Sarah Jaffe reports in AlterNet on how the protesters at Wall Street are taking a route that differentiates them from any earlier protest movement. The article is titled
Occupy Wall St. Prepares for Crackdown — Will Bloomberg Try to Tear It All Down?
What Bloomberg may be preparing to “tear down” is a fairly articulated infrastructure that sustains the occupation. This goes from the provision of meals, to a free medical station, from a library to lights and electricity for computers and phones, and to cleaning up after the crowd of demonstrators.
“We have been self-governing and self-organized and taking care of our space,” the woman facilitating the GA calls through the people’s microphone earlier today. “Today we clean to call their bluff.” The sanitation team is calling for all hands to clean the park, and indeed all morning volunteers have been picking up trash with gloved hands. The willingness of the protesters to embrace such tasks is part of the reason they’ve been successful in camping out for nearly a month.
Arun Gupta, editor of the Indypendent and one of those who helped create the Occupied Wall Street Journal newspaper, says, “You have this uncommodified radical public space right in the heart of global capital. There is no money being exchanged, and that’s remarkable in a city that is kind of the height of the idea that we exist to consume.”
“People who couldn’t afford food or health care, that’s no longer the case. They can come here and get what they need,” says Red, a street medic at the medical station. “It’s probably my favorite part of this movement.”
The People’s Library might be the most impressive structure in the park. It’s now extended from the concrete benches along one wall onto tables, and the books have been stickered, labeled, and had their barcodes scanned and cataloged onto the web. This, as libraries across the US face budget cuts and closure.
Over the weekend, the computers throughout the plaza (at the media station as well as the “Internet cafe” and phone charging station) were powered not by the generators that have kept them going most of the time, but by a solar panel-laden truck brought up by Greenpeace.
The kitchen, which now has several racks of dishes and supplies, has created agray water system to filter the water used to wash the dishes before using it to water the plaza’s flowers.
Street medic Red says, “It really restores your faith that there’s some level of decency left in our culture.”
And it appears to be exactly what will be targeted by the mayor, the police, and the wealthy park owners. The infrastructure is exactly what makes Occupy Wall Street different from other protest actions, and by cleaning the park and trying to dismantle that infrastructure they’re attempting to reduce the occupation’s symbolic power.
“We are now creating a society that we envision for the world. Being responsible for ourselves is as the heart of that,” the People’s microphone rumbles.
More in the original article here: Occupy Wall St. Prepares for Crackdown — Will Bloomberg Try to Tear It All Down?