and
scholars started showing up at Zuccotti, and even though no one knew exactly what
it was all about—since Occupy was proceeding along the “horizontal” lines of anarchist
practice, and there were no demands, no structures, no leaders—visitors to the park
couldn’t miss the electricity in the air, the sense that something widely felt but
long buried or dispersed had exploded spontaneously into the world and come together
in this chaotic, thousand-headed form.

Nelini’s boss at work, Bill, knew she was involved, and one day he asked her, “You’ve
been down at Occupy, right? What is it?”

She told him: it was the coolest thing, it was a movement, it was really happening,
more and more people were getting involved, all kinds of different people, not just
activists.

“The unions want to do a march in solidarity,” Bill said—but they were also wary of
Occupy, of what it was or could turn into. “Is it okay to do that?”

Nelini agreed to help organize a solidarity march to Foley Square with thousands of
union members and students. She became a liaison between the occupation and the outside
groups. The word “leader” was pretty much banned, but she was becoming one. Her boss
decided to let her work at Occupy full-time, and even after she stopped sleeping at
the park she only got two or three hours a night at home, she was so frantic with
adrenaline and a million things to do. Her visibility brought her to the attention
of some right-wing websites, and they brandished Nelini’s affiliation with the Working
Families Party as proof that the whole thing was being secretly controlled by ACORN,
the defunct community organization, which had helped to found the party.

Late on the night of Sunday, October 2, the day after she’d been arrested, along with
seven hundred others, on the Brooklyn Bridge, Nelini got a call from Max, her new
friend at Occupy. There was a conference in Washington first thing Monday morning,
organized by the activist Van Jones’s group Rebuild the Dream, a left-wing answer
to the Tea Party. Max worked for the group, and Jones had asked him to pick someone
from Occupy to come down and speak, but the original choice turned out to believe
in global conspiracies and lizardmen, so he had to be dropped at the last minute.
Could Nelini get on a train to D.C.? She reached Penn Station at 4:30 a.m., but her
credit card didn’t work, so she called Max, who was broke and woke up his boss at
Rebuild the Dream, who bought Nelini a plane ticket since the train was going to get
in too late. In Washington she ran from her cab into the conference and was out of
breath when she took the stage and started speaking.

“I went down there and didn’t realize it was going to change my life,” she said, straining
to reach the lectern microphone and put the unbelievable excitement of the past two
and a half weeks into words. “I started sleeping on cardboard and pressuring labor
and community organizations to come on down and check it out … A lot of people have
asked about demands. We don’t need demands. If we demand something from Wall Street,
we’re telling them that they have the power. And we have the power because we have
strength in numbers.”

Nelini had begun to think that Occupy Wall Street was the start of a revolution.

*   *   *

The park was a small rectangular block paved in granite, with fifty-five honey locust
trees, in the shadow of skyscrapers. On the west end, facing the huge construction
site at Ground Zero, a drum circle rolled out its wild, interminable beat, adrenaline
for the occupiers and annoyance for the neighbors. The drummers’ area was called “the
ghetto,” made up of hard-core anarchists and long-term homeless people, a world unto
itself, where interlopers were made to feel unwelcome. Tents were forbidden by the
police, so the overnight occupiers lay down on tarps over the unforgiving granite.
The center of the park was crowded with various hubs dedicated to the occupation’s
self-organization: the kitchen tarp, where food prepared on the outside was served
to anyone who lined up; the comfort station, where occupiers could obtain donated
wet wipes, toiletries, and articles of clothing; the recycling site, where people
composted food waste and took turns pedaling a stationary bike to generate battery
power; the library, which grew to several thousand volumes stacked high on tables;
the open-air studio, where computers and cameras streamed live footage of the occupation
twenty-four hours a day.

On the east end, along the wide sidewalk next to Broadway, beneath the red steel sculpture
called
Joie de Vivre
, the occupation and the public merged. Demonstrators stood in a row, displaying signs
as if hawking wares, while workers on their lunch hour and tourists and passersby
stopped to look, take pictures, talk, argue. An elderly woman sat in a chair and read
aloud from Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.” Another woman stood silently while holding up
a copy of
Confidence Men
, a book about the Obama presidency—day after day. An old man in a sport coat and
golf cap held a sign:
FOR: REGULATED CAPITALISM. AGAINST: OBSCENE INEQUALITY. NEEDED: MASSIVE JOBS PROGRAM
. A union electrician in a hard hat:
OCCUPY WALL STREET. DO IT FOR YOUR KIDS
. A woman in a blue nurse’s smock:
THIS RN IS SICKENED BY WALL STREET GREED. TRUST HAS BEEN BROKEN
. A young woman in jeans:
WHERE DID MY FUTURE GO? GREED TOOK IT
. There was
WE’RE HERE
.
WE’RE UNCLEAR. GET USED TO IT
, and also
SOMETHING IS WRONG
.

Everyone who wasn’t holding a sign was taking pictures. The crowd was dense, the talk
overlapping: “… part of the effort to destroy the middle class all over the world…”
“The goal is to have everyone help decide what the goal is…” “When was Glass-Steagall
enacted?”

Two friends were standing on the sidewalk, Shira Moss and Mazal Ben-Moshe, thirty
and twenty-seven. Shira had a degree in midwifery but no job, Mazal was studying social
work. Shira had gotten to the park at 5:30 in the morning—she had been waiting for
this her whole life. Mazal had volunteered for Obama in 2008 and was thrilled when
he was elected, but after that she disappeared, didn’t even bother voting in 2010,
and now she felt ashamed and wanted to step forward. A few guys in hard hats, on their
lunch break from construction work on 4 World Trade Center, walked by and checked
out the signs. One of them, Mike, saluted the protesters. “There’s no work for us
anymore—we’re out of work a year at a time,” he said. “It’s because of them”—he waved
toward the narrow canyons of the financial district. “The people who are holding us
back. The banks, the government, anyone who controls the money.”

Two middle-aged men stopped in front of Shira and began to argue with her in heavy
Russian accents. “Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela is ultimate destination of what you’re
doing,” the first Russian said.

“My wife is midwife—she has job,” the second man said.

“Congratulations, that’s great,” Shira said.

“You can get job, too.”

“I’d love one. Can’t find one.”

“This is waste of your time. Go look for job—put your time into that.”

“Bottom line: go to North Korea,” the first Russian said. “This is your final destination.”

A fortyish man in a baseball cap who had been listening said to the first Russian,
“There are oligarchs in Russia. Do you see any connection between that and what she’s
saying?”

“This is government problem, this is not banks’ problem.”

The second Russian began to complain about the people in Zuccotti. “They smoke in
park! This is illegal. They think they are superior.”

“True or false,” Shira said: “things are absolutely fair for everyone in this country.”

“True,” the second Russian said.

A chorus of voices: “False!”

*   *   *

Ray Kachel lived all of his first fifty-three years within a couple of miles of his
birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry.
In 1984 he bought his first Mac, a 512K, dropped out of Seattle Central Community
College, and was hired by a company that converted printed material into digital records.
At night he was into the club scene, DJing at Tugs Belltown Tavern, spinning Eurobeat,
Men Without Hats, Prince. On Monday nights he also played synthesizer and drum machine
in a band called 5 Sides Collide, which broke up when the singer decided she was into
women. Celebrities would go there for coke—Elton John was spotted at least once—and
Ray used for several months, selling to support his habit, then decided he hated the
way it felt and stopped doing drugs.

The scene fell apart in the mid- to late eighties, and Ray lost his day job, too.
But for the next couple of decades he made a decent living on the margins of the Seattle
technology world, keeping up with advances in audio and video production, picking
up freelance work editing online content. Between tech jobs he worked in his parents’
janitorial business. He spent his money on a few pleasures, like microbrewery beer
and his vast DVD library. His favorite movie was
Stalker
, the 1979 sci-fi film by Andrei Tarkovsky. “Three guys traipsing through the woods—it’s
visually and aurally very, very strange,” Ray said. “Tarkovsky is famous for painfully
long takes, creating an environment that’s uncomfortable without it being clear why.”

Ray lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment. He was an inconspicuous person—small of
stature, with short-cropped hair, drab clothes, and a mild manner. After his parents
died, he became something of a hermit, with few friends. On the other hand, a lot
of tech workers were antisocial. The information economy employed millions of skilled,
culturally literate, freelance oddballs. As long as the new economy made room for
him, Ray lived the life he wanted.

When the recession hit, tech jobs in Seattle started drying up. After the death of
the owner of his main client, a company that hired him to do DVD customization, Ray
found that he no longer had contacts for other work. He cut back on expenses and quit
drinking beer. At the end of 2010, he ordered from Amazon a green, apple-shaped USB
stick containing the entire Beatles collection; just before it was due to ship, he
canceled the order. “Around that time, I started realizing spending two hundred fifty
dollars on something wasn’t such a good idea,” he said. “I’m glad I made that decision,
because I wouldn’t have enjoyed the stereo mix anyway.”

In March 2011, Ray’s mouth went dry. He felt sick with anxiety and could barely eat.
He realized that he was coming to the end of his savings. He could survive as a barista
or a delivery driver, but he didn’t think he was capable of chatting with customers
all day, and he had stopped driving years before. He applied for every tech opening
he could find, but only one offer came, from Leapforce, a company that evaluated Web
search results. Ray signed on as an “At Home independent agent,” doing work on his
iMac for thirteen dollars an hour, but almost immediately the hours dwindled to twenty
or thirty minutes a day. That was his last job.

Over the summer, Ray went on eBay to sell off his computer equipment, like a drought-stricken
farmer eating his seed corn: first his MacBook Air, then his iPad, then his iMac.
He found buyers for his DVD collection, which had a thousand titles, after first ripping
digitized copies of everything. The last thing Ray sold was his copy of Final Cut
Pro, Apple’s state-of-the-art editing suite. “I was hoping, by holding on to that,
if I found another project, I could work on somebody else’s machine. But it just wasn’t
happening.” The sales brought in about twenty-five hundred dollars. In September,
he fell behind on his rent. The only thing worse than being homeless, he thought,
was being homeless in his hometown.

Ray had started tweeting in 2009, as a way to become more social. On Twitter, he met
many people who were in similarly desperate circumstances, unemployed and facing destitution.
And on Twitter he learned, in the last days of September, as he was getting ready
to vacate the apartment, about a rash that had broken out in lower Manhattan.

The protesters at Occupy Wall Street were angry about things that Ray recognized from
his own life: the injustice of a system in which the rich and the powerful sucked
the life out of the middle class. He had long felt critical of the banks, the oil
companies, the huge corporations that didn’t pay taxes. Fracking was a particular
concern of Ray’s. He was also an obsessive follower of Rachel Maddow—he loved her
wit, her agreeableness—and she was beginning to talk about Occupy Wall Street on her
cable news program.

Ray had four hundred fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For
two hundred fifty, you could travel anywhere in America on Greyhound. He had never
been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, so full
of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there he could surely
find a
place
to exist. On the last night of September he went to bed telling himself, “Oh, this
is just absolutely nuts, you can’t do that.” He woke up in the morning with a clear
thought: “This is exactly what I’m going to do.”