Reflections on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

By Dilip -

Essays

OCCUPY FLASHBACK
In 1988, fresh out of college, I had the good fortune to get a job entering data in the New York City office of a civil liberties organization headed by a prominent liberal fundraiser devoted to Democratic Party politics and the arts. She took an interest in my student movement experience and direct-action preoccupations. One afternoon, she invited me into her office to share the story of her experiences in the streets of Chicago in August of 1968. Eager for the vantage point, I listened intently, tracking her experience against the radical accounts I had both read and heard.  She was in Chicago as part of Gene McCarthy’s team. McCarthy’s beleaguered bid for the Democratic Party nomination, she was convinced, offered the last slim bit of leverage for the inclusion of an anti-Vietnam War plank in the Party platform of that blood-soaked year.  Barely forty-years old, she had cultivated friendships and heated debates all year with some of the most influential leaders in the radical youth movements of the day. It was, therefore, no surprise to any of them when the third week in August rolled around and the  profound divisions between the radicals and the liberals on the question of Vietnam and the Democratic Party were entirely in-tact, and in full-view.
The Conrad Hilton was the headquarters for both the McCarthy camp and for the nominee-apparent, Hubert Humphrey.  Meanwhile, the Yippie-inspired “Festival of Life” was getting underway in Grant Park.  The trickle of young anti-war protestors that began over the weekend, swelled and by the start of the convention on Monday evening, their numbers lurched toward 10,000.   But Chicago ’68 is less remembered today for the specific reasons young people were drawn there, and more for the brutal police violence unleashed on them. Trammeled by 23,000 local police and National Guard troops summoned by local Democratic Party-boss and Chicago mayor, Richard Daly, the legacy of Chicago was forever memorialized on film and audio. By Wednesday night, the worst police violence of that week (the “Battle of Michigan Avenue”) erupted as police bulldozed protestors using military jeeps with fence-high, barbed-wired buttresses fitted to the vehicles’ front-ends. Behind the trucks followed rows and rows of police, a couple thousand of them, swinging clubs mindlessly and firing tear-gas.
The chanting of the protestors, now with their backs up-against the Hilton, faltered — and then faded.  The mighty unison of “Peace Now.  Peace Now”  began breaking-up, punctuated by screams and insults. .

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