CHAPTER 1

SOME GREAT CAUSE

#A99 #Bloombergville #Jan25 #SolidarityWI #NYCGA #OCCUPYWALLSTREET #October2011#OpESR #OpWallStreet #S17 #SeizeDC #StopTheMach #USDOR

Under the tree where the International Society for Krishna Consciousness wasfounded in 1966, on the south side of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village,sixty or so people are gathered in a circle around a yellow banner that reads,in blue spray paint, "general assembly of nyc." It is Saturday, August 13, 2011,the third of the General Assembly's evening meetings.

"No cops or reporters," someone decrees at the start of the meeting. Othersdemand a ban on photographs.

From where I'm sitting in the back, my hand inches up, and I stand and explainthat I am a writer who covers resistance movements. I promise not to takepictures.

Just then, a heavyset man in a tight T-shirt, with patchy dark hair and a beard,starts snapping photos. He is Bob Arihood, a fixture of the neighborhood knownfor documenting it with his camera and his blog. People shout at him to stop; heshouts back something about the nature of public space. Soon, a few from thegroup break off to talk things through with him, and the discussion turns backto me.

The interrogation and harrowing debate that follow are less about me, really,than about them. Are they holding a public meeting or a private one? Is ajournalist to be regarded as an agent of the state or a potential ally? Can theyexpect to maintain their anonymity?

After half an hour, at last, I witness an act of consensus: hands rise aboveheads, fingers wiggle. I can stay. A little later, I see that Arihood and thepeople who'd gone to confront him are laughing together.

Those present were mainly, but not exclusively, young, and when they spoke, theyintroduced themselves as students, artists, organizers, teachers. There were alot of beards and hand-rolled cigarettes, though neither seemed obligatory. Onthe side of the circle nearest the tree were the facilitators—DavidGraeber, a noted anthropologist, and Marisa Holmes, a brown-haired, brown-eyedfilmmaker in her midtwenties who had spent the summer interviewingrevolutionaries in Egypt. Elders, such as a Vietnam vet from Staten Island, werelistened to with particular care. It was a common rhetorical tic to address thegroup as "You beautiful people," which happened to be not just encouraging butalso empirically true.

Several had accents from revolutionary places—Spain, Greece, LatinAmerica—or had been working to create ties among pro-democracy movementsin other countries. Vlad Teichberg, leaning against the Hare Krishna Tree andpecking at the keys of a pink laptop, was one of the architects of the Internetvideo channel Global Revolution. With his Spanish wife, Nikky Schiller, he hadbeen in Madrid during the May 15 movement's occupation at Puerta del Sol. AlexaO'Brien, a slender woman with blond hair and black-rimmed glasses, covered theArab Spring for the website WikiLeaks Central and had been collaborating withorganizers of the subsequent uprisings in Europe; now she was trying to foment amovement called US Day of Rage, named after the big days of protest in theMiddle East.

That meeting would last five hours, followed by working groups convening inhuddles and in nearby bars. I'd never heard young people talking politics quitelike this, with so much seriousness and revelry and determination. But theirunease was also visible when a police car passed and conversation slowed; amember of the Tactics Committee had pointed out that, since any group of twentyor more in a New York City park needs a permit, we were already breaking thelaw.

Fault lines were forming, too. Some liked the idea of coming up with one demand,and others didn't. Some wanted regulation, others revolution. I heard the slogan"We are the 99 percent" for the first time when Chris, a member of the FoodCommittee, proposed it as a tagline. There were murmurs of approval but alsocalls for something more militant: "We are your crisis." When the idea came upof having a meeting on the picket line with striking Verizon workers, O'Brienblocked consensus. She didn't want the assembly to lose its independence bysiding with a union.

"We need to appeal to the right as well as the left," she said.

"To the right?" a graduate student behind me muttered. "Wow."

Just about the only thing everyone could agree on was the fantasy of crowdsfilling the area around Wall Street and staying until they overthrew thecorporate oligarchy, or until they were driven out. As the evening grew darker,a pack of intern-aged boys walked by, looking as if they had just left a bar,and noticed the meeting's slow progress. One of them, wearing a polo shirt, heldup a broken beer mug and shouted, at an inebriated pace, "If you always actlater, you might forget the now!"

Bob Arihood died of a heart attack at the end of September, after he exhaustedhimself photographing a march from the Financial District to Union Square. Bythen, the idea that the General Assembly had been planning for was a reality,spreading fast. One of his photos of the meeting survives on his blog, the onlypicture of its kind I've found. In that cluster of people around the banner,almost everyone is looking toward the camera; a guy I now know as Richie,dressed in white, is pointing right into the lens. Some look curious, somesuspicious, some scared, some indifferent. I'm barely visible in a far corner ofthe group.

I recognize most of the others now in a way I couldn't then. Some have had theirnames and faces broadcast on the news all over the world. There's the woman fromLaRouchePAC with such a good singing voice, and the group who went to highschool together in North Dakota. When I showed Arihood's picture to a friend, herecognized his former roommate from art school. I try to guess what the ones Iknow best were thinking, what it was exactly that they imagined they were doingthere—so expectant, so at odds with one another, so anxious about beingwatched.

The saying "You had to be there" typically comes at the end of a joke thatdidn't get the right reaction, that set up high hopes but by the time of thepunch line fell flat. If you were there, after all, you'd know that somethinghappened that really was significant or funny or worth repeating. I keep wantingto say those words again and again about Occupy Wall Street—"you had to bethere," "you had to be there!"—but I stop myself, because doing so wouldalso be an admission of defeat. Those words are a conversation stopper. If...