"Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants."
Since September 17th, New York City has been "occupied" by a group of people who have decided that it is finally time to stand up, speak up, and live out change. And, I do mean live out, in the most literal sense of the words. There are no tents or hanging tarps, no "structures" of any kind, just a mass of sleeping bags and bodies each night. They provide each other with food, warm clothing, first aid, entertainment, and a chance to be heard.
There are grandmothers who want peace, pilots and teachers who want better pay, parents who want a better future for their children, and an entire generation of twenty-somethings who, collectively, see a thousand symptoms of a broken system and have decided, in a method that is 1/3 protest, 1/3 street fair, and 1/3 social media, to do something about it. They are leaderless, but not visionless, intentionally without a formal list of demands, but not without dreams of a new world.
Over the last weeks, largely without the attention of traditional media, they have spread to well over 800 US cities, and they don't have any intention of going away any time soon. It might just be time to sit up and listen.
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