From a friend of Steve… Pavlov Katz

Hi everyone,

It’s been a really long time since I last wrote. I left New York for a few weeks in early December, and returned later in the month. The timing wasn’t too good, since very little happened around here during the holidays, and there was a lot of frustrating, idle time. One positive thing that did happen during that time, though, was that a lot of people worked on creating a sense of community among us who are staying at one of the churches in the upper west side. I’d originally thought of it as simply a place to sleep, and to simply leave in the morning and start my real day downtown at OWS. But some more insightful people saw it as more than that, as a chance to develop our identity as a group, a subsection of OWS. The original motivation for this might have been simple necessity– to reduce thefts and conflicts, but in any case, it’s turned into an actual community, an opportunity to meet new people and work together constructively.

Otherwise, things were scattered and thin through late December, until New Year’s eve. Earlier in the evening a few of us went around town, happy to get away from the uninspired atmosphere, but came back to the area and walked into Zuccotti Park around 10 pm. Several hundred people were there, a low-level party. More people arrived steadily, and the absurdity of the situation became embarrassingly apparent. Here we are, 300, 400, 500 of us, in a park we lived in, a park from which we changed world history, until a mere six ago. And now we’re surrounded by standing metal barricades which enforce arbitrary, stupid rules which are arguably illegal. Say, what about these standing metal barricades, anyway?

This is the first of a series of reports from my friend Steve, who has been participating in Occupy Wall Street since October 5th.

Hi everyone,

I arrived at Occupy Wall Street Wednesday morning. It was pure luck that I got there the day of the big march.

The feeling in the park was really nice from the moment I arrived (especially since I had to walk around Wall Street itself for a while before finding it). A lot of people under odd conditions, and doing so quite well.

Zuccotti Park is just a few blocks up Broadway from Wall Street. It’s one of the only, if not the only, parks in NYC that is privately owned. Because of the deal made with the city at the time of construction, the park is open 24 to the public 24 hours, while every other park in the city is closed at night. News report (NPR) says it was pure luck that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) people picked it to occupy!

Before I got there, I’d read about a system where people can call from anywhere in the country and order a pizza to be sent to the folks in the park. This is a little misleading. In fact, there’s a full-time kitchen crew that serves throughout the day. So it’s even more organized than I’d imagined, with donations coming in and being used effectively.

This is the latest report from Steve at Occupy Wall Street.

Hi everyone,

It’s been slow around here since my last post. Strange to say this, since up to recently things have been frantic.

We’re still hanging in, securing housing for ourselves and running meetings again. I went to a spokes council meeting the other night. It was kind of nice to see the process functioning. Spokes council is a cumbersome process, but it’s quite democratic. Of course, it’s a messy process, lots of arguments, and then the next day everyone else yells about the decisions made. Once you explain the reasons, they lower the volume of their yelling a bit. I suppose groups making decisions about how to conduct themselves is by nature complicated and controversial and always will be.

The past few days in particular have been difficult. A lot of people arguing, about all kinds of things. I think this is partly because we’re all stressed about not having a home, and partly because we’re confused about our mission at this point. With Thanksgiving coming up it’s unlikely much will be done about this in the next few days.

This is the latest report from Steve at Occupy Wall Street. It sounds like it is becoming an occupied territory, with the NYPD playing the role of the IDF and controlling movement of people and goods in and out.

Hi everyone,

It’s Saturday morning, things are actually quiet enough for me to sit and write. Here’s what happened since my last, kind of frantic, message early Thursday afternoon.

I walked over to City Hall where I heard a rally was supposed to be held to demand Bloomberg’s resignation. I just missed it, people had already left for Foley Square. On the way over I made another attempt to call someone here at the storage place, and by chance happened to catch him, and find out the space was open, so I turned around and came back here. Had I not reached him, I would have gone to Foley Square and then to the Brooklyn Bridge, and witnessed history, or gotten arrested, or beaten up.

You probably know better than me what happened there. I don’t have video capabilities on this old computer. In any case, there were many, many people in Foley Square, and even more at the bridge, 5,000, I heard? Lots of pushing and shoving, hundreds of arrests throughout the day, I think. I was here helping restore the medical supplies shelf when one of the medics got a call that trouble was about to start, and we helped pack up bandages, etc. We were out of Maalox, which is used as an antidote to pepper spray. The shelf has thinned out considerably this week, since the police took the medical tent and all the supplies they had there.