Written in Occupation: Everyday Magic, Day 427

Around the perimeter, visitors and regulars stand at the gate and film what’s happening. Tourists walk through, giving out money or bringing in clothes or food. Double-decker tour buses pause to look down into the occupation where a man in a suit holds a Tibetan flag as large as him.

I eat a pear I plucked out of a food bin in the center where a crew continually serves whoever is hungry. When I donated some books to the library, I found the books organized according to genre and subject, the whole library burgeoning with words. Then I saw more of the occupation’s infrastructure: a think tank (a box people can put paper into), a notary public, a sanitation station, a health center.

I want to say to the occupiers both “Thank you” and “Please stay.” They are living in a ceremonial village, holding the light high enough to show us how difficult making change is, how most societal issues and causes are interwoven, and how all they’re protesting comes from a core of tangled motives and lost values at the center of our economy. They show us that this is not a movement about a single demand or list of demands, but one about how and why we need to live differently. And they call for us as a culture to look at how, in the last 30 years, wealth has been drastically redistributed at the expense of the human and other-than-human communities of this earth.

So while they’re sleeping on the ground, getting arrested, trying to catch a nap in the middle of lines of tourists snapping their photos or washing dishes in the rain, I hope they know that, just like the young man I saw today holding up the sign that said, “I love you,” I love them too as well as many of us. And we’re infinitely grateful for their vision and courage.

#OccupyWallStreet