What I Saw At the Revolution, Part 1

On Friday, October 7th 2011 I visited the protesters at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. I wanted to get some sense of what day-to-day living was like for them, and get a perspective on the size of the event. This first batch of photos and recordings is from my cell phone.

 Arriving early in the morning (about 10 A.M.) many of the protesters were still asleep,and it was rather quiet. I walked around and checked out some of the signs.

I met a man dressed in a Fox News costume. Seeing me walking around, taking pictures, and not quite dressed like everyone else he joked that they all knew I was with the FBI. As we spoke more, he started to explain some things about the nature of the protest, specifically the day-to-day organization.

Apologies for the sideways orientation. I don't know if that can be fixed. 

To give you an idea of the size of things, I walked around the perimeter of the entire park once and filmed my walk. 

I started at the western-most corner, the intersection of Trinity and Cedar, and walked around clockwise. 

I left to have lunch with a friend and returned after noon and the crowd - observers and participants - had swelled. Here is a short video scanning the length of the park from across Liberty Street.

Entertainment was in full swing: drumming and hula-hoops:

In order for one person to communicate something to the whole crowd, a protester does something called a "mic check" or uses the "people's mic"; you stand up, yell, "mic check!" and the crowd nearby repeats, "mic check!" Then you state your message or announcement a sentence at a time, and they repeat each sentence to  you as you say it. When you're done, you say, "Thank you!"

I only managed to capture one of these, but I saw an entire speech by Naomi Klein delivered in this manner, by the woman herself, on their live feed.  It reminds me of other logistics I observed at Woodstock 1994 such as calling the medic. In that manouevre, if you see a person requiring medical attention in a thick crowd you tap the shoulder of the nearest person between you and the medics at the front of the stage, point backwards, and yell, "MEDIC!" The next person does the same, and when the message reaches the EMTs, the crowd parts like the Red Sea, and the medics rush down to where the injured person is.

To sum up my impressions:

• The protest site is not a cesspool of human waste and trash, as some want to imply (I have seen that story repeated several times in the past few days, with no change and no useful observations reported). 
• The protest site and the participants are is organized, if not pretty. 

I have a shitload of pictures from my digital SLR that I will punch up later today.