The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (58 page)

Ray didn’t tell his few friends about the plan. But on the night of October 3, he
wrote on his Wordpress blog, for anyone who might be reading: “About to board a bus
to NYC. Not sure if I’ll ever come back to Seattle … I have had some moments of panic,
asking myself if I’ve completely lost my mind. That’s entirely possible. But those
moments pass quickly and my sense of adventure takes over and I’m ready to hit the
road all the more.” He had abandoned most of his remaining possessions; he was traveling
with a small duffel and a daypack, and they contained not much more than a few changes
of clothes, a portable hard drive with some of his movies, and a relatively stupid
cell phone with enough memory to send and download tweets. The bus left at midnight.
At five in the morning on October 6, Ray arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal
in midtown Manhattan. By ten, he had made his way downtown to the occupation.

The leaves on the honey locust trees were still green. The park was swarming with
clusters of sign holders, drummers, kitchen workers, groups holding meetings, barkers
shouting about this or that issue. Sleep-deprived and hungry, Ray was beset by a feeling
of déjà vu—everything around him seemed oddly familiar. He sat on the wall along Liberty
Street and listened to a conversation among a few people nearby, and his head was
going to explode—he seemed to have physically been in this space, talking to these
people, knowing exactly what they were going to say. At one point, someone told him
that a shower could be arranged if he went down to the comfort station in the middle
of the park. In the déjà vu timeline, he had gotten the shower and his life continued
in a normal, contented way, leading him back to his warm bed, for he had decided not
to occupy Wall Street; but in reality, there was no shower to be had, and suddenly
Ray was confronted with the fact of being homeless and broke in a strange city. He
withdrew into himself, speaking to no one, curling up to sleep in his fleece and waterproof
shell on the steps near the east side of the park.

One day, Ray overheard a group of young occupiers who were sitting on the steps just
a few feet away talking about him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make
it here doing that,” one of them said. “He isn’t taking care of himself.” They were
right—his socks and shoes, drenched in a rainstorm, had been wet for several days.
Ray saw that he couldn’t survive here as his own independent, satellite self. He had
to become part of the collective in an unreserved way—something that he’d never done
in his life.

He volunteered for the newly formed Sanitation Working Group. To keep warm after dark,
he spent part of each night scrubbing the paths and the sidewalks. Another occupier,
seeing Ray working, gave him a sleeping bag and a tarp. He began making friends: Sean,
an Irish immigrant from the Bronx who worked the graveyard shift spraying fire retardant
on steel, then came downtown to spend his days at Zuccotti; a homeless substitute
teacher with a degree in physics; Chris, a drifter from Tarpon Springs, Florida, who
had been so outraged by the pepper-spraying video on YouTube that he had ridden the
rails to Manhattan in order to defend female honor.

Ray found a sign that said
BAN FRACKING NOW
, and, after working on his delivery, he spent a few days talking to strangers on
the sidewalk along the south side of the park. It was a little like acting, and he
discovered a voice inside himself that could speak out. He tweeted regularly, and
his account, which had had a few dozen followers in Seattle, suddenly grew to well
over a thousand.

October 8: There are elements of communal living. it’s a really amazing experience
tho totally out of my comfort level.

October 22: It surprises me i have a guardian angel. it doesn’t surprise me he’s a
soft-spoken, hard working Irish guy from the bronx.

October 23: Dear mr. ferguson. i have lived in new york for over two weeks now. it
does not smell of wee.

October 27: Keep seeing references to “horrendous police abuse” re: ows. i’ve been
here 2
+
weeks and have seen none and heard of little.

November 13: I lived in my old apartment in Seattle for nearly a decade and barely
knew 2 other tenants … i’ve lived in liberty square for just over a month and regularly
talk with many of my neighbors and have made many new friends.

So he didn’t panic when, one rain-swept night, his duffel was stolen as he slept,
and water entered the tarp in which he was rolled up, soaking his sleeping bag; and
he stayed calm the next morning when his daypack—including the portable hard drive—was
taken away by zealous members of the Sanitation Working Group who were clearing out
waterlogged objects, leaving Ray with nothing but the clothes he had on. He turned
to his new friends for help and was given a dry sleeping bag. By then, he belonged
to the occupation. Liberty Square was his home.

*   *   *

On Wednesday, October 12, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD announced that the park would
be cleared that Friday for cleaning. Neighbors were complaining about the nonstop
drumming at the western end, the trashy look of the place, the reported incidents
of public urinating and defecating. Nelini had been spending a lot of her time trying
to get the drum circle to cool it. She attended meetings of the local community board,
heard the complaints, and tried to work out an agreement under which the drumming
would be limited to two hours a day. But when the city’s announcement came, she and
other occupiers took it as a disguised plan to shut them down.

They raised the alarm through social media, and around the city supporters bombarded
elected officials with phone calls and Facebook posts. By Thursday night, thousands
of people had descended on the park to prevent the police from clearing it. Zuccotti
had never been so crowded—even people who had been skeptical of the occupation, who
found the drum circle annoying and disliked the activists’ clichés, were there in
the belief that something important, something that belonged to all of them, was under
threat.

No one from Occupy would talk to the mayor’s office on principle (though the principle
remained obscure). So Nelini’s boss, Bill, was negotiating feverishly with the deputy
mayor behind the scenes to keep the park open. Nelini went home late that night for
an hour’s sleep because Zuccotti was too crowded. When she came back at 5:00 a.m.,
the occupiers were already awake. Over the next hour Zuccotti filled up again, and
by six, people were squeezed into every foot of granite from Broadway to Trinity Place.
It was still dark when Nelini’s phone rang.

“We won,” her boss said.

“What?”

“We’re not getting kicked out. Get to Becca right now.”

Nelini’s friend Becca was standing at the top of the Broadway steps. There was a message
from Bill in her phone, and Nelini began reading it to the huge crowd.

“Late last night!” She waited as the human microphone carried her words from east
to west in three receding waves. “We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park!
Brookfield Properties! That they are postponing their cleaning!” The roar began before
the first wave could carry the message across the park and continued for almost a
full minute. Thousands of hands raised tens of thousands of fingers and wiggled them
in the nonverbal anarchist language of approval. Nelini started again: “The reason
why! Is because! They believe they could work out an arrangement with us! But also!
Because we have a lot of people here!”

Afterward, she could hardly remember what happened during the single most dramatic
moment of her life, it was so surreal. Her friend Max said, “This is going to make
an excellent moment in the movie.”

“You’re ruining it,” Nelini said.

“I wonder who’s going to play you.”

*   *   *

When Occupy started, Kevin Moore’s colleagues at the bank were dismissive. One guy
in the office said, “They should just take out the fucking billy clubs and get in
there.” But after ending his workday in midtown (most of Wall Street was no longer
on Wall Street), Kevin made a point of going down to check it out, and then he kept
going back. He liked the free flow of conversations on Broadway, the spectacle of
the park. The scene in Zuccotti reminded him of the city back in the eighties, when
he attended private school, listened to Run-D.M.C., and went down to Times Square
to watch the games of three-card monte and the police raids—when New York was wilder
and more ragged. The occupation of the park was a big strain on the police force and
the neighborhood, and just sitting there was going to get old pretty fast. They’d
have to figure out another way to keep the issues in focus. But he was glad that someone
was calling attention to those issues. He knew some of them firsthand.

There were things Kevin didn’t like about Occupy. The protesters needed a marketing
director, and he thought they should be talking about the 0.1 percent, since he was
part of the 1 percent and he had no control over politicians. He also didn’t like
the way some protesters demonized everyone who worked in finance, just the way his
colleague at the bank demonized everyone in the park. It was like the Democrats and
Republicans, talking past each other. Once, on a trip to London, Kevin saw some Occupy
types storming what they thought was an investment house, but they had the wrong building—it
was just a regular bank branch, and the snowballs were hitting back office workers.
Kevin knew about the sins of Wall Street, but the level of the protesters’ vitriol
surprised him. If they wanted change, they’d have to appeal to the better angels of
a banker’s nature.

From lower Manhattan, the protean flame spread around the country and the world. Within
weeks there were twenty-five, fifty, a hundred occupations. The movement’s slogan,
“We are the 99 percent,” was simple and capacious enough to cover a multitude of discontents
and desires. It became the name of a blog on Tumblr that collected a gallery of hundreds
of faces in snapshots sent by readers, some obscured or half hidden by the anonymous
autobiographical statement that each person wrote down on a piece of paper and held
up for the camera. A face in darkness:

I did everything they told me to, in order to be successful.

I got straight A’s and a scholarship.

I went to University and got a degree.

Now I’m sinking in student debt, unable to get a job.

I have an eviction notice on my door, and nowhere to go.

I have only $42 in the bank.

I AM THE 99%!

A woman’s blurry features peering out from behind the sheet:

I am a 37 year old who makes $8.00 an hour in a management position. Our assistant
and general managers make a decent 5 figures to do nothing but talk about employees/customers.
I don’t get 10 minute breaks, nor 30 minute meal periods.

After paying:

Insurance

Federal & State taxes

Social Security

Medicare

I am left working for the gas money to get to work.

I AM PISSED!

Read by the dozens, these compressed, homemade life stories amassed the moral force
of documentary research from hard times, or a Steinbeck novel. And they explained
why Occupy Wall Street became an instant brand name.

Uses of the phrase “income inequality” quintupled in the media, and President Obama
gave a speech on the subject, talking about the 1 percent. Every celebrity and public
figure had an opinion about Occupy. Colin Powell expressed guarded sympathy and recalled
an earlier time when his parents in the South Bronx could always count on having a
job. Robert Rubin talked about thirty years of falling median real wages (except for
the late nineties): “They’ve identified issues that are really central to what’s going
to happen to our economy.” Peter Thiel told an interviewer, “In the history of the
modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war, or
deflationary economic collapse. It’s a disturbing question which of these three is
going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out.” Elizabeth Warren, campaigning
for the Senate, said, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they
do.” Newt Gingrich, campaigning for president, was heckled by Occupy protesters at
Harvard, and afterward he told the audience at an Iowa family values forum, “All the
Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. They take
over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t
pay for, to beg for food from places they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those
who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the
park, so they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue to
which we owe everything. Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has
collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something
as simple as saying to them: ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.’” Asked for
his opinion, Andrew Breitbart replied, “It depends if you’re talking about the fecal
angle, the public masturbation angle, the rape, or the grope angle of Occupy Wall
Street. We’re covering all of the circus.” He narrated a film exposé called
Occupy Unmasked
, the last project he completed before his death, released posthumously. Jay-Z started
selling an “Occupy All Streets” line of Rocawear T-shirts, but later on he defended
entrepreneurs among the 1 percent from Occupy Wall Street’s attacks. “This is free
enterprise,” Jay-Z said. “This is what America is built on.”

Throughout October occupations sprang up everywhere. Occupy Youngstown drew some veterans
of Save Our Valley, the movement to keep the steel mills open in the late seventies.
On October 15, seven hundred people marched through downtown Greensboro, past the
banks and the civil rights museum housed in the old Woolworth’s building, to Festival
Park. Dean Price was one of them. He had gone to the Occupy Greensboro planning meeting,
and after the march he talked to the kids who pitched tents in the parking lot of
the YWCA next to the park and were serving pasta to homeless men. They told Dean their
stories of low-wage jobs, no health insurance, mountains of college debt, and it made
him angry to think that anyone who got started around 1950 or 1960 had everything
and didn’t do fuck with it, just sat at the table and gorged themselves till they
were full and then left the scraps for the next generation. Now young people were
protesting on Wall Street because the whole thing was hog-tied, but Dean tried to
make the occupiers see the change that was coming, right there in Greensboro.