Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising: The Invitation (Ep. 1)

Optimist Economy is on break this month, but we know that optimist listeners are interested in tales of economic history, issues of inequality and movements for change. So we thought some of you might enjoy "Occupy!" a six-part narrative series about Occupy Wall Street, the 2011 protest village that lasted nearly two months and turned a spotlight on systemic economic inequality in the U. S. --- EPISODE 1: An Invitation In 2011, a handful of skeptical New Yorkers answer a call to Occupy Wall Street. What they find feels less like a protest and more like a glimpse of a different world—one where people openly share stories of debt, hardship, and frustration. They start to build an anti-capitalist village in a tiny Manhattan park — under the watchful eyes of police. This is the first episode of Future Hindsight’s brand new 6-part series, OCCUPY! An Unfinished Uprising. Subscribe to Future Hindsight wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single episode! Want to dive deeper? Listen to these episodes of Future Hindsight: For a conversation on activism with a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street, tune in to this episode with Micah White: https://www.futurehindsight.com/episodes/episode/micah-white For a recap of how American capitalism evolved into what it is today, listen to this episode with Kurt Andersen: https://www.futurehindsight.com/episodes/episode/americas-evil-geniuses-kurt-andersen On solidarity and mutual aid, listen to this conversation with Manuel Pastor: https://www.futurehindsight.com/episodes/episode/solidarity-and-mutuality-manuel-pastor Credits: Host / Executive Producer: Mila Atmos Producer / Writer: Maria Luisa Tucker Audio Producer: Zack Travis Additional production help: Mia Warren, Erika Gjada, Megan Detrie, Lizzie Jacobs, and Ilya Magazanin Archival research: Marisa Holmes Archival material courtesy of: Occupy Wall Street Media Working Group. Original music: Rude Mechanical Orchestra and Puge Ruhe Special thanks to T. J. Raphael, Lauren Passell, Arielle Nissenblatt, and Kate Blumenfeld for being our first listeners and sounding boards, and to Tom Koenig for his support. Distributed by PRX.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy were about as different as two politicians could be. The lanky businessman and the stout old senator, the conservative darling and the liberal icon. But did you know they once teamed up to tackle an elusive challenge? Universal healthcare.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  In season four of the Big Dig podcast, we tell the story of Romney Care and the odd couple alliance behind it. Find Mitt and Ted wherever you listen.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Future hindsight.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Zuccotti Park is a tiny plaza in Manhattan's financial district, a small rectangle of concrete and granite, surrounded on every side by skyscrapers. It's mostly a spot for office workers to smoke a cigarette or eat a quick falafel while they scroll on their phones. After dark, when the offices have emptied out and the surrounding shops and restaurants are closed, the park gets quiet, even a little eerie, usually. But on the night of November 15, 2011, Zuccotti Park was buzzing with tension and fear. Dozens of tents were set up among the grid of carefully landscaped trees

• 1:24Speaker 01

  sheltering about 200 activists. They had come to Occupy the park as both a political statement and a social experiment, determined to stay as long as they could. It had been 59 days. But now, as the 60th day of the occupation was approaching, hundreds of police officers began swarming the park.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  All right, is anyone here? The same now, right now, we're being raided at Occupy Wall Street. Police are starting tweeting as many people as possible and letting folks know Occupy Wall Street is being raided.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  As the cops surrounded them, the occupiers had a livestream going. They sent out a call for help to their network of supporters across the city.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  It was the middle of the night, and suddenly, phone calls, text messages, like, all these notifications. My phone just blew the hell up. And it's like, "The park is being raided now. We need people now."

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Hundreds of supporters began rushing to Zuccotti Park as the occupiers tried to hold ground.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  The cops are, like, right in front of us. A wall of cops in riot gear. They've got the, you know, the shields, and they're fully weaponized. And we look like a bunch of hippies.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  There's people screaming everywhere. Like, literally tents are being torn apart with knives. They're throwing people's stuff over their heads. They're going through tents, just throwing them out. All my shit's in there. All my friends are in there. That's my fucking home.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Supporters began arriving, ready to join what had essentially become a giant sit-in. But the cops had blocked off streets and installed barricades around the park.

• 3:06Speaker 06

  The cab came in closer and closer to Zuccotti. There was police everywhere. Roads were blocked. It felt like a war zone. The cab driver was scared. So we're like, "Don't go any further. We'll get out and walk."

• 3:17Speaker 02

  I was like, "Let me out." And I, like, ran the rest of the way. I was trying to get over these things. I was like, "How do I climb over this?" I was trying to do parkour.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Soon, an enormous crowd of people protesting the raid surrounded the park. They locked arms, blocking police vans and watching as the police arrested the occupiers. Tension and rage ticked up.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Get him back, I don't want to risk it. Get him on the phone.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Zuccotti Park was the nucleus of the Occupy movement, the first American movement driven by social media. The occupiers had slept in the park for almost two months through the rain and snow. They had been infiltrated, pepper sprayed, and made fun of by the mainstream media. But their message, that the capitalist system was rigged to benefit the 1% and exploit the rest of us, that message had resonated from the moment they set up camp in the park.

• 4:29Speaker 06

  What started as less than a dozen college students camping out in a park near the New York Stock Exchange is now hundreds of protesters.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  The crowds swelled dramatically as labor unions and college students added their voices. Protests against Wall Street continued to grow across the country.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Occupy Wall Street has become Occupy the world.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Occupy Wall Street came on the heels of a devastating economic crash that was caused by corporate greed, but paid for by millions of regular people who lost their homes, jobs, and retirement savings. Our political leaders bailed out the banks by using taxpayer dollars. Basically, regular working people had to foot the bill for corporate greed. And Occupy was able to channel the widespread rage, frustration, and despair into something inspiring. It's hard to explain why it exploded so dramatically and then flamed out so quickly. But looking back, it's clear that Occupy changed the way Americans understood capitalism.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  It punctured the myth that hard work is all it takes to get ahead. Politicians like Bernie Sanders, who embraced the idea of the 99%, suddenly became icons. Occupy Wall Street truly kicked off an era of protests and populist politics that have, in many ways, led us to the strange moment we're in today. And today, well, we're in a very dark place. Donald Trump is marching us steadily toward full authoritarianism, and our political leaders on both the left and right seem incapable of, or unwilling, to stop it. But that Occupy energy, that recognition that no one is coming to save us, so we better save ourselves,

• 6:18Speaker 01

  that energy is bubbling up again, just like it did in 2011. We again have an economic crisis, a war in the Middle East, and no one seems to be looking out for regular working people. Understanding the story of Occupy can help us figure out how to harness that grassroots power more effectively than we have before. And I want to know, what did Occupy get right? And what did it get wrong? What can we learn from its successes and failures that might help us build a new movement against fascism? From Future Hindsight, I'm your host, Mila Atmos, and this is Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Episode one, The Invitation.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  The Occupy movement starts with the story of a generation whose promise had been abruptly halted when the economy crashed in 2008.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  The housing market collapse created one financial crisis after another, and it often seemed as if the news could only get worse. In just six months, three of the five biggest independent firms on Wall Street have now disappeared. Bailing out Wall Street is the only way to save Main Street, so says the president.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  The signs were everywhere, but now it's official we are in a recession.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  The bankers who caused the crash got bailed out. Congress allocated $700 billion taxpayer dollars to stabilize the economy, and most of that money went to the too-big-to-fail financial institutions that had caused the economic meltdown. Distressed homeowners got little assistance. And the people who'd been laid off or lost huge chunks of retirement savings because of the crash, they didn't get any bailouts. Meanwhile...

• 8:12Speaker 06

  The nine banks that received the most help from the massive taxpayer bailout gave 5,000 employees bonuses of at least $1 million each.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  In the aftermath of the crash, a lot of young people either could not afford college or were graduating with crushing student loan debt. They were entering the workforce in the middle of a deep recession, and their ability to launch a career or repay their loans or buy their first home, well, all of that had essentially been put on pause for who knows how long. To put it another way, what COVID lockdowns were to Gen Z, the 2008 financial crash was to millennials.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I want to introduce you to three people who were in their teens or early 20s when the economy took its nosedive. First is Nalini Stamp, a born and raised New Yorker, an Afro-Latina woman.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  My mother went bankrupt during the financial crisis. We were served an eviction notice from our apartment. Like, all of these things came crashing down, and I never was comfortable about seeing it.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  A confluence of medical bills, delinquent child support, and the economic crash put them in a tight spot. Nalini was in high school at the time.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  I was like, "Why is there only this amount of food in the fridge?" I didn't feel like we were on steady ground. We got an eviction notice. It was a pink slip. That's when I started to not show up to school anymore. I said, "What is the point of this?"

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Nalini realized college was out of reach. The price tag was just too high. So she gave up, quit school, got a GED, started working minimum wage jobs. By 2011, Nalini had gotten a lower-level job at the Working Families Party, a pro-worker political party that runs progressive candidates.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  I have a good enough degree, GED. And I was lying to my colleagues when I first started at the Working Families Party that I went to college for some bit of time. I was so embarrassed by that.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Then there's Sandy Nurse. She was born in Panama to two Navy sailors, a white American mother and a black Panamanian father.

• 10:19Speaker 06

  I started as a kid who was a part of a US military occupying force, the mission of which is to exploit people, land, and resources for the benefit of the United States of America. And I spent a lot of time, my, almost my entire childhood, moving around the world and seeing the reactions to that, the consequences of that.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  She went to college in the US, where she graduated with a poli sci degree and an incredible amount of student loan debt. And in 2011, she'd begun what seemed like a promising career in humanitarian aid.

• 10:56Speaker 06

  I was just coming off of a United Nations World Food Program in Haiti. I was visiting different cities and villages. To write these reports about the distribution of food aid. At the time of the earthquake, all food systems collapsed in Haiti.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So she's a do-gooder, trying to help Haitians in the aftermath of an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left many more homeless. Except, the way that the UN food program was helping just feels wrong. The UN was paying Haitians who had just been through a traumatic natural disaster in food or low wages in exchange for hard labor.

• 11:40Speaker 06

  The thing that really just kind of snapped for me and essentially just broke my heart was seeing on this mountainside, these old Haitian women in their flip flops, carrying these boulders to make these walls to prevent the landsides. And this is a job that most in the United States, we'd see on a highway, you'd see people with like a backhoe or like a big claw caterpillar thing. These women are just moving these boulders. And I just said, this is not for me. We should not be asking these women to work for a sack of beans or some small dollars to do public works projects that are the job of a state, a nation state, or a government.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  I walked away from that really let down by the promise of what I was being told as a child about the project of Americanism.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  And so Sandy quit that whole endeavor, gave up on that career path to take a less ethically fraught job.

• 12:38Speaker 06

  My family was upset and didn't understand what I was doing. And they were like, you're like a bike, you're like a food delivery person now.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  So, summer of 2011, she was delivering food to residents of gentrified Brooklyn and trying to figure out her place in the world.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  And it just so happened at that moment Occupy came about.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Which brings me to Marisa Holmes, one of the people who planned the occupation from the beginning. She's a soft spoken white woman. She comes off as earnest and idealistic, not as cynic like Sandy or Nalini. Maybe it's her Midwestern roots.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I grew up in central Ohio, in a small town that kind of became a suburb. And my parents had been involved in like Democratic Party politics mostly. I mean, they definitely talked about politics like constantly.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Her dad was actually a labor lawyer for a time.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  I was in high school when 9/11 happened. Terrorists declare war on the United States, hijacking jetliners, crashing them into New York's World Trade Towers.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  President George W. Bush made the call to enter into a war that would end up expanding and lasting 20 years. On my orders, coalition forces have begun selected targets.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  I learned about, you know, politics and how power works and how to organize first from my parents and then became more radicalized in the context of the anti-war movement.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  From then on, she was a dedicated activist. By the summer of 2011, Marissa was 25, a grad student, living in Brooklyn, and part of a new anarchist group called the New York City General Assembly. And it was that group, the anarchists, who really gave life to the Occupy movement.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  It was a long, hot August in the summer of 2011. And we met under the Hare Krishna tree in Tompkins Square Park.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Tompkins Square Park is a leafy oasis in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It has all the regular things a New York City park has: a bustling playground, a dog run, old men sitting on benches feeding the pigeons, rats, and the Hare Krishna tree. But what, you may be wondering, is the Hare Krishna tree?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  In the middle of Tompkins Square Park, there's a rather large tree with roots that kind of extend out into the concrete and break it up. And people go there to meditate and play music and just be together.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  This huge elm tree was the site of the first Hare Krishna outdoor chanting session in the country in 1966, which is how it got its name. In August of 2011, it became the meeting spot for the New York City General Assembly.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  I always got there early and would jot down a few things for agenda points and wait for people to show up. Usually people were late because, you know, operating on anarchist time, people are generally late.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Many of the people who showed up at the Hare Krishna tree had been protesting the city's austerity measures because, remember, while the financial institutions that had caused the 2008 crash had gotten massive government bailouts, city budgets all over the place had been cut and three years later were still struggling. They had camped outside City Hall for three weeks to protest then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg's budget cuts to city services. They called that occupation "Bloombergville," but it had petered out rather unsuccessfully. Now they were hungry to do something else, and they were trying to figure out what exactly the next big thing would be.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Their meetings, which they called assemblies, would stretch on for hours as they debated strategy and principles. The afternoons in the park would turn into evenings at nearby bars, where smaller groups would continue their discussions around pitchers of beer. There was no shortage of ideas and opinions among this committed group of activists. The challenge was getting a bigger crowd to show up to whatever direct action they planned. There was not a lot of social movement energy. This is Astra Taylor, an author and documentary filmmaker who was in her mid-30s at the time. She had already spent more than a decade as an activist and, I think it's safe to say, was worn down a bit.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  That was from experience. It was an incredibly demoralizing experience to protest in the aughts. I mean, typically what would happen is the cops would kettle you, which means that they would sort of wrap your protest in this orange netting and haul you off to jail. Or they'd say, stay in this little tiny free speech pen. If there was political energy, it was online. There was this kind of prankster disruptive spirit on the internet. And that is where the spark that ignited Occupy came from: a meme.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  In July 2011, 90,000 people got an email with a stark and beautiful image. In black and white, you see the charging bull statue, that huge bronze beast in Manhattan's financial district that's supposed to represent the stock market. A ballerina is standing on top of the bull's back. She's thin, white, wearing a dark unitard. Her eyes are lowered. She's in a classic arabesque pose, arms outstretched and one leg gracefully arcing out behind her. Behind the ballerina and the bull, there's a crowd emerging from a haze of smoke. They look like our stereotypical idea of anarchists, wearing gas masks and dark clothes.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  They're surging forward in the same charging motion as the bull. One of them brandishes a stick. At the top of the image, in red, "All Cats," it says. "What is our one demand?" Below it, hashtag Occupy Wall Street, September 17th, bring tents.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  The email with this image came from Adbusters, an activist magazine that liked to stir up trouble. It was known for its beautifully designed spoof ads critiquing consumer culture. Adbusters regularly instigated boycotts and encouraged people to artfully vandalize billboards. And now their Occupy Wall Street image and hashtag was ripping through the internet. One of the groups that promoted this idea to Occupy Wall Street was Anonymous, the hacktivist collective that had gained notoriety for launching cyberattacks against corporations and the Church of Scientology. Anonymous announced that they were taking to the streets and urged people to join them. Fellow citizens of the internet, we are Anonymous.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  On September 17th, Anonymous will flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and Occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand and a plurality of voices. We want freedom. This is a non-biological. Protest. We do not encourage violence in any way. The abuse and corruption of corporations, banks and governments ends here. Join us. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Wall Street, expect us.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  The editors at AdBusters had made it clear that they only wanted to instigate, not organize. And certainly, Anonymous wasn't used to IRL actions. For Marissa's group of anarchists, the New York City General Assembly, it was like they'd been given a safety date for a party they'd been thinking about throwing, but hadn't fully committed to yet.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  But now that someone else had announced an actual time and place, they decided to go with it. They created a plan for the first day and hoped that people would show up. And really, that was the big question. Would online enthusiasm translate into the real world? Would people actually show up? Astra was skeptical. It was a pretty bleak time to be a leftist. Despite the fact that we were in an economic meltdown, there was mass foreclosures, there was mass joblessness, economic insecurity. The left wasn't mobilizing, but the right was.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  From Washington DC to Connecticut to Wisconsin and all over the country, thousands of people came out to protest government spending.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  The Tea Party got off the ground in 2009. The Tea Party movement was a right-wing populist uprising. They protested both the bank bailouts and government efforts to help distressed homeowners and unemployed people, which they viewed as government handouts to undeserving, poor people. And so, they showed up en masse on Tax Day to protest government spending. Over half a million people across the country attended these Tax Day protests. People were angry about the bank bailouts. They were angry about the economy. They were feeling insecure. And it was channeled into this right-wing reactionary racist movement. It was like, how can we be in a situation akin to the Great Depression and the populist right is mobilizing?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  And progressives and the left are nowhere to be found. But now, there was a call to respond from the left that seemed to have some traction. It was late, three years after the economic crash. But at least it was something. And it promised to be noisy and disruptive and maybe a little nuts. A call to camp out on Wall Street for as long as they could as a way to bring attention to how unfair it was that regular people had borne the brunt of a financial crash brought on by Wall Street greed. It was something that, well, Astra didn't help plan and didn't think was gonna work. But... The fact that there was crickets on our side

• 22:54Speaker 01

  after this incredible betrayal of the country by these bankers and by the politicians of both parties who were bailing them out and leaving people to suffer, it just felt like, well, we have to do something. And that was enough of a motivation to get me to show up at something that I wasn't particularly optimistic about. Perhaps it was only because Occupy was kind of the only game in town. But our cynics, Sandy and Nalini, that I introduced to you earlier, were curious.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  I had been following online a little bit. And one of my best friends, both of us were kind of these gloom and doom, disillusioned, apathetic, hate political culture. We had that kind of a summer. We were just kind of reveling in the futileness of everything. And so, we were kind of following along. And we just decided, oh, we're gonna go down there on the first day. Let's just check it out.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  I was approached by a lot of white people about Occupy Wall Street, like, in the months before. And I was like, why would I choose to sleep outside? What?

• 23:56Speaker 02

  What is this white shit, to be honest? That was my, like, I was like, what is this? Sleeping outside, like, by choice? I thought it was insane.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  The day to Occupy arrived. September 17, 2011, a Saturday. Marissa and a bunch of the other hardcore activists were ready to set up camp outside the New York Stock Exchange.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  I woke up around 8 o'clock and packed my backpack, which was quite large. I'm, like, 5'2" and it was probably, like, my size. I made my way on the four train. And then I got off at the Wall Street stop and wandered around and realized that the police were already there and there are barricades up.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Since they couldn't actually get to the stock exchange, Marissa and her fellow activists from the New York General Assembly rerouted the group to Zuccotti Park. The crowd, some with signs, some playing instruments, made their way there. Nalini showed up at Zuccotti and looked around. The occupiers had been doing yoga, face painting, eating peanut butter sandwiches, singing. There was already a drum circle. It didn't feel very serious.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  I felt like I was in the movie Hair. It was very, like, hippy dippy. I was political to the point of doing stuff, but I never was like, I'm an anarchist or a socialist. Like, I just cared that the rich have too much money. I knew it in my bones, like, rich people, corporations, like, they're crazy. And I was an injustice. But I just looked around and was like, yeah, I'm gonna be here for, like, an hour.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Eventually, the festival part of it all that Nalini really wasn't feeling transitioned into something deeper and more personal.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  For the afternoon, people were having small group conversations on questions that we had come up with in the New York City General Assembly. And those questions were loosely, like, what world do you want to live in? What's happening right now with the economic crisis? How do we get from where we are now to this world that we want to live in?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Astra arrived in time for the small group conversations. What was so striking to me and caught my imagination out the gate was that instead of standing there and chanting, which would have been a kind of conventional thing to do, I mean, that's what protesters usually do, we were all told to sit in small circles with our neighbors. And so, we immediately organized ourselves into these mini-assemblies, groups of maybe a dozen to 15 people. And we just started talking. And that already felt was like such a break with the usual script. Because instead of standing sort of outside the New York Stock Exchange and saying, you know, you suck, and shouting at it, we were actually building bonds with each other.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  People had all kinds of stories. Like, they had hitchhiked across the country and had nothing, like, had no job, no money. Just, you know, used whatever they could to get to the occupation. And there was this, like, palpable sense of rage, like, this simmering rage that people wanted to unleash. People had been waiting for years to say something, and they finally could say it.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Nalini had certainly felt that way. She'd been carrying the shame of the empty fridge, the eviction notice, her lack of college education, the lie to her employer that she hadn't been able to afford the college education she had put on her resume. She was suddenly hearing stories just like hers from other people.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  What shifted for me was that General Assembly that first night and people getting up and telling their stories.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  At first, people told their stories in these small groups. And then, the whole crowd, estimated to be almost 1,000 people, was brought together for a general assembly. In anarchist fashion, there was no leader, just a facilitation team that invited everyone to take turns speaking.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  I remember somebody saying that their parents' home got foreclosed upon. I remember hearing somebody just said, I went to all this college and have all this debt. And like, we were all told we had to go to college to get a better job. And somebody was like, and I'm working at Starbucks. Not that it's like, you know, solidarity with the Starbucks Workers Union, but like, that wasn't what we were told you go to college for, right?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  There was a building sense of connection of no. It wasn't just you or your bad choices that put you in debt. There's a pattern here. With each sort of confession, there was this...

• 28:38Speaker 02

  This sense of hope. We know how bad it is. And we just need to come together and build this space. And like, it's gonna happen. And we are the people to do it. The sense of urgency and commitment was really... I had never seen that before.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Part of it was the way all of this was unfolding. They used something called the people's mic, where everyone had to repeat what the speaker was saying. And again, anyone could speak. There weren't leaders or vetted speakers. And then, there were the twinkle fingers, where you waggle your fingers to show agreement. It was just so different from anything Nalini had seen before.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  This whole, like, hands thing, twinkle fingers, I was like, okay, this is gonna be wild.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  But she was, in spite of herself, inspired. She stood up to speak at one point.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  I remember getting up. I don't remember what I said. I think I was like, I hate the blah, blah, blah. But I don't remember what I said. But that moment, I sat down after I spoke. And I was like, whatever's happening, I like it. And I'm gonna do what needs to be done.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  That moment of cynicism turning to optimism was happening for other people at the park too, including Sandy, who had arrived with friends.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  I can't explain exactly why I stayed. I just know that we went down. We went for this little march. And then, we hung out in the park and participated in these breakout group conversations.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Of course, the powers that be wanted them out of the park. In the spirit of direct democracy, their decision to stay or go was up to the group as a whole. So, Marissa took a bullhorn to make an announcement. A really amazing process of direct democracy. And, but we recognize that, you know, this is a specific group, a gathering that we have here. We want to hear from people here to see how we can proceed tonight. So one of our first sort of orders of business is, you know, are we going to stay or not? She passed the bullhorn to someone else from the facilitation team.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  I'm here with some logistical information. This square, this square is technically a privately owned square.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  We have been in contact with the property owner, who has told us that his intention is to not allow people to sleep in this park tonight.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  The pros and cons were weighed. The sun fully set. People were lit by flashlights. And at some point, the bullhorn was replaced by the people's mic, perhaps to dissuade the cops from issuing noise violations. Facilitation team. Facilitation team. Something that people want. That people want. Stay here. Stay here. Occupy this square. Occupy this square. How do you feel about that?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  This was a moment for each individual. Sandy, Astra, Nalini, and everyone else to decide, would they stay or would they go? Sandy.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  The crowd kept getting thinner and thinner. And we just kept hanging out. And eventually, we just decided, yeah, we're going to stay the night. I mean, fuck it, see what happens. We don't have much on the line because we're not fully invested in the idea that we're going to get the world we want. So let's just hang out here with these folks who seem angry too.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, somewhere else in the park, Nalini was making the same decision.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Me and my friends, we were like, you're going to sleep here? We're like, yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Astra made a different choice.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  I headed home because I did not think this tiny ragtag group had a snowball's chance in hell of staying the night. No way. I could see the cops. They were coming closer. And my sense was that they were going to go, OK, kids, you've had enough. Like, you know, we're going to beat the shit out of you. That's what I thought was about to happen. And I didn't want to be there for that.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Marissa was anxiously watching the police in riot gear.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  I was terrified because I didn't feel like we had prepared enough. I really, I felt this sense of responsibility. So I was both excited and terrified of what would come next.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Nathan Schneider, a journalist who had been covering activism in the city, was there.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  There had been a few thousand people there that day, but by this point, it was dark. New York has this kind of eerie feeling in these sections of the city where not a lot of people are out at night in these corridors of office buildings. And so by this point, there were just 100, maybe 200 at most, if that, protesters, sitting in this park, surrounded by police. It was a very scary moment.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  In the dark, in that moment of tension, he witnessed some kind of exchange between what seemed like the property owners and the NYPD.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  I saw a suburban roll up a police vehicle. You know, someone was talking to the officers who were there. I think I saw Police Commissioner Kelly. Something that was said in that exchange in that moment said, OK, this is not going to be an attack. The police surrounding this park had made the decision to let it be. And after that, the tension kind of reduced.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  People started to fall asleep. Here's Nalini again.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  I just got too tired and we all like fell asleep on the ground. It got cold. I didn't bring anything.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  And Sandy.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  One of my friends drove to Yonkers to get us blankets. I don't know why he went that far, but he's like, I'm going to, I'm going to make sure you all have blankets. And went up to Yonkers and came back with all these blankets.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  And then in the middle of the night, a ferry comes, I swear to God, just drops blankets over us. And that was the moment when I was like, OK, yeah, we might not know what we're doing, but we'll figure shit out for each other.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Occupy is a story of the improbable becoming possible. A story of hopelessness and cynicism making way for inspiration and collective action. It was clear from that very first day that Occupy had tapped into something that Nalini, Sandy, Marissa, and thousands of others had all been feeling. They were understandably furious with the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy. And they felt betrayed by the political leaders who enabled, and some would say rewarded it. But Occupy was a lot more than an opportunity to rage at the system. Anger wasn't the thing that kept people coming back for 59 days to sleep on the concrete.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  There was some other magic happening that had something to do with the energizing force of collective action. It's that, the energy, the inspiration, that's most interesting to me. Is there a way to harness that again? Occupy was also a social experiment. They weren't just there to protest. They were trying to create an anarchist, anti-capitalist utopia inside that tiny park. And against all odds, people across the United States set up their own occupations and copied what the radicals in New York City were doing. In this way, Zuccotti Park became a testing ground for a set of ideals that the organizers had arrived with. Leaderlessness, radical inclusivity, direct democracy.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  At the beginning, it wasn't at all clear if any of it would work. What happens when a movement has no leader? Does radical inclusivity make it stronger or more chaotic? And if change must come from outside the system, how do you build something powerful enough not just to resist injustice, but to replace it?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Coming up on the next five episodes of Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Occupy Wall Street, it was, it was a really exciting and enlivening and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck. The NYPD would pick people up on the street for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or something. They would drop them off in the park and say, you need a hot meal? You need a blanket? You need a coat? Go down to Zuccotti Park. And the escalation of police activity was like really, really wild. Out of nowhere, that's, that's when we were sprayed.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Occupy was a physical space where people put their values into practice. And that's not something that we see very often. I wish something like it would happen again.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising is a future hindsight production, hosted and executive produced by me, Mila Atmos. Reporting, writing, and producing by Maria Luisa Tucker. Additional production help from Mia Warren, Erika Gjada, Megan Detrie, and Lizzie Jacobs. Audio engineering and producing by Zack Travis. Archival research by Marisa Holmes. Archival material courtesy of Occupy Wall Street Media Working Group. Original music by Rude Mechanical Orchestra and Pooj Ruh. Special thanks to TJ Raphael, Lauren Passell, Ariel Nissenblatt,

• 38:23Speaker 01

  and Kate Blumenfeld for being our first listeners and sounding boards, and to Tom Koenig for his support.