Occupy Wall Street after the Zuccotti Park eviction

They've lost their space, but not their momentum


After teetering for weeks between his quarreling impulses — protect civil liberties or clean up Zuccotti Park? — Mayor Bloomberg sent in hundreds of officers early Tuesday morning to smash up tents and possessions, drive out the campers and keep most reporters out. And after the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) challenged the police action, a judge affirmed the city’s eviction — meaning that, for now, the group no longer has the right to sleep in that downtown plaza. This might seem like a setback for Occupy Wall Street, but the truth is much more complex.

Bloomberg’s timing in ordering the removal was probably not random. Occupy Wall Street had announced that it wanted to “shut down Wall Street” Thursday morning. The mayor might have thought that clearing the camp would throw Occupy into such disarray it would forestall an ugly confrontation near the New York Stock Exchange.

If so, that was short-term thinking. Even as the thermometer sinks, Occupy Wall Street’s psychic temperature rises. Even supporters who didn’t feel at home in the park resent the forced clearance and will now turn out in larger numbers. The mayor may even have heightened the risk of more violent confrontations.

As I write, the Zuccotti exiles are trying to figure out where to recamp, and recamp many of them surely will. Odds are, a critical mass will find other more-or-less public encampments for their community meetings, if not for sleeping. To keep up the territorial symbolism, they don’t need to reach the scale of the original Zuccotti. They only need to be visible as centres of community and, not least, lures for the media eye..