MB Civic

After waking up to the horrendous news of what Bloomberg and the police state did the night before, I went down to Occupy Wall Street’s Liberty Park. Despite a court injunction that barred Bloomberg from evicting people from the park, the police were still there and had surrounded the park with those metal pens. Turns out Bloomberg was shopping around for a judge who would give him the decision that the 1% wanted and over the next few hours people waited for this or that court ruling to come down. I kept hearing contradictory information. There were a lot of people there (I spotted Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson walking around). I spent most of the next few hours with a cool guy from North Carolina who was passing out copies of Loose Change – any time a reporter came up to talk to him he’d go, “did you know WTC 7 collapsed and wasn’t hit by a plane?…etc” – he had a whole spiel going and it was really funny to see each reporter get nervous + uncomfortable each time. He said he’d brought 2,000 dvd copies with him and only had a few left.

Finally around 5:30 the police opened up the park, but they were treating the site like a bad rock concert, controlling entrance points and checking bags to make sure no one brought in tents, sleeping bags and food. Despite this, people were elated to be back inside. I was among the first few people to go in. The scene was pretty surreal – night time, the leaves on the trees bright yellow, and the floor lights on the ground turned on, skinny white bands of light. I felt like I was in a dream. Corporate TV cameramen were all over the place trying to interview people. At one point Fox News showed up and everyone started chanting “Fox News lies” until the dude finally left the park. I was interviewed by a couple very young reporters from Japanese and German newspapers I’d never heard of. I spoke to a lawyers guild guy in a green hat and he said the court ruling pretty much allowed Zuccoti Park “owners” to make any rules they wanted. So police were confiscating food, not letting anyone lie down and sleep, arbitrarily telling people where they could and couldn’t stand .. it was pretty creepy. There was sort of an uneasy stand off going on, with occupiers not planning to leave any time soon but being constantly harassed and deprived of sleep/comfort. I saw two occupiers who I’d spoken with on previous visits to the park. One guy, an African American musician in a cowboy hat named Derek, seemed cheerful and not too worried about what would happen next. Another really smart young guy named Joe from Brooklyn, about 20 years old, looked pretty tired. His shoes were worn through and his face was smudged. I asked what he was going to do if he couldn’t sleep in the park that night and said “I have no idea .. I don’t have anywhere else to go” – mab