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How Occupy Wall Street Still Explains Politics Today

It sowed the seeds for a new era of social movements—but its politics of powerlessness should act as a cautionary tale.

The date is October 15th, 2011, and it’s the height of Occupy Wall Street. The movement had launched barely a month earlier, when hundreds of activists with sleeping bags descended on Zuccotti Park, a small public space blocks away from Wall Street, to protest growing income inequality, brutal government austerity measures, and other signs of a seriously unjust economy. Around midday thousands of us stream out of our home base and hit the streets, heading uptown. As the cops stretch their line to block us, people pour through the gaps like streams of water, forcing them to race us and try to regroup at the next intersection. There are just too many of us, and we’re too fast, too relentless, so they give us the streets, deciding to simply follow us as we snake our way between cars like waves around boulders. 

Soon, the march breaks up into different groups, each going to a branch of a different bank, and blocking their entrances. We shut the banks down for hours, until dozens are arrested. We continue from there to a rally in Washington Square Park, which fills and fills and fills until its entire ten acres are completely covered with protesters. Moments after walking off the makeshift stage, I can’t remember a word I said, only the sea of people, the shining faces, the sun glaring down on us, the extraordinary feeling of momentum.

After the rally concludes, we march again, beginning our journey of the thirty-five blocks to Midtown. Now there must be over ten thousand of us, so it’s impossible to go all together. We clog the major arteries of the city to a chorus of cars honking—some in frustration, some in solidarity. 

It’s evening by the time we make it to Times Square—80,000 of us by our count. We sing and chant and light sparklers, feeling big and powerful in a way that to this point I have only read about in books. I stand on a trash can on the corner of 42nd St and Broadway, and can see across the street the ABC building, which has a rolling ticker on its facade, where breaking news scrolls across a massive screen. And then suddenly, as if the world is responding to all these people here together, to our chants, to this dream, the ticker pumps out, in big, red, block letters: OCCUPY WALL STREET GOES WORLDWIDE. 

It feels like time has stopped. Where the days have felt like weeks, these few seconds........

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