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Episode 2: Occupy Goes Viral · OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising

• Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising Episode 2: Occupy Goes Viral Previously on OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING Astra Taylor: We are in an economic meltdown, there was mass foreclosures, there was mass joblessness, economic insecurity. Marisa Holmes: There was just like this simmering rage that people wanted to unleash. People had been waiting for years to say something and they finally could say it Marisa Holmes (People’s mic): (The people want) to stay here ( to stay here) and occupy this square ( and occupy this square). How do people feel about that? [Cheers] On the morning of Sept. 18th, 2011, Sandy Nurse, Nelini Stamp and Marisa Holmes woke up on the ground in the middle of Manhattan’s financial district. They’d slept in Zuccotti Park – just right there out in the open – with dozens of other people. Against all odds, the police had left them alone. Sandy Nurse: We woke up. It was very calm the next morning and people started organizing food. I was making peanut butter jelly sandwiches. There's one of these benches in the park that became the breakfast bench and eventually became the kitchen. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were served to whoever arrived at the kitchen. And from that Sunday morning on, there was constant activity in the park. Like a beehive, it was highly organized in a way that was, perhaps, not visible to the uninitiated. Here’s Marisa: Marisa Holmes: There was a kind of rhythm to the park, amidst all the chaos. In the first week, the occupiers organized themselves into dozens of different working groups. Occupier (People’s mic): (Media) legal (legal) outreach (outreach) arts and culture (arts and culture)… Sandy joined the direct action group, which, among other things, led two daily marches to the New York Stock Exchange. The first one was in the morning, kicking off the day with an attempt to disrupt the opening bell at 9:30 a.m. Sandy Nurse: Yeah, let's disrupt business as usual. The people who work in these institutions, we should confront them and, you know, tell them what we think about what they do. We were telling a story and trying to point to symbolic institutions, such as the stock exchange. Most people understand the stock exchange as the financial markets, as this trading floor that is deterministic of so many people's lives. People have invested in it, their pensions are invested in it, their livelihoods, their sense of security and stability is all tied into this. And we were pointing at it and saying that it's, it's broken and it's not working. And it's rigged. And these people are trading your livelihoods on a daily basis with no concern and just enjoying and reaping unbelievable disproportionate benefits that you will never have in your life. And when the market closed at 4:00 p.m., they would march again. Marisa Holmes: We would March down Broadway and then circle by the stock exchange and chant, like “banks got bailed out, we got sold out, banks got bailed out.” [Chants] We got sold out all day, all week occupy Wall Street! Often there were instruments involved and dancing and just this, like, kind of joyous atmosphere. These marches came to define Nelini's schedule as she tried to balance how to manage her full time job and help hold down the park. Nelini Stamp: If I can be here at the opening bell, not be here all day, and then be here by like the closing bell, that's enough chunk of time and I could sleep over the night and then I gotta figure out when I'm gonna go home and shower. I was doing too much. I literally went into Sephora to be like spritzer and makeup. That Sephora got me through Occupy Wall Street. Marisa was regularly facilitating the daily general assembly meetings, which, on most days, drew hundreds of people. Marisa Holmes: We did two assemblies a day. One in the afternoon and one in the evening and often they were just like, kind of blend into each other. So I'd be facilitating for like eight hours straight. And then I would, you know, forget to eat dinner. Nelini eventually started facilitating the meetings as well, which she says brought out her inner theater kid. Nelini Stamp: It's getting seen as a white movement. And so simultaneously like a bunch of us Black and Brown New Yorkers slash Black people got asked to be on the facilitation team. And I, like, went to a class I learned how to facilitate. And then they were like, all right, facilitate the general assembly. I don't know if the ancestors with, with me, but I was really good at facilitation. I was like the vibes that I had the, like, energy that I had, the like temperament that I had. I didn't let nobody get mad at me and then if somebody was, like, really rude, I'd be like, that was rude. Can we agree that was rude? It was a frenetic schedule of marches, meetings, and sustaining a growing encampment. And, it was growing, in large part, because of social media. Remember that this is 2011. People were just starting to trade their flip phones and iPods for smartphones. Netflix was still in the business of mailing DVDs to people. Adele, Katy Perry, and Bruno Mars were dominating the airwaves and Game of Thrones had just premiered. And social media – well, it was still very novel. And increasingly powerful. Economic insecurity had sparked the uprising, but it was social media that made it really take off. In fact, it was a viral video that transformed the movement from a local protest to a global phenomenon. But uprisings or social movements or whatever you want to call Occupy – something like that doesn’t spontaneously happen because of a few social media posts. These types of movements are built on the quiet work of the people who came before the memes and viral moments. At Zuccotti Park, the people who built that foundation were anarchists. From Future Hindsight, I’m your host Mila Atmos and this is OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING. Episode 2: Occupy Goes Viral Marisa Holmes: I was like 19, 20 when I started really identifying as an anarchist. This is Marisa Holmes again – the idealistic grad student you heard in the first episode who had helped plan Occupy Wall Street. Marisa Holmes: There's like the common sort of trope of the anarchist who's head to toe in black, carrying a Molotov, and only out for violence. That's the stereotype. If you look up synonyms for anarchy, here's what comes up: chaos, confusion, disorder, mob rule, nihilism, rebellion, reign of terror. But the actual anarchists like Marisa who were behind the scenes of Occupy – most of them seem to have a pretty different understanding of what anarchy means. Not as a colloquialism for chaos, but as a pretty peaceful ideology that is very much about cooperation. Marisa Holmes: An anarchist society would be a society without the state that's run directly democratically through worker confederations, and councils, like neighborhood councils, city councils. And it was mostly these types of anarchists rather than the burn-it-all-down anarchists who made Occupy what it was. That cooperative version of anarchy, which focused on the principles of consensus, self-organizing, horizontalism, and direct democracy–that’s what shaped daily life in Zuccotti Park for the 59 days of the occupation. These were not new concepts, nor were they exclusive to New York City circa 2011. David Graeber, the late anthropologist and author who called himself a “small A anarchist” compared Occupy to international movements that had come before, with the purpose of reinventing democracy. Here he is in an interview that first week of the occupation: David Graeber: The idea is that, you know, all of the political parties have basically bankrupted themselves. There's no possibility of their actually coming up with a solution and essentially you have to start over. People have to, like, go into their public squares, meet each other, start talking to each other and start brainstorming ideas. I mean, essentially the idea is the system is not gonna save us. We're going to have to save ourselves. So we're going to try to get as many people as possible to camp in some public place and start rebuilding societies as we'd like to see it. David was just one of a number of older, seasoned anarchists who had been studying and putting into practice those principles for years, and now they were counseling the mostly young occupiers. Another one of those seasoned anarchists was Brooke Lehman – yes, of the Lehman family that founded the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which had gone belly-up in the 2008 crash. Brooke Lehman: Going into Occupy Wall Street, it was no secret that my last name was Lehman. Occupy Wall Street was sort of on the, the tail end of the collapse of the economy, which was started by the collapse of Lehman brothers. But Brooke is no banker. Brooke Lehman: I knew that we had a lot of money and I knew that I found that really abhorrent. From a very early age, I just had this sense that something was wrong. That growing up with hired servants in our household, that there was an oppressive nature to that. But, the family didn’t talk about it. Brooke Lehman: I became an activist when I was about 16 and I think I was a giant pain in the ass to my parents. Eventually, she became an anarchist. But Brooke wants you to understand that there are different types of anarchists, as I mentioned earlier. Brooke Lehman: I would probably rather organize with anyone else other than an individualist anarchist. Individualist anarchists are closer to libertarians: many of them are cool with free market capitalism and think everyone should just look out for themselves. Brooke Lehman: My people are social anarchists. So social anarchism is really about having a highly structured community where there's complexity and that you're navigating democratically a complex bunch of relationships. And you're seeing the greater good as being what's best for most people. Brooke had been part of several previous attempts to occupy Wall Street and those had all failed. Brooke Lehman: One time, everyone was arrested within about 10 minutes, so the idea that a bunch of like scraggly anarchists who weren't even that deeply in community with each other would pull this off seemed absolutely ridiculous to me. So I didn't even go. And it wasn't until day two, when I realized they had actually occupied and spent the night that I was living upstate at the time, I told my partner that I needed to go to the city and I didn't come back for two months. I was shocked. I think everyone was shocked that it actually happened. And it was really exciting. So Brooke, a Lehman and a social-anarchist, came down to Occupy, joined the facilitation and structure working groups, and started teaching Occupiers a key concept. Brooke Lehman: A very radical form of democracy called direct democracy. What we have today is a representative democracy or more appropriately a Republic where we elect representatives who are not directly accountable in any day-to-day way to their constituency. They can make decisions. Oftentimes they go back on their own promises. And, a direct democracy means that it's usually on a local scale where communities would come together and deliberate and decide upon issues that affect their lives directly rather than electing representatives. The form of direct democracy that was chosen for Occupy Wall Street was a general assembly, and this was a really beautiful form of direct democracy where literally anyone could walk in off the street, and put theirselves in the line and speak to thousands of people. It was a very emotional experience for a lot of people. I know this is getting a little wonky here — direct democracy and general assembly — but over and over one of the things occupiers told us was that these ideas were what made Occupy feel so different. They were what made it feel like an alternative world where their voice mattered and hope was possible. When people showed up in Zuccotti for the evening general assembly, they didn’t sit passively, listening to a leader explain what the plan was. They helped make the plan. Because, again, it wasn’t a speech or a meeting, it was an assembly. Marina Sitrin: The language is important because it's more of an invitation. This is Marina Sitrin, another one of the veteran activists at Occupy. She's a sociologist and lawyer who has anarchist leanings. She arrived at Zuccotti to help train the facilitators. Marina Sitrin: Everyone speaks and is heard and we try and come together and make agreements together rather than coming up with a proposal and you vote yes or no to that proposal and some people are unhappy. You instead talk about it and talk about it and try to really hear each other to come to some kind of agreement, a consensus. Marina yes-anded the whole direct democracy concept. She explained something called horizontalism. Marina Sitrin: The origin of the word is 2001 in Argentina and in Spanish, it's horizontalidad. When I would ask, Well, what is this thing? They would show me with their hands and make, like, a point going upward to show like the top of a triangle and say, ‘It's not this.’ And people would show me with their hands making a kind of flat line going across to be horizontal with one another, to not have people with power over each other. So it's a practice where people look at one another and talk to each other and really try and listen to each other and make decisions together about all kinds of different things. Basically, there is no hierarchy. There are no leaders, just facilitators. I know, it sounds so idealistic and foreign and far away from anything right now. And, really, that’s what made it so appealing then. These ideas of direct democracy, consensus, dialogue, horizontalism – these were the main concepts the organizers brought into Zuccotti Park on day one. They were not hosting a standard protest. In fact, Marisa, to this day, refuses to call Occupy a protest movement. Marisa Holmes: Occupy was not a protest. Occupy was a direct action. And what's the difference between the two? So a protest is a form of indirect action. It's a way of appealing to those in power, voicing your grievances and hoping that they respond. And a direct action is when you just make the thing happen on your own or collectively without any kind of intermediary force, without the government or corporations or even some other organization doing it on your behalf. So, yes they did hold marches – Marisa Holmes: It was a form of outreach to, to find people, to bring them in, to invite them into this experiment. But, like David Graeber said, the idea wasn’t to protest until elected officials would fix the system. The idea was to build a whole new system. A society of their own making. And they were inviting the whole world to join them. Occupy organizers wanted to create their own media so they could bypass traditional gatekeepers and share their message directly. And social media made that possible, especially Twitter and Facebook, which were the dominant platforms at the time. Here's Nelini: Nelini Stamp: I was like, ‘what?’ when somebody told me to join Twitter I was like, you want me to TWIT? I literally said TWIT. And they were like, no tweet. And I was like, twit, what is this? What is this? But twit she did. There was a contagious sense of possibility that had been moving across borders, and it was fueled by regular people communicating directly with the masses. Nelini Stamp: It wasn't just us. There was Tahrir Square. It's you know, the Indignados in Spain, like it's the Indignés in France. Like there was a whole 2011 – it was Wisconsin, right? I think we put Twitter on a broader map. Uprisings happen when the government continually fails to listen. When enough people are so backed into a corner, so fed up, that they are willing to forcibly break the system that they know isn’t working for them. They are willing to take a gamble on something radically different and, sometimes, that means putting their bodies on the line. In 2011, that had been happening around the globe. Mass protests in Tunisia started a domino effect of uprisings – often deadly – across the middle east in what became known as the Arab Spring. In January, the Tunisian president stepped down after weeks of protests there. In February, after hundreds of thousands of protestors filled Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Hosni Mubarak was forced out. More than 800 protestors had been killed in the process. The same month in the U.S., Wisconsin-ites took over their capital building and stayed for several weeks to stand up for collective bargaining rights. It was obviously much smaller in scale and consequence than what was happening in Tunisia and Egypt – but for Americans unaccustomed to seeing any significant protest at home, it was inspirational. Then in May, Spanish Indignados held massive protests to call for the end of austerity measures and a more democratic government. In each case, social media had made it possible by allowing people to spread information, coordinate gatherings, and broadcast events to the world in real time. Of course, at that time, nobody knew how these global events would play out. They could not know, for instance, that the Arab Spring would ultimately usher in a new authoritarian regime in Egypt. What they did see, though, by the time Occupy Wall Street began in September 2011, was that social media was an incredible organizing tool, locally and globally. Here’s Marisa again: Marisa Holmes: We built basically like a global platform for retweeting, all of each other's stuff, so we were basically doing what bots do, but manually, with hundreds of people running these accounts. And they had a powerful slogan. Chants: We are the 99%! We are the 99%! Nelini Stamp: We are the 99%. It's class. And the whole thing about we are the 99% you could attach it to any fricking issue. It was amazing. I think it was like a dream come true for, like, organizers in New York City. The genius of the 99% chant is that it unifies people across political differences around a shared sense of economic injustice. It flips the usual script from Left versus Right to Bottom 99% versus Top 1%. The slogan inspired the Tumblr site wearethe99percent.com. Tumblr, for those of you younger than, say, 25, was a super popular social blogging site at the time. Wearethe99percent.com invited people to share their stories of financial stress. Priscilla Grim: People had to submit a photo, they had to say something about what their condition was, and it was largely intended to be anonymous. This is Priscilla Grim. She was one of the first people to post a selfie with her message written on a piece of paper. We asked her to describe several of the posts on the 99% Tumblr site. Priscilla Grim: Here it is, And that is me. I don't have any gray hair. I have killer eye makeup and my arms look really good. Yeah. And while she does look great in the photo, her sign points to her struggle. It says: Priscilla Grim: Single mom, grad student, unemployed and I paid more tax last year than GE. I am the 99% Occupy Wall Street, September 17th. The summer of 2011, I was in my second year of grad school at Columbia. I had an 8-year-old daughter. And then I heard about this thing Occupy Wall Street through a Facebook video and all I could think was, Oh my God, this is genius. Priscilla was immediately down with the cause, and was soon managing the We are the 99 percent Tumblr. Priscilla Grim: Basically after the first week and a half, we started getting like 20 to 30 submissions a day. These stories are so heartbreaking and overwhelming. This is one of my favorite ones. It was one of the first ones that came in. “I have a master's degree and a full-time job in my field, and I have started selling my body to pay off my debt. I am the 99%” They have a picture of what looks to be an open-toed, high heeled shoe. She appears to be fair-complected and her toenails are painted and peeping out of the shoe. Another one showed a man with a sign that said: Priscilla Grim: “I am a two-time felon with no job, and I owe over $10,000 in medical bills. I am the 99%.” And yet another story. Priscilla Grim: “I have a BA and an MA in econ. Ten years of work experience in my field, and I've been unemployed for almost one year now. So much for the knowledge economy. I will dig ditches to be able to take care of my family again. We know who caused this quote crisis. I'm looking at you, Merrill, Citibank, S&P and the SEC. You all should be in jail. Instead, you get bonuses and tax cuts and tax expenditures and bailouts. We got laid off, our bus routes cut, our schools closed, and our pensions frozen. My husband nearly died for this country. Now, Wall Street's, GOP stooges in DC are trying to take away the measly $125 disability check the VA sends him so the job creators of America can have more tax breaks to pay themselves more bonuses. Can you see why I'm pissed? Because I've got nothing left for you to steal. I am the 99%”. The stories kept coming in, rapid fire. The Occupy Wall Street hashtag and “we are 99%” messages were being retweeted and shared. And they were also live streaming. You couldn’t just hold up a smartphone back then. The technology was a lot more clunky than that. Lorenzo Serna was part of a team of live streamers. Lorenzo Serna: I had like a laptop I had to wear around my neck and like really specific cords. And then somebody was running the camera and we were attached by a physical short cord and so we had to stay next to each other. I didn't really understand what I was doing, but it was working because then we realized we're live and, um, somebody's like, Hey, people in Spain are thanking us for the live stream. And I was like, what? And like, people in Spain were literally watching us take this square. And they were excited and we're like, that conversation was being created now internationally. And I was like, that was our goal. You know, we're doing it. Like we're succeeding. Without social media and live streaming, honestly, Occupy might not have registered for folks outside of the local activist circles. Like, for example, a young woman named Chelsea Elliott, who was about to accidentally star in a viral video that would turn Occupy into national news. Chelsea was not an anarchist. She had not studied horizontalism or direct democracy. In fact, Chelsea had never even been to a protest before 2011. But she was definitely part of Generation Occupy – the people who came of age just as the economy crumbled around them. She had graduated college and moved to New York in 2008. Chelsea Elliott: I mean, it was financially scary. It was the Great Recession. I think at the time it was like, oh my God, this is the biggest crash since the Great Depression, none of us really had any sort of steady income. And it's literally, like, our first moment in the workforce and it felt like the sky was falling. Everybody was in a very similar situation really struggling to get, like, serious jobs or working multiple jobs, crashing on couches. Everyone had bed bugs. By 2011, Chelsea was working at Whole Foods and doing freelance graphic design jobs. But the work was not steady. Her friend, Kate — also not an anarchist – was similarly disillusioned. Kate, in her short career, had already been laid off once and stiffed several months of pay. By the summer of 2011, she had taken the only job she could find. Kate: I was designing an iPad app to showcase Ralph Lauren's personal private car collection. Here's this man who is uber-wealthy, owns this massive global corporation, and I'm being paid through that corporation to showcase his wealth to other people as though it's some kind of goal that we should all hope to achieve. And I thought to myself this is the most disgusting, bullshit job I have ever had. But I'm stuck because there are no other options for me because wealthy people were abusing the working class. In their freetime, Chelsea and Kate were reading about the causes of the Great Recession – the unregulated mortgage industry, Wall Street greed, feds who did nothing. And, like a lot of people, they were not happy about the $700 billion taxpayer-funded bank bailout. They were also watching the Arab Spring on the news. And then – Chelsea Elliott: My roommate's friend was telling me about a Lupe Fiasco tweet about this thing called Occupy Wall Street. And so I think the first day, like it had started was on a Saturday. So I went there the Sunday evening after it started. Yeah, it was, it was so fun and cathartic I kept going back. Chelsea and Kate were both enchanted by the little anarchist village that had sprung up in the park. Chelsea Elliott: T here was a library, uh, there was medics, sanitation, food, I think initially in the beginning it was mostly pizza and, like, apples, and uh, yeah, the drum circle that would never stop. It was very serious, but also at the same time, like not serious at all. There was sort of, like, a weird balance. The state of the world and capitalism in itself felt like such a joke that it was fun to have sort of this playful place where we could discuss these incredibly serious things. Kate: There was so much beautiful art and of every kind, whether it was chalk art or publications or puppets, costumes, plays. There's just so much creativity and passion and beauty. Chelsea, Kate, and an increasing number of other 20-somethings who hadn’t considered themselves particularly political – they were suddenly engaged and learning from a whole crew of anarchist or anarchist-leaning scholars, lawyers, and authors. Chelsea Elliott: Occupy changed the way that I view capitalism and the way that we talk about capitalism. It's having a discussion about wanting society to be better and ways that we can change it and the people that are left behind and the people that are hurt in the process of people creating wealth for themselves. But the rest of the world? Well, maybe it was the street theater, which could be silly, or maybe it was the drum circle or the fact that it was being run by a bunch of anarchists, but Occupy was not taken seriously at first. In fact, in that first week, it was being portrayed as a joke. Literally. Anonymous: We shall incessantly repeat one simple demand– Stephen Colbert: And what is their one simple demand? Comedian Stephen Colbert gave a wry smile. Stephen Colbert: Well in a blog post entitled, Hey, President Obama, get ready for our one demand, they state we will beat our drums, chant our slogans, and then we'll get down to business and hold several people's assemblies to decide what our one demand will be. [Laughter] I predict the people's assembly will demand that the hacky sack belong to everyone in the hemp fiber birthing yurts. [Laughter] Kate and Chelsea did not find this funny. Katie: The outside critique is two things. Who is your leader and what are your demands? Those are the two things that people were always asking of everybody at Occupy Wall Street. And the answer was different depending on who you asked. And most people would say, oh, we're all leaders. We're not leaderless, we're leader full. Chelsea: It wasn't the point who the leader is or what the specific demands are. It's about understanding what's happening and people voicing it. The Adbusters meme of the ballerina and the bull had said there would be one simple demand. Then the Anonymous video had promised the same thing. But the anarchist organizers had never been interested in distilling the movement down to one simple demand. They were more focused on building community and asking the questions that had led them to this moment. They were building their own world, not trying to fix the broken one that felt rigged against them. But, still, a lot of outsiders saw them as spoiled kids who just needed to get a job. Nelini: It's a lot of like, oh, these hippies in the park with no jobs and blah, blah, blah. Like people would literally pass us by like, get a job. And I'm like, I have one. Kate: People would come out and be like, get a job! And it's like, it's fucking Saturday. The organizers had decided to plan the big marches on Saturdays exactly because so many supporters were working during the week. To mark one full week of a successful occupation, the organizers planned a weekend march from Zuccotti Park up to Union Square, about two miles away. Chelsea and Kate decided to march together. Chants: Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets! There were so many people that they spilled into the street, blocking traffic at times, and engulfing residents and tourists along the way. The crowd was followed closely by police officers. But as the crowd began flowing out of Union Square, NYPD officers, who had largely stayed back, started clearing the streets of protestors. They began making arrests. Sometimes violently. Protestor: Get your foot off his neck! Cop: Back up, I’m not asking again. Back up or get arrested! Back up or get arrested! Chelsea Elliott: It was getting really, like, physically scary. Kate: We got split up across the sidewalk or something. And all of a sudden these orange nets came up and I was like, wait, wait, wait. I have to get to my friends on the other side of the sidewalk. And so I was sprinting around trying to find a way over to them. A line of officers held up orange mesh about chest high, kettling some protestors in. Several protestors had their phones or cameras out, recording the action. In one video, you can see three young women who look confused and worried. One of them is Chelsea. She has a cardboard protest sign dangling from her right hand. Then there's some kind of commotion behind her. She turns to look. Kate is also nearby, watching what's happening. Chelsea Elliott: This girl was screaming at the cops and a police officer came over to this girl. She was already behind the orange net. They grabbed her by her hair, slammed her down, face down, drug her underneath the orange mesh and started to arrest her. Her face was bleeding. Kate: And I captured it on video. It was the first time I've ever seen police violence against an average citizen. In real time, I was just in shock. In another video, you see Chelsea reacting to what she's just seen. She makes eye contact with a cop who is just a couple feet away from her. She says something and then covers her mouth in horror, looking like she's about to cry. Chelsea Elliott: I was like, ‘what the fuck is going on?’ to the cops standing next to me, and then out of nowhere, that's that's when we were sprayed. An NYPD Deputy Inspector named, no joke, Anthony Bologna – Tony Baloney – walks up to Kate and Chelsea and pepper sprays them directly in the face, and then turns and walks away. Chelsea crumples to the ground immediately. Chelsea Elliott: So all of a sudden, you just feel this burning on your face. You basically can't open your eyes. Your entire face feels burning, like if you were to catch it on fire. It hurts to open your eyes. It hurts to close your eyes. And it's also really difficult to breathe. Chelsea is on the ground. The woman next to her is kneeling, eyes closed, hands in the air blindly trying to grab for someone or something, and screaming. Protestor: Does anyone have water? water?! Chelsea Elliott: just like seconds before there was like, you know, a hundred people around you. By the time I opened my eyes, like pretty much everyone had gone. Including Kate. She'd been arrested, with about 80 other people. Almost immediately, videos of the incident were shared. Chelsea Elliott: The video went viral really quickly. In the following weeks, my inbox was blowing up. People were calling me – interviews, lawyers like calling. In fact, Chelsea and five other protestors ended up suing the NYPD and eventually getting payouts when the city settled their cases. The videos, no doubt, helped make their case. But more importantly, when the rest of the country saw the police violence against peaceful protestors, it flipped a switch. Kate: The movement just grew exponentially after that because there was so much publicity. For many people, this was the first time they had seen a cell phone video of police violence. And the fact that it was four young, white women, who were obviously not resisting in any way – well, it was a shock. If the police were attempting to dissuade people from joining the protesters, it backfired. The Thursday night after the pepper spray incident, the crowd at Zuccotti was big. The general assembly was underway, and it was an important one. Manissa Maharawal: If you imagine there's hundreds of people in a small concrete park, a lot of people are standing on things. This is Manissa Maharawal. It was her first time joining the occupiers. She'd come with some fellow South Asian friends. They'd learned a little about direct democracy and the consensus process, but this was their first time seeing it in action. And, like I said, it was a big night. Instead of demanding things, the occupiers had been working on a declaration that would list their grievances. And they – meaning hundreds of people who were there for the general assembly on this particular night – were hoping to officially adopt the declaration through a consensus process. You heard a tiny bit about the people’s mic and twinkle fingers in the last episode, but I’ll let Brooke elaborate on how it all works. Brooke Lehman: We weren’t given a sound permit for Zuccotti Park, and so we used something called the people's mic, which means that, person speaking would speak in short pieces, and then the few hundred people standing in front of them would repeat it once. And then oftentimes the thousands of people beyond the hundreds of people in the front would repeat it a second time. Facilitator: Mic check! Crowd: Mic check! Mic check! Facilitator: Mic check! Crowd: Mic check! Mic check! Brooke Lehman: And this is the way that we were able to amplify people's voices to the back of this park. This is a form of active listening. The crowd is encouraged to respond to the speaker with hand signals. Brooke Lehman: We often did twinkle fingers, which is applause, applause in sign language. But then in Occupy Wall Street people started doing what I absolutely hate, which is called stankle fingers, where you put the fingers down, which just is rude. But, you know, the stankles can serve a purpose if consensus is the goal. So, facilitators were reading the draft declaration aloud, hoping for twinkle fingers all around. Manissa Maharawal: Everyone's using people's mic. So someone says something and then hundreds of people repeat it. So they repeated this line, right? ‘One race, the human race formerly divided.’ And as I was saying it, ‘one race, the human race formerly divided by divisions of race and class,’ like, it felt wrong. It didn't sit with me right. Manissa and her friends had just learned another hand signal called the block. Manissa Maharawal: They were like, ‘Okay, like, who agrees to this?’ Manissa and her friends did not agree that we are “formerly” divided by race and class. And, even though this was their first day at Occupy, they could halt the whole thing with one hand signal. Manissa Maharawal: And then we, like, all do like this block, which is like, you cross your arms across your chest, kind of like trying to get the attention of the people who are facilitating the meeting. They're like, ‘Wait, there is like, is someone blocking it?’ And we're, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And we’re, like, waving our arms. Mainissa and her friends brought the meeting – with hundreds of people – to a standstill. Manissa Maharawal: And then it's like, ‘Are you blocking the whole declaration?’ We're like, ‘No, this line. We need to work on this line.’ They're like, ‘Okay’. I found out afterwards that this committee that had been writing the declaration had been working on it for like weeks, you know, and then like five random people come and block it, you know? But she’s glad she did. They ended up removing the line about the human race being formerly divided by race and class. Manissa Maharawal: Obviously that one line was a stand in for, like, bigger issues, a larger blind spot, that I think did exist around how to talk about race in Occupy Wall Street. But still, it was an improvement. And that was the point of consensus: to come up with something that would be better by virtue of including many voices. The occupiers passed the Declaration of the Occupation that night. Nelini Stamp: As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. Nicole Carty: We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. Chris G.: As one people united, we acknowledge the reality that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members. Kara Demetropoulos: That our system must protect our rights. And upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights and those are their neighbors. That a democratic government derives its just power from the people. Zak Solomon: But corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the earth and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. The declaration was wide-ranging – there were 23 grievances about everything from corporate greed to animal abuse. But at the heart of it was the idea that democracy really can be by and for the people. That direct democracy – the kind that was happening at Occupy – that was the way to rise up and address all the injustices of the world. Nelini Stamp: We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street and Liberty Square urge you to assert your power. Exercise your right to peaceably assemble, occupy public space. Create a process to address the problems we face and generate solutions accessible to everyone. To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all the resources at our disposal. Join us and make your voices heard. The declaration, created by the whole group, made the grievances clear. But there would never be the one clear demand that had been promised. The growing crowd of occupiers brought many different motivations and tactics into the mix. Which meant, despite the organizers’ best efforts, sometimes the good kind of anarchy – Marisa Holmes: A society without the state that's run directly democratically through worker confederations and councils. Would occasionally turn into the chaotic kind of anarchy – Sandy Nurse: A group of individuals like black block, um, antifa, said, we're taking over the, the roadway. And I was like, that's not what the fuck we're doing. We're not putting kids on a fucking roadway. Like I was hot. That’s next time on OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING.