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Episode 1: The Invitation · OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising

• Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising Episode 1: The Invitation Zuccotti Park is a tiny plaza in Manhattan’s financial district – a small rectangle of concrete and granite surrounded on every side by skyscrapers. It’s mostly a spot for office workers to smoke a cigarette or eat a quick falafel while they scroll on their phones. After dark, when the offices have emptied out and the surrounding shops and restaurants are closed, the park gets quiet, even a little eerie. Usually. But on the night of November 15th, 2011, Zuccotti Park was buzzing with tension and fear. Dozens of tents were set up among the grid of carefully landscaped trees, sheltering about 200 activists. They had come to occupy the park as both a political statement and a social experiment, determined to stay as long as they could. It had been 59 days. But now, as the 60th day of the occupation was approaching, hundreds of police officers began swarming the park. Lorenza Serna: Just so you know, right now, we're being raided at Occupy Wall Street. Please, uh, start tweeting as many people as possible and letting folks know, uh, Occupy Wall Street is being raided. As the cops surrounded them, the occupiers had a live stream going. They sent out a call for help to their network of supporters across the city. Chris G.: It was the middle of the night and suddenly phone calls, text messages, like all these notifications. My phone just blew the hell up. And it's like, the park is being raided now! We need people now! Hundreds of supporters began rushing to Zuccotti Park as the occupiers tried to hold ground. Kara D.: The cops are like right in front of us. A wall of cops uh in right gear. They've got the you know the shields and they're fully weaponized and we look like a bunch of hippies. Lorenzo Serna: There's people screaming everywhere. Like literally tents are being torn apart with knives. They're throwing people's stuff over their heads as they're going through tents, just throwing 'em out. Occupier: All my shit's in there! All my friends are in there! That's my fucking home! Supporters began arriving, ready to join what had, essentially, become a giant sit-in. But the cops had blocked off streets and installed barricades around the park. Stephanie Luce: The cab came in closer and closer to Zuccotti. There was police everywhere. Roads were blocked. It felt like a war zone. The cab driver was scared, so we're like, don't go any further. We will get out and walk. Nelini Stamp I was like, let me out. And I like ran the rest of the way. I was trying to get over these things. I was like, how do I climb over this? I was trying to do parkour. Soon, an enormous crowd of people protesting the raid surrounded the park – they locked arms — blocking police vans and watching as the police arrested the occupiers. Tension and rage ticked up. Cop: Get back, get him back on the floor! Protestor: Fuck youuuuu, fuck you! Chants: Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Zuccotti Park was the nucleus of the Occupy movement – the first American movement driven by social media. The occupiers had slept in the park for almost two months through the rain and snow. They had been infiltrated, pepper sprayed, and made fun of by the mainstream media. But their message – that the capitalist system was rigged to benefit the 1% and exploit the rest of us – that message had resonated from the moment they set up camp in the park. News Clip 1: What started as less than a dozen college students camping out in a park near the New York Stock Exchange is now hundreds of protesters. News Clip 2: The crowds swelled dramatically as labor unions and college students added their voices. News Clip 3: Protests against Wall Street continued to grow across the country. News Clip 4: Occupy Wall Street has become occupy the world. Occupy Wall Street came on the heels of a devastating economic crash that was caused by corporate greed — but paid for by millions of regular people who lost their homes, jobs, and retirement savings. Our political leaders bailed out the banks by using taxpayer dollars. Basically, regular working people had to foot the bill for corporate greed. And Occupy was able to channel the widespread rage, frustration, and despair into something inspiring. It’s hard to explain why it exploded so dramatically and then flamed out so quickly. But looking back, it’s clear that Occupy changed the way Americans understood capitalism. It punctured the myth that hard work is all it takes to get ahead. Politicians like Bernie Sanders who embraced the idea of the 99% suddenly became icons. Occupy Wall Street truly kicked off an era of protests and populist politics that have, in many ways, led us to the strange moment we’re in today. And today? Well, we’re in a very dark place. Donald Trump is marching us steadily toward full authoritarianism and our political leaders on both the left and right seem incapable of or unwilling to stop it. But that Occupy energy, that recognition that no one is coming to save us so we better save ourselves — that energy is bubbling up again, just like it did in 2011. We again have an economic crisis, a war in the middle east, and no one seems to be looking out for regular working people. Understanding the story of Occupy can help us figure out how to harness that grassroots power more effectively than we have before. And I want to know: What did Occupy get right and what did it get wrong? What can we learn from its successes and failures that might help us build a new movement against fascism? From Future Hindsight , I'm your host Mila Atmos and this is OCCUPY: AN UNFINISHED UPRISING. Episode 1: The Invitation The Occupy movement starts with the story of a generation whose promise had been abruptly halted when the economy crashed in 2008. News clip: The housing market collapsed, created one financial crisis after another, and it often seemed as if the news could only get worse. News clip: In just six months, three of the five biggest independent firms on Wall Street have now disappeared. News clip: Bailing out Wall Street is the only way to save Main Street, so says the president. News clip: The signs were everywhere, but now it's official: We are in a recession. The bankers who caused the crash got bailed out. Congress allocated $700 billion taxpayer dollars to stabilize the economy, and most of that money went to the “too big to fail” financial institutions that had caused the economic meltdown. Distressed homeowners got little assistance. And the people who’d been laid off or lost huge chunks of retirement savings because of the crash? They didn’t get any bailouts. Meanwhile… News clip: The nine banks that received the most help from the massive taxpayer bailout gave 5,000 employees bonuses of at least $1 million each. In the aftermath of the crash, a lot of young people either could not afford college or were graduating with crushing student loan debt. They were entering the workforce in the middle of a deep recession, and their ability to launch a career, or repay their loans, or buy their first home – well, all of that had, essentially, been put on pause for who knows how long. To put it another way – what COVID lockdowns were to Gen Z, the 2008 financial crash was to Millennials. I want to introduce you to three people who were in their teens or early 20s when the economy took its nose dive. First is Nelini Stamp, a born and raised New Yorker, an Afro-Latina woman. Nelini Stamp: My mother went bankrupt during the financial crisis. We were served an eviction notice from our apartment. Like all of these things came crashing down and I never was comfortable about saying it. A confluence of medical bills, delinquent child support, and the economic crash put them in a tight spot. Nelini was in high school at the time. Nelini Stamp: I was like, why is there only this amount of food in the fridge? I didn't feel like we were on steady ground. We got an eviction notice. It was a pink slip that's when I started to not show up to school anymore. I said, what is the point of this? Nelini realized college was out of reach. The price tag was just too high. So she gave up. Quit school, got a GED. Started working minimum wage jobs. By 2011, Nelini had gotten a lower-level job at the Working Families Party, a pro-worker political party that runs progressive candidates. Nelini Stamp: I have a good enough degree. G E D. And, um, and I was lying to my colleagues when I first started at the Working Families Party that I went to college for some bit of time. I was so embarrassed by that. Then there’s Sandy Nurse. She was born in Panama to two Navy sailors: a white American mother and a Black Panamanian father. Sandy Nurse: I started as a kid who was a part of a US military occupying force, the mission of which is to exploit people for land and resources for the benefit of the United States of America. And I spent a lot of time, almost my entire childhood, uh, moving around the world and seeing the reactions to that, the consequences of that. She went to college in the U.S., where she graduated with a poly sci degree and an incredible amount of student loan debt. And, in 2011, she’d begun what seemed like a promising career in humanitarian aid. Sandy Nurse: I was just coming off of a United Nations World Food Programme in Haiti. I was visiting different cities and villages to write these reports about the distribution of food aid at the time of the earthquake, all food systems collapsed in Haiti. So she's a do-gooder, trying to help Haitians in the aftermath of an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left many more homeless. Except the way the UN Food Programme was “helping” just feels wrong. The UN was paying Haitians, who had just been through a traumatic natural disaster in food or low wages in exchange for hard labor. Sandy Nurse: The thing that really just kind of snapped for me and, and essentially just broke my heart was seeing on this mountain side, these old Haitian women in flip flops carrying these boulders, um, to make these walls to prevent the landslides. And this is a job that most in the United States we'd see on a highway we’d see people with like a, a backhoe or like a big claw, Caterpillar thing. These women are just moving these boulders. And I just said, this shit is – this is not for me. Like, we should not be asking these women to work for a sack of beans or some small dollars to do public works projects that are the job of a, a state, a nation state, or a government. I walked away from that really let down by the promise of what I was being told as a child about the project of Americanism. And so Sandy quit that whole endeavor. Gave up on that career path to take a less ethically fraught job. Sandy Nurse: My family was upset and didn't understand what I was doing. And they were like, you're like a bike – you're like a food delivery person now? So – summer 2011, she was delivering food to residents of gentrified Brooklyn and trying to figure out her place in the world. Sandy Nurse: And it just so happened at that moment Occupy came about. Which brings me to Marisa Holmes, one of the people who planned the occupation from the beginning. She’s a soft-spoken white woman. She comes off as earnest and idealistic, not a cynic like Sandy or Nelini. Maybe it’s her midwestern roots. Marisa Holmes: I grew up in central Ohio in a small town that kind of became a suburb. And my parents had been involved in Democratic party politics, mostly. I mean, they definitely talked about politics, like constantly. Her dad was actually a labor lawyer for a time. Marisa Holmes: I was in high school, um, when 9/11 happened. News clip: Terrorists declare war on the United States, hijacking jetliners, crashing them into New York's world trade towers. President George W. Bush made the call to enter into a war that would end up expanding and lasting 20 years. George W. Bush: On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets… Marisa Holmes: I learned about politics and how power works and how to organize first, you know, from my parents and then became more radicalized in the context of the anti-war movement. From then on, she was a dedicated activist. By the summer of 2011, Marisa was 25, a grad student living in Brooklyn, and part of a new anarchist group called the New York City General Assembly. And it was that group, the anarchists, who really gave life to the Occupy movement. Marisa Holmes: It was a long hot summer of 2011. And we met under the Hare Krishna tree in Tompkins Square Park. Tompkins Square Park is a leafy oasis in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It has all the regular things a New York City park has: a bustling playground, a dog run, old men sitting on benches feeding the pigeons. Rats. And the Hare Krishna tree. But what, you may be wondering, is the Hare Krishna tree? Marisa Holmes: In the middle of Tompkins Square Park, there's a rather large tree with roots that kind of extend out into the concrete and, and break it up and people go there to meditate and play music and just be together. This huge Elm tree was the site of the first Hare Krishna outdoor chanting session in the country in 1966, which is how it got its name. In August of 2011, it became the meeting spot for the New York City General Assembly. Marisa Holmes: I always got there early and would jot down a few things for agenda points and wait for people to show up. Usually people were late because, you know, operating on anarchist time, people are, are generally late. Many of the people who showed up at the Hare Krishna tree had been protesting the city's austerity measures because, remember, while the financial institutions that had caused the 2008 crash had gotten massive government bailouts, city budgets all over the place had been cut and, three years later, were still struggling. They’d camped outside City Hall for three weeks to protest then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg's budget cuts to city services. They called that Occupation Bloombergville. But it had petered out rather unsuccessfully. Now, they were hungry to do something else and they were trying to figure out what, exactly, the next big thing would be. Their meetings—which they called assemblies—would stretch on for hours as they debated strategy and principles. The afternoons in the park would turn into evenings at nearby bars, where smaller groups would continue their discussions around pitchers of beer. There was no shortage of ideas and opinions among this committed group of activists. The challenge was getting a bigger crowd to show up to whatever direct action they planned. Astra Taylor: There was not a lot of social movement energy. This is Astra Taylor, an author and documentary filmmaker who was in her mid-30s at the time. She had already spent more than a decade as an activist and, I think it’s safe to say, was worn down a bit. That was from experience. Astra Taylor: It was an incredibly demoralizing experience to protest in the aughts. I mean, typically what would happen is the cops would kettle you, which means that they would sort of wrap your protest in this orange netting and haul you off to jail, or they'd say, “stay in this little tiny free speech pen.” If there was political energy, it was online. There was this kind of prankster disruptive spirit on the internet. And that is where the spark that ignited Occupy came from – a meme. In July 2011, 90,000 people got an email with a stark and beautiful image. In black and white, you see the Charging Bull statue, that huge bronze beast in Manhattan’s Financial District that’s supposed to represent the stock market. A ballerina is standing on top of the bull’s back. She is thin, white, wearing a dark unitard. Her eyes are lowered. She's in a classic Arabesque pose, arms outstretched and one leg gracefully arcing out behind her. Behind the ballerina and the bull, there's a crowd emerging from a haze of smoke. They look like our stereotypical idea of anarchists, wearing gas masks and dark clothes. They're surging forward in the same charging motion as the bull. One of them brandishes a stick. At the top of the image, in red, all caps, it says: WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND? Below it: hashtag Occupywallstreet, September 17th. Bring tent. The email with this image came from AdBusters, an activist magazine that liked to stir up trouble. It was known for its beautifully designed spoof ads critiquing consumer culture. AdBusters regularly instigated boycotts and encouraged people to artfully vandalize billboards. And now, their Occupy Wall Street image and hashtag was ripping through the internet. One of the groups that promoted this idea to Occupy Wall Street was Anonymous, the hacktivist collective that had gained notoriety for launching cyberattacks against both corporations and the Church of Scientology. Anonymous announced that they were taking to the streets and urged people to join them. Anonymous: Hello citizens of the internet. We are Anonymous. On September 17th, Anonymous will flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy wall street for a few months. Once there. We shall incessantly repeat one simple demand and a plurality of voices. We want freedom. This is a non-violent protest. We do not encourage violence in any way. The abuse and corruption of corporations, banks, and governments ends here. Join us. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Wall street. Expect us. The editors at AdBusters had made it clear that they only wanted to instigate, not organize. And certainly Anonymous wasn’t used to IRL actions. For Marisa’s group of anarchists – the New York City General Assembly – it was like they’d been given a save-the-date for a party they’d been thinking about throwing, but hadn’t fully committed to yet. But now that someone else had announced an actual time and place, they decided to go with it. They created a plan for the first day and hoped that people would show up. And, really, that was the big question. Would online enthusiasm translate into the real world? Would people actually show up? Astra was skeptical. Astra Taylor: It was a pretty bleak time to be a leftist. Despite the fact that we are in an economic meltdown, there was mass foreclosures, there was mass joblessness, economic insecurity. The left wasn't mobilizing, but the right was. Chants: USA! USA! USA! News clip: From Washington D.C. to Connecticut, to Wisconsin, and all over the country. Thousands of people came out to protest government spending. [chants] Astra Taylor: The Tea Party got off the ground in 2009. The Tea Party movement was a right-wing populist uprising. They protested both the bank bailouts and government efforts to help distressed homeowners and unemployed people – which they viewed as government handouts to undeserving poor people. And so, they showed up en masse on tax day to protest government spending. Astra Taylor: Over half a million people across the country attended these tax day protests. People were angry about the bank bailouts. They were angry about the economy. They were feeling insecure, and it was channeled into this right wing, reactionary racist movement. It was like, how can we be in a situation akin to the Great Depression and the populist right is mobilizing, and progressives and the left are nowhere to be found? But now there was a call to respond from the Left that seemed to have some traction. It was late – three years after the economic crash – but at least it was something. And it promised to be noisy and disruptive and maybe a little nuts. A call to camp out on Wall Street for as long as they could as a way to bring attention to how unfair it was that regular people had borne the brunt of a financial crash brought on by Wall Street greed. It was something that, well, Astra didn't help plan, and didn't think was gonna work. But– Astra Taylor: The fact that there was crickets on our side after this incredible, incredible betrayal of the country by these bankers and by the politicians of both parties who were bailing them out and leaving people to suffer. It just felt like, well, we have to do something and that was enough of a motivation to get me to show up at something that I wasn't particularly optimistic about. Perhaps it was only because Occupy was kinda the only game in town, but our cynics, Sandy and Nelini that I introduced you to earlier, were curious. Sandy Nurse: I had been following online a little bit and one of my best friends – both of us were kind of these gloom and doom, disillusioned, apathetic, hate political culture – we had that kind of a summer. We were just kind of reveling in the futileness of everything um, and so we were kind of following along and we just decided, oh, we're gonna go down there on the first day. Let's just check it out. Nelini Stamp: I was approached by a lot of white people about Occupy Wall Street, like in the months before. And I was like, why would I choose to sleep outside? What? Like, like what is this white shit, to be honest? That was my – like, what is this? Sleeping outside, like by choice? I thought it was insane. The day to occupy arrived. Sept. 17, 2011, a Saturday. Marisa and a bunch of the other hardcore activists were ready to set up camp outside the New York Stock Exchange. Marisa Holmes: I woke up around eight o'clock and packed my backpack, which was quite large. I'm, like, five two, and it was probably like my size. I made my way on the 4 train and then I got off at the Wall Street stop and wandered around and realized that the police were already there and there were barricades up. Since they couldn’t actually get to the stock exchange, Marisa and her fellow activists from the New York General Assembly re-routed the group to Zuccotti Park. The crowd – some with signs, some playing instruments – made their way there. Nelini showed up at Zuccotti and looked around. The Occupiers had been doing yoga, face painting, eating peanut butter sandwiches, singing. There was already a drum circle. It didn’t feel very serious. Nelini Stamp: I felt like I was in the movie Hair. It was very, like, hippy dippy. I was political to the point of doing stuff, but I never was like, I'm an anarchist or a socialist. Like, I just cared that the rich have too much money. I knew it in my bones that like rich people, corporations, like they're crazy. And it was an injustice, but I just looked around and was like, yeah, I'm gonna be here for like an hour. Eventually the festival part of it all that Nelini really wasn't feeling transitioned into something deeper and more personal. Marisa Holmes: For the afternoon, people were having small group conversations on questions that we had come up with in the New York City General Assembly, and those questions were loosely like, “What world do you wanna live in? What's happening right now with the economic crisis? How do we get from where we are now to this world that we want to live in?” Astra arrived in time for the small group conversations. Astra Taylor: What was so striking to me and caught my imagination out of the gate was that instead of standing there chanting, which would've been a kind of conventional thing to do, I mean, that's what protestors usually do. We were all told to sit in small circles with our neighbors, and so we immediately organize ourselves into these mini assemblies groups of maybe a dozen to 15 people, and we just started talking and that already felt was like such a break with the usual script because instead of standing sort of outside the New York Stock Exchange and saying, you know, “you suck” and shouting at it, we were actually building bonds with each other. Marisa Holmes: People had all kinds of stories, like they had hitchhiked across the country and had nothing - like had no job, no money. Just, you know, uh, used whatever they could to, to get to the occupation. And, there is just, like, palpable sense of like rage, like this simmering rage that people wanted to unleash. People had been waiting for years to say something and they finally could say it. Nelini had certainly felt that way. She’d been carrying the shame of the empty fridge, the eviction notice, her lack of college education. The lie to her employer that she hadn’t been able to afford the college education she’d put on her resume. She was suddenly hearing stories just like hers from other people. Nelini Stamp: What shifted for me was the general assembly that first night and people getting up and telling their stories. At first, people told their stories in these small groups. And then the whole crowd – estimated to be almost 1,000 people ​​– was brought together for a general assembly. In anarchist fashion, there was no leader, just a facilitation team that invited everyone to take turns speaking. Nelini Stamp: I remember somebody saying that their parents' home got foreclosed upon. I remember hearing somebody just said, I went to all this college and have all this debt and like we were all told we had to go to college to get a better job. And somebody was like, and I'm working at Starbucks. Not that it's like, you know, solidarity with the Starbucks workers union, but like that, wasn't what we were told you go to college for, right? There was a building sense of connection – of no, it wasn't just you and your bad choices that put you in debt, there's a pattern here. With each sort of confession, there was this– Marisa Holmes: This sense of hope. We know how bad it is and we just need to, to come together and build this space and like, it's gonna happen And like, we are the people to do it. The sense of urgency and commitment was really – I had never seen that before. Part of it was the way all of this was unfolding. They used something called the people’s mic where everyone had to repeat what the speaker was saying. And, again, anyone could speak! There weren't leaders or vetted speakers. And then there were the twinkle fingers where you waggle your fingers to show agreement. It was just so different from anything Nelini had seen before. Nelini Stamp: This whole like hands thing, twinkle fingers, I was like, okay, this is gonna be wild. But she was, in spite of herself, inspired. She stood up to speak at one point. Nelini Stamp: I remember getting up. I don't remember what I said. I think I was like, “I hate the blah, blah, blah,” but I don't remember what I said, but that moment I sat down after I spoke and I was, “Whatever's happening, I like it. And I'm gonna do what needs to be done.” That moment of cynicism turning to optimism was happening for other people at the park, too. Including Sandy, who had arrived with friends. Sandy Nurse: I can't explain exactly why I stayed. I just know that we went down, we went for this little march and then we hung out in the park and participated in these breakout group conversations. Of course, the powers that be wanted them out of the park. In the spirit of direct democracy, the decision to stay or go was up to the group as a whole. So, Marisa took a bullhorn to make an announcement. Maris Holmes [on bullhorn]: It’s really amazing process of direct democracy. Um, and, but we recognize that, you know, this is a specific group, a gathering that, that we have here, and we wanna hear from people here to see how, um, we can proceed tonight. Um, so one of our, our first sort of orders of business is on, you know, are we going to stay or not? She passed the bullhorn to someone else from the facilitation team. Facilitation team member [on bullhorn]: I'm here with some logistical information. This, this square. This square is technically a privately owned square. [boos] We, we have been in contact with the property owner who has told us that his intention is to not allow people to sleep in this park tonight. [boos] The pros and cons were weighed. The sun fully set. People were lit by flashlights. And, at some point, the bullhorn was replaced by the people's mic, perhaps to dissuade the cops from issuing noise violations. Marisa Holmes (People’s mic): The facilitation team (the facilitation team) is sensing (is sensing) that people want (that people want) to stay here (to stay here) and occupy this square (to stay here and occupy this square). How do you feel about that? [Cheers] This was the moment for each individual – Sandy, Astra, Nelini and everyone else – to decide. Would they stay or would they go? Sandy: Sandy Nurse: The crowd kept getting thinner and thinner and we just kept hanging out and eventually we just decided, yeah, we'll stay the night. I mean, fuck it. See what happens. We don't have much on the line, um, cuz we're not fully invested in the idea that we're gonna get the world we want. So let's just, uh, hang out here with these folks who seem angry, too. Meanwhile, somewhere else in the park, Nelini was making the same decision. Nelini Stamp: Me and my friends, we were like, you're gonna sleep here? And we're like, yeah. Astra made a different choice. Astra Taylor: I headed home because I did not think this tiny ragtag group had a snowball’s chance in hell of staying the night. No way. I could see the cops. They were coming closer and my sense was that they were gonna go, “Okay, kids. You've had enough, like, you know, we're gonna beat the shit out of you.” That's what I thought was about to happen, and I didn't wanna be there for that. Marisa was anxiously watching the police in riot gear. Marisa Holmes: I was terrified because I didn't feel like we had prepared enough. I really, I felt this sense of responsibility. So I was both excited and terrified of what would come next. Nathan Schneider, a journalist who had been covering activism in the city, was there. Nathan Schneider: There had been a few thousand people there that day, but by this point it was dark. New York has this kind of eerie feeling in these sections of the city where not a lot of people are out at night in these corridors of office buildings. And so by this point, there were just a hundred, maybe 200 at most, if that, um protesters sitting in this park surrounded by police. It was a very scary moment. In the dark, in that moment of tension, he witnessed some kind of exchange between what seemed like the property owners and the NYPD. Nathan Schneider: I saw a suburban roll up, a police vehicle. You know, someone was talking to the officers who were there. I think I saw police commissioner Kelly. something that was said in that exchange, in that moment, said OK this is not going to be an attack. The police surrounding this park had made the decision to let it be. And after that the tension kind of reduced. People started to fall asleep. Here's Nelini again. Nelini Stamp: I just got too tired and we all, like, fell asleep on the ground. It got cold. I didn't bring anything. And Sandy: Sandy Nurse: One of my friends drove to Yonkers to get us blankets. I don't know why he went that far, but he is, like, I wanna make sure you all have blankets and went up to Yonkers and came back with all these blankets. Nelini Stamp: And then in the middle of a night, a fairy comes, I swear to God. Just drops blankets over us. And that was the moment when I was like, okay, yeah, we might not know what we're doing, but we'll figure shit out for each other. Occupy is a story of the improbable becoming possible – a story of hopelessness and cynicism making way for inspiration and collective action. It was clear, from that very first day, that Occupy had tapped into something that Nelini, Sandy, Marisa, and thousands of others had all been feeling. They were understandably furious with the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy. And they felt betrayed by the political leaders who enabled and, some would say, rewarded it. But Occupy was a lot more than an opportunity to rage at the system. Anger wasn’t the thing that kept people coming back, for 59 days, to sleep on the concrete. There was some other magic happening that had something to do with the energizing force of collective action. It’s that – the energy, the inspiration – that’s most interesting to me. Is there a way to harness that again? Occupy was also a social experiment. They weren’t just there to protest, they were trying to create an anarchist, anti-capitalist utopia inside that tiny park. And, against all odds, people across the United States set up their own occupations and copied what the radicals in New York City were doing. In this way, Zuccotti Park became a testing ground for a set of ideals that the organizers had arrived with: leaderlessness, radical inclusivity, direct democracy. At the beginning, it wasn’t at all clear if any of it would work. What happens when a movement has no leader? Does radical inclusivity make it stronger or more chaotic? And if change must come from outside the system, how do you build something powerful enough not just to resist injustice, but to replace it? Coming up on the next five episodes of OCCUPY: AN UNFINISHED UPRISING: Lisa Fithian: Occupy Wall Street – it was a really exciting and enlivening and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck. Kate: The NYPD would pick people up on the street for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or something, they would drop them off in the park and you need a hot meal, you need a blanket, you need a coat – go down to Zuccotti Park? Nelini Stamp: And the escalation of police activity was, like, really, really wild. Chelsea Elliott: Out of nowhere, that's, that's when we were sprayed. Lisa Fithian: Occupy was a physical space where people put their values into practice, and that's not something that we see very often. Manissa Maharawal: I wish something like it would happen again.