16. Occupied with Wall Street
(Updated 2-23-15)
Emerson
replayed the frozen morning he faced the music at WBAI eleven years earlier;
security at the heady studio on Wall Street wouldn’t let him on the talk show
after the Christmas coop. With the wind whipping around the jack knife corners
of the financial district, he had passed Zuccotti Park without a second glance,
certainly no thought of stopping in it to take a piss behind a bush on that
empty Sunday morning. If he had known that spit in a vest pocket would be the
heart of resistance against the takeover, the beginning of the grandiose
non-violent occupation, he would have at least stopped in to bring hot soup to
the homeless there whose piss froze their cardboard beds to the pavement.
Ten
years after the Twin Towers had disintegrated like sand castles in the American
mea culpa, he couldn’t even find the little shit of a park. He was looking for
something much bigger, at least as big as the footprint of one of the downed
towers. Maybe four-hundred thousand joyful protesters blaming the end of the
free world as they knew it on the melting environment had taken one hundred
fifty years for his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to prophesize.
It was futile to do anything about
it in 1840 and it was still futile. Greed has its way because might always,
always makes right with gag orders.
Look
as Emerson may, he couldn’t find the war; no man could find the war. Workers of
the world would unite over the ashes of cold dead remains, but in the ‘slash
and burn’ mentality of the ruling class, the world wasn’t worth living in
anymore.
So
Emerson followed the cooing of the pigeons that strutted near hot dog vendors
and glided like silent drones over Pine Street on the backside of the Stock
Exchange. The pigeons would tell him where the bread crumbs lay in the park
under the nearest trees to Wall Street in Zuccotti. Emerson walked on the other
side of little Pine Street slowly passed the black-clad gargantuan guards
standing like upright cockroaches. “The occupation isn’t here,” he muttered to
himself as the guards, armed, seemed to eye his passing, so he put his head
down and kept on moving his flat feet squashing the dungaree sneakers onto
steamy grates around Broadway.
He
looked left; nothing. He looked right; nothing. Then he saw three young sojourners
across the valley, like mountain men in the wilderness, tattered packs ripped
and tied to their backs haphazardly.
“Where
are the Occupy Wall Street people?”
“Over
yonder,” one young bearded man responded pointing unhesitatingly across the
street that he kept climbing.
“Over
there?” said Emerson incredulously for he had passed by that spot a short while
ago and had seen no one but a few folk standing around talking. The police were
there now indicating what terrible danger they were preventing and the business
people they were protecting. “Over there?”
“Yeah,
over there,” the other tracker yelled from up the path where Emerson stood in
disbelief. Emerson followed. When they reached the clearing in the petrified
forest of buildings, he had to rub his eyes in disbelief. Perhaps two dozen
people were there mulling around a missing piece of New York puzzle. Some
looked like they had just been sleeping. There even looked like there was a
soup kitchen with a staff meeting cross-legged near some hung tarps. “Gee,” Emerson
thought, “I’ve seen more people congregating in Thompson Square on a Tuesday
afternoon that I see here. This is the resistance?”
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