Every type of person came to Occupy Wall Street: kids who dropped out of college for it, hobos who hopped a freight and walked hundreds of miles, environmentalists who swabbed the Liberty Plaza streets with vinegar, bright and early every morning, acupuncturists who could work in tight spaces, family men with a sideline in poetry, Christians, union members, knitting grandmothers, libertarians, anarchists of every stripe, Democrats and Republicans, normal people with the interests and vices of the normal, people whose lives had veered off the path of the mainstream, 9/11 first responders, war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether they were young or old, bearded or clean-shaven, tattooed or unmarked, destitute or well-to-do, they found each other in a shanty-town at the bottom of Manhattan in the fall of 2011. All came because they were saddened and fed up with the state of America in this new century. All came to voice their grievances and stand up for their beliefs. All came to speak loudly for themselves and for those who had not yet found their voice.
Though the tents were knocked down and the library books thrown in dumpsters, this lawful, peaceful and inspiring assembly, representative of a various and multitudinous American populace, lives on. Visit the occupation in the pages of Why We Occupy, a book that captures the immediacy and vitality of a chaotic and beautiful protest movement, one that continues to burn just below the surface like the undoused embers of an incipient forest fire.
