Occupy Wall Street -- just venting

[PamNY]

I was contemplating why I posted about this in the first place. Finally figured out the reason for my first post: this is a place I'm comfortable talking about fear in general, and on the street in particular.

My first post was about a large, fast-moving crowd that I didn't expect or know about -- and a cop ordering me to not run across the street away from them, for reasons which I understand now, but didn't then.

I certainly wasn't looking for sympathy, but I knew my experience would be understood in this group. I didn't think of my post as political at all -- in fact, my complaint was about our city government, not about the protesters.

Later, the story became that individual people in the neighborhood and (mostly) our unpaid community board volunteers are doing all of the negotiating with the protesters about small, day-to-day issues. I mentioned a bit about the human-scale things that were taken away on 9/11 because it's an interesting local detail, and I made it very clear that OWS, in general, is paying attention to our concerns. It is quite remarkable that five OWS people attended a community board meeting in the middle of yesterday's march of 15,000 people.

My story would be the same regardless of who was camped out in Zuccotti Park; if the Tea Party was over there with a drum circle, you can be assured that we would try to get them to stop at a reasonable hour. Nothing political about it.

Tulip, thank you for your eloquent post, and I am sorry about your friend.