A Vist to Occupy Wall Street - New York

Regarding "Occupy Wall Street"-i walked through the Zucotti Park site around lunch time, just to observe: people smoking dope. begging for money,banging on drums, the overly-vigorous wild-eyed harangue, selling buttons (for a profit, i must add!), kids playing guitar in their expensive techno-tents.. Then it all came back to me... Thompkins Square park circa 1969, with a touch of 5th grade "recess:"

I did not detect anything resembling a health emergency, just crowds noise and mess. So welcome to New York. Eh! But if the protesters would take the time to clean up and organize their areas, I think they would project the image of a more disciplined and credible force. But a movement that claims it has no leaders also has no authority to impose such discipline, and so they may just dissolve into their own amorphous blob of hyper-democracy.

It seemed that a lot of people came from elsewhere and just sort of find their own home here. One gent apparently took it upon himself to whip out a pair of gardening shears and get some of the shrubbery into shape for the winter.

The amorphous nature of the complaints voiced by the "occupiers" means that they are a Rorschach of protest, so that you can come under their "big tent" of leftist non-ideology. Although I saw a table or two with outright communist literature, they Occupiers, as a whole had not yet made the mistake made by anti-war demonstrators in the 1960s by marching under the enemy flag, although in this case, does the enemy have a flag? Does the Wells Fargo Bank even have an identifiable symbol? I saw more than a few US flags flying form the OWS site. The visuals are important in our post -literate, video-brained society. So what are you against? High bank profits? Join the march! Accumulation of wealth by the richest 1%? Join the march! Halitosis? Join the march. The lack of a center of gravity for the protests , the lack of focus, makes the process intriguing but inevitably unsuccessful as a fulcrum for political change, unlike the Tea Party, which radicalized the Republican Party into a bunch of right wing ideologues who would have made Barry Goldwater proud.

I'm guessing that the mayor's strategy is to let the winter cold take care of the problem. but the petulant , the crazy, or the zealous might just make it through a mild winter ( every hear of "Valley Forge"?) Let's see what the winter brings, and whether the sunshine soldiers" of OWS will melt away at the first frost.