Notes from #Occupy: Looking for Common Ground

by Eric Francis Coppolino and photographs by Eric Francis Coppolino, October 26, 2011

On October 15, I went to the big rally in Times Square that was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Around the world in an estimated 1,500 other cities, similar protests were happening. This was one day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg wisely chose to not clear out the movement’s base camp in Zuccotti Park, in New York’s financial district. I arrived a little early, wondering what would happen. By 5pm, the stated time of the protest, Broadway was packed from 42nd Street north up to 47th Street. A small ocean of friendly, sincere people had come out to make their presence known to the world—not to celebrate New Year’s Eve but rather to state their objection to greed.

For many years, we have all watched the injustices mount against the American people. I’ve long wondered when we were going to hear an objection, and this event was something of a miracle. A decade of war, years of economic decline, jobs being shipped overseas, people with enormous college debt unable to find work—the silence was deafening and disturbing. Suddenly I was standing in Times Square, surrounded by people aware of the problem and choosing to join together as one voice. As the crowd gathered, the news ticker above ABC studios delivered the message, “Occupy Wall Street Goes Worldwide.”

Notably, this was the first coordinated day of global action since the F-15 protests against the Iraq war on February 15, 2003—just over eight-and-a-half years ago. I’m not sure what is more amazing—that the F-15 protests happened at all, or that they didn’t continue. But they put on the record, before the fact, the public’s objection to an invasion that went horribly on every account. The current movement is happening in a different era of history, presumably for a different reason. In 2003, the economy was still riding from bubble to bubble, and objecting to a war was seen as a political statement that could be seen as unpatriotic.

In 2011, we have another situation on our hands, one requiring neither prescience or an especially sensitive moral compass. There are millions of people for whom the economic system is not working. The real unemployment rate is closer to 20 percent, poverty rates are increasing, and one in five Americans is having trouble feeding their family. Then we see headlines about huge banks that took bailouts reaping profits, giving bonuses to top executives, and laying off workers. You don’t need to be an economist to understand this is a problem.