November at OWS
As Occupy Wall Street continues into the month of November, a lot has changed since I first visited OWS about a month ago. The site of the protests is clearly more “hunkered” down than my initial visits. Yes the site is now about 50% tents while the food area, the media center, and the library have a much more defined area and structure. The debates, conversations, and open workshops are also better laid out. The limits placed on the drumming is certainly a godsend for the community and to be honest, I couldn’t see much of a tie between the goals of OWS and the drumming. It seemed like a simple coalescence of a certain scene. With all that said, I think the number one concern that I have had as well as others related to the number of homeless people who have come to call OWS their residence.
There have been some conspiratorial talk that the New York Police Department have told the poverty stricken to head to OWS. Admittedly, there are two ways to view this. Either the NYPD is purposely trying to dismantle the cause through subverting it with New York City vagrants or the possibly more likely scenario that the police do not know what to do with these people that the state is not prepared to care for. So doing the best that many of the police can do, they’re directing them to the most affordable and perhaps most benevolent support in the city: OWS. I am not trying to paints the police as being a naive force for good but I do think that many of the police at Zuccotti Park cannot recognize the movement of OWS as anything more than certain class of people protesting. That is to say, certainly the people at Zuccotti Park are the same as the homeless people who wander the city. Isn’t there a relief effort occurring right in Lower Manhattan? Of course this is not true but to the police the scene is exactly that.
