I didn’t expect to cover Occupy Wall Street early Friday morning. Like my colleague Allison Kilkenny, I expected that the NYPD would clear the park with SWAT teams in the middle of the night, before the protesters could mobilize their allies.
The protesters were facing de facto eviction. Mayor Bloomberg had warned that the sanitation crews would arrive at Zuccotti Park at seven am on Friday morning, and Occupy Wall Street had called upon its supporters to show up at six, prepared for non-violent direct action.
So, when my alarm went off at 4:30, I was half-surprised to learn that the occupation was still going on.
It seemed like an early-morning showdown was inevitable. I had no plans to get arrested. But if the police are disregarding the First Amendment rights of protesters, why would you expetct them to respect the First Amendment rights of reporters?
I decided that if I was going to get arrested, I was taking as little equipment to Central Booking as possible. So, I left my camera at home. I took the pictures with my cell phone.
When I emerged from the Fulton Street subway at around 5:30, there were a fair number people on the street and, amazingly, they were all headed for Zuccotti Park. We waited, and waited. And the park got more and more crowded.
Many protesters were engaged in a combination of street cleaning and street theater. Someone yelled over the “human mic” that if people didn’t move their shit, it was going to be moved for them. So much for leaderless action…but, man, that park was clean.
The street medics started to get antsy. The National Lawyers Guild protest observers were having an intense huddle. If you want to know what’s going on at a protest, watch the medics and the NLG observers. They usually have pretty good protester-side inteligence, because it’s in everyone’s interest to keep them apprised, plus they’re easy to spot from a distance.
The medics sport red crosses made of duct tape. The good ones know more about the effects of pepper spray and tear gas than most doctors.
NLG observers wear neon green baseball caps. They carry permanent markers and invite protesters and assorted hangers-on to write the NLG phone number on their bodies so that they will know who to call if they get arrested. “212−674−6018” will probably wash off my left palm in a day or two.
The General Assembly kicked off. There were some chants of “This is what democracy looks like!” and “We are the 99%.” So far, so good. Nobody had been arrested, pepper sprayed, or trapped in an orange net.
Then the cheering got really loud. And then nothing happened. The human mic is charming, but imperfect. It seemed like maybe the people at the front knew more then we did. Or, maybe whatever they’d been excited about died out before it got to us because the hivemind had processed and rejected it.
Finally, the guy next to me checked his cell phone and learned that the Deputy Mayor had announced that the cleaning had been postponed. “It’s a good temporary victory,” he said, beaming. That seemed about right.
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