OWS, You’ve Made Your Point, Now Go Home

What has struck me about these protests is how controlled the participants have been. Oh yes, there's been complaints of littering/messes left by the participants, but I'd wager that it's the same as any other large gathering of humans, such as at a concert. What you aren't hearing (except for the one in Rome last weekend) are reports of rioting, looting, vandalism, etc. Despite the anger that's fueling these protests, and the reports of questionable police activity which is to be expected when police have uncertain situations on their hands and get antsy, the protesters remain peaceful. And have been that way for a month now. That could certainly change, but the fact that they've remained "controlled" tells me that this is for the long-haul - the demands may be amorphous, but the goals are not, and change wanted by the majority of the population, whether entirely wise or not, is inevitable if the pressure remains.

The article that's really fascinating is the one I quoted at the bottom - How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started , and who's involved in its direction - people who've participated in this kind of change before and have demonstrated success and persistence.

http://www.9news.com/rss/article/224936 ... um=twitter
Occupy Wall Street reaches 1-month birthday
4:18 PM, Oct 17, 2011
Written by Associated Press

The month-old Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, with nearly $300,000 in the bank and participants finding satisfaction in the widening impact they hope will counter the influence on society by those who hold the purse strings of the world's economies.

The expanding occupation of land once limited to a small Manhattan park in the shadow of the rising World Trade Center complex continued through the weekend, with hundreds of thousands of people rallying around the world and numerous encampments springing up in cities large and small.

For the most part, the protest action remained loosely organized and there were no specific demands, something Legba Carrefour, a participant in the Occupy D.C. protest, found comforting on Sunday. "When movements come up with specific demands, they cease to be movements and transform into political campaign rallies," said Carrefour, who works as a coat check attendant despite holding a master's degree in cultural studies. "It's compelling a lot of people to come out for their own reasons rather than the reasons that someone else has given to them."

Donated goods ranging from blankets and sleeping bags to cans of food and medical and hygienic supplies are being stored in a cavernous space donated by the United Federation of Teachers, which has offices in the building a block from Wall Street near the private park protesters occupy. Supporters are shipping about 300 boxes a day, many with notes and letters, Strekal said.

$300K in donations so far, and nearly 300 boxes coming in a day of supplies...doesn't sound like they're going home anytime soon! :thumbsup:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailycha ... continents
The "occupy" protests
Cross continents
Oct 17th 2011, 16:37 by The Economist online

These people are seriously organized - just look at the NYC General Assembly's Calendar (link below to their About Us will get you into their site). The story of where they originally wanted to do the protest, and how they ended up in Zuccotti Park is in here, as well as how fortuitous timing with the Canadian Adbusters article helped spark the movement.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10 ... al-origins
How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started
Meet the international activists who lit the fuse for the populist protest movement that's sweeping the world.
—By Andy Kroll
Mon Oct. 17, 2011

Months before the first occupiers descended on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, before the news trucks arrived and the unions endorsed, before Michael Bloomberg and Michael Moore and Kanye West made appearances, a group of artists, activists, writers, students, and organizers gathered on the fourth floor of 16 Beaver Street, an artists' space near Wall Street, to talk about changing the world. There were New Yorkers in the room, but also Egyptians, Spaniards, Japanese, Greeks. Some had played a part in the Arab Spring uprising; others had been involved in the protests catching fire across Europe. But no one at 16 Beaver knew they were about light the fuse on a protest movement that would sweep the United States and fuel similar uprisings around the world.

The group often credited with sparking Occupy Wall Street is Adbusters, the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine that, in July, issued a call to flood lower Manhattan with 90,000 protesters. "Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?" the magazine asked. But that's not how Occupy Wall Street sprang to life. Without that worldly group that met at 16 Beaver and later created the New York City General Assembly , there might not have been an Occupy Wall Street as we know it today.

The group included local organizers, including some from New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, but also people who'd taken part in uprisings all over the world. That international spirit would galvanize Occupy Wall Street, connecting it with the protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Madrid's Puerta del Sol, the heart of Spain's populist uprising. Just as a comic book about Martin Luther King Jr. and civil disobedience, translated into Arabic, taught Egyptians about the power of peaceful resistance, the lessons of Egypt, Greece, and Spain fused together in downtown Manhattan. "When you have all these people talking about what they did, it opens a world of possibility we might not have been able to imagine before," says Marina Sitrin, a writer and activist who helped organize Occupy Wall Street.

In America, we march, we chant, we protest, we picket, we sit in. But the notion of a people's general assembly is a bit foreign. Put simply, it's a leaderless group of people who get together to discuss pressing issues and make decisions by pure consensus. The term "horizontal" gets tossed around to describe general assemblies, which simply means there's no hierarchy: Everyone stands on equal footing. Occupy Wall Street's daily assemblies shape how the occupation is run, tackling issues such as cleaning the park, public safety, and keeping the kitchen running. Smaller working groups handle media relations, outreach, sanitation, and more.