For a full-size image, click on any photograph. Hit either delete, backspace or back page to go back.
Market Street in San Francisco, Oct. 15, 2011
Story and photos by Thomas K. Pendergast
Maybe the Occupy movement can be explained with the proposition that all actions are really just reactions, or that for every expansion, there's a contraction. It seems this movement has gained momentum through a series of actions and reactions, by rapid expansions and then sudden contractions.
Inspired by the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy movement became something quite exceptional in its own right during the last quarter of 2011.
What started in New York with a couple of hundred protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street has spread across the country, sprouted up in cities from coast to coast, and now the total number of people who have participated in Occupy demonstrations is likely to be in the tens of thousands.
Historians might peg the dawn of the Occupy movement on June 9, 2011, when the Canadian magazine Adbusters registered the domain name OCCUPYWALLSTREET.ORG.
On July 13, the magazine asked the public if they were "ready for a Tahrir moment" and then proposed that on the following Sept. 17, they "flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street." This tactic was described as a "fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain."
"The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America," the magazine’s announcement claimed.
They set a target of 20,000 people to gather there on that date.
"Once there," the proposal continued, "we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices."
What that simple demand might be Adbusters did not say because they gave this decision to whomever showed up to participate.
Oct. 25, 2011, in Oakland, California.
On August 28 the international hacker group Anonymous joined the populist call-to-arms by also asking people to go to Manhatten on Sept. 17.
Yet, when the big day came, only about 1,000 people showed up to camp out in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
In spite of visits and photo opprotunities by celebrities like Rosanne Barr, Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon, within a few days the number of protesters had dwindled down to perhaps a couple of hundred people.
There was little media coverage of the nascent movement until the following Wednesday, Sept. 21, when Keith Olbermann asked on his cable news show, "Why isn't any major news outlet covering this? If that's a Tea Party protest in front of Wall Street about Ben Bernanke putting stimulus funds into it, it's the lead story on every network newscast."
That got a reaction from the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. Columnists for all three publications explained that there had been no reports on this movement because, as far as they were concerned, it just wasn't big enough to be newsworthy.
On Sept. 25, a post from the New York Times writer Ginia Bellafante dismissed the protest and called one demonstrator a look-alike for Joni Mitchell with a "wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968."
The next day Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon also dismissed the demonstration, writing that "the protests last week were a bust, but perhaps the young protesters learned a lesson: Just because it's on social media doesn't make it true."
The day after that Boston Globe columnist Joanna Weiss wrote "it’s hard to take a protest fully seriously when it looks more like a circus - some participants seem to have taken a chute straight from Burning Man - and when it’s organized by a Canadian magazine and a computer-hacking group. (Also, organizers first declared that they would draw 20,000 protesters, but only 1,000 showed up. That’s not a media conspiracy. It’s math.)"
Even as they wrote off the Occupy movement, however, more sympathetic publicity was coursing through the Internet and social media thanks in no small part to the actions of a New York City police officer.
Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8
