Why Occupy Wall Street?

Maybe you're wondering why I've become such a vocal proponent of The Occupation. I ask myself that sometimes, too. I've always had a tendency to take up causes and run with them, from Meals on Wheels to the Drug War, so often that I profess I DON'T NEED ANY MORE CAUSES! But this one is especially important.

It started last week when someone forwarded me a video of NYPD brutalizing Wall Street demonstrators. Several things shocked me about it. For one, the caption read, "Watch this video before youtube takes it down again." Why would it be removed? The uploader claimed that news of the protests is being suppressed. Sounded like a baseless conspiracy theory to me. But as I watched, a respected journalist confirmed that there seems to be a media blackout. Not only is no major U.S. news outlet reporting on it, but some email servers and websites have blocked messages and traffic related to it. All video is coming from amateurs and independent journalists on the ground.

It was the video footage in this report that was most disturbing. I watched in horror as young protesters already contained behind police netting, not bothering anybody, got pepper sprayed point-blank by high-ranking NYPD official Anthony Bologna. He ran off in hopes that no one saw him, but the camera caught it. It also caught police attacking people, dragging them across pavement by their clothes, swarming them, standing on their necks, and bruising their wrists with zip tie cuffs. What was their "crime"? Videotaping the police and dissenting when others were arrested.

Why hadn't I heard about these events when I am on CNN and other news sites literally all day every day? I keep up on the news, people, and there was none to be found here. That's when I turned to social networking to keep updated. (Hey, it worked for Egypt.)

It was through those sources that on Saturday, I started watching a livefeed of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge and police occasionally struggling with them. This is a nonviolent movement that aims to respect laws, so I couldn't understand why they'd block traffic on a city bridge where they surely weren't allowed. That's when I heard them chanting, "Let us go, let us go!" I saw that they were penned in by a slew of cops and barricades, all the way around. One by one, police randomly picked people, dragged them out of the crowd, and arrested them, sometimes violently. A teenaged girl with braces, old people, young people, union workers, businesspeople, hippies, over 700 citizens--every one of them taken into custody. All for exercising their 1st amendment rights to gather peaceably and express themselves. My hand flew up to my mouth in terror as tensions mounted and police got violent. At times it seemed as though protesters were going to defend their peers from being mistreated at the risk of...well, having all of NYPD draw weapons and seriously injure everyone.

Now, I wasn't around during the equal rights movement of the '60s and '70s, when citizens were beaten and killed by authorities who were supposedly charged with protecting them. But I've seen clips, and this is the closest thing to it I've ever witnessed. NYPD consistently uses unnecessary force with impunity. In the case of the demonstrators who got pepper sprayed, officials have closed the investigation, saying the cop used normal crowd control measures. What? I couldn't help but think, Is this the start of a revolution? Another thought was, Thank god this is being taped and can prove the protesters are being peaceful and the police are not. But the fact that it was live also caused something interesting to happen...

As I sat in front of the computer bawling, unable to look away, I was bombarded with livechat alongside the video. In less than an hour, the number of viewers soared from 9,000 to 20,000. That's 20,000 people from around the world, all watching NYPD behave badly. And these people got PISSED and MOTIVATED. We started sharing links and phone numbers for NYPD, Internal Affairs, Mayor Bloomberg's office. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of us called and left messages and complaints and requests for investigation. We blew up CNN's facebook page asking why the Breaking News was a story about a plane crash in a distant country with no injuries (no joke) with zero mention of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests taking place. People sitting at home who'd otherwise been complacent were forced to confront the truth and take action. And you know what? CNN and Fox have started reporting! I certainly don't expect their coverage to be fair or balanced, but at least we demanded attention for an issue they'd ignored for 3 weeks.

So, why were they demonstrating on the bridge, anyway? Protesters say NYPD split up their march and led half of them onto the bridge. Then, the officers barricaded them, set up police netting, and arrested them for being on the bridge. There is no way I can forget the injustices I witnessed this weekend, nor do I ever want to. That solidified it for me. For the next few weeks, I live, eat, breathe Occupy San Diego, whatever I have to offer, to donate, to do, I will. And I hope one day I can tell my nieces and nephews about how I was an active participant in the reorganization of our country's financial system, how I fought to eradicate corporate greed, how I stood up for my fellow citizens whose civil liberties were being violated, all because, well, it was the right thing to do.