Post-midnight existential debate at the Occupation Wednesday.
A cop mustered the camping occupiers to ask: Could you please stop smoking that stuff? That prompted protesters on the Green to ask each other: What are we really doing here?
The impromptu hours-long midnight bull session began around 12:10 a.m. Wednesday, the fourth night that a growing band of anti-corporate demonstrators aligned with the nationwide Occupy Wall Street movement have spent camped out on the upper Green.
It all started when police officers called the occupiers hanging around 43 tents on the upper Green to a big tree in the middle of the encampment.
As the crowd of 40 or so gathered around, hushed, Officer Leonardo Soto shined his light on a cardboard sign lying against one of the tents. The sign read: “1 day CEO worth one year my labor? My ass.”
“It’s kind of true,” Soto said in reference to the sign and chuckled, prompting relieved laughter from his audience.
Then he got serious. “I walk around this tent, and it reeks like a grow field,” the officer said. “The drugs have got to stop. … You definitely don’t want what happened in New York to happen here.”
Soto was referring to the near-eviction of protesters at the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City’s Zuccotti Park that, while postponed, led to several struggles with police and arrests last Friday.
His audience immediately agreed with him: No more smoking pot, or anything else, around the camp.
“Thank you, officer!” someone yelled in response, and the crowd repeated after him in the human amplification method typical of the Occupy movement.
As soon as the cop left, a few people lit up again, drawing looks of consternation from fellow occupiers.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Chris Kiley, an organizer who’s been spending nights on the Green then going to work in the morning.
“That’s a laziness factor,” an occupier calling himself Tommy Doomsday, noting the pot-smokers could just find another place to do so, as the cops had suggested.
“No, that’s a defiance factor,” Kiley responded.
The group brainstormed about what to do.
Call the cops? No, because then the smokers would get in trouble and be associated with the movement. Cover the smell with incense? No, that would enable the activity.
Eventually a small group of occupiers including Kiley and Doomsday convinced the misanthropes to find another spot to smoke. Then they sat down in a cluster of lawn chairs around 12:45 a.m. to draft a proposal for the New Haven Occupation’s General Assembly meeting scheduled for Wednesday evening.
Their main goals: Start talking more about the movement’s message and less about the logistics of the actual protest. And: come up with a statement endorsing a drug and alcohol-free occupation on the Green.
We need to ask ourselves if we’re here to party or to send a message,” said Kiley. “We have a lot of stake right now. Why are we here? What are we doing?”
At center, Sean Conlon of the band Ale Hounds.
The 50 to 60 people sleeping on the Green since the occupation started Saturday have mostly been handing out food (a few hundred meals a day are served, brought in mostly by donations), displaying signs, shouting protest slogans to passing cars, and enjoying each others’ company.
Tuesday night, Kiley and other demonstrators said it is time for a change.
A mission statement Kiley had initially brought up with the General Assembly hadn’t been well-received. What about an open letter? Should they simply oppose corporate corruption or call for more specific actions, like a constitutional convention or the formation of another political party?
Just minutes later the meeting was interrupted again.
“It’s coming to my attention that hard drugs are being done in that tent,” said Eric Nash, who patrolled the area all night as a member of the Security Committee. He pointed to a tent a few yards away from where Kiley and the others had been talking.
It was time for an emergency assembly to decide what to do.
“We need to go over there and exercise our right to remove them from our movement,” Nash said to a crowd of about 30 who gathered around him. “Who wants to go over and do some talking with me?” About half the people raised their hands.
The group slowly approached the tent in the middle of the encampment. Nash did his best to knock on the outside. It took several minutes for a man in a red sweatshirt to stumble out.
“We’ve got to ask you all to vacate the tent,” Nash told the man calmly. About 20 minutes later, the group of 15 remained standing around the tent as all three individuals who had been sleeping there finally left.
Ben Aubin, who created New Haven’s Free Store with an outpost on Wall Street and initially met with city cops and officials to get their OK on an occupation of the upper Green, said the movement’s been experiencing “a lot of disorganization and a lot of miscommunication” between two main groups: Those who are actually living on the Green and the hundreds more who are helping out with the movement in other ways.
A shelf full of food donated to the occupiers.
“When you’ve been out there for three days straight and the fourth day is nothing but rain, time ticks slow,” Aubin said. “The feeling is magnified that nothing is being done, and nothing is being discussed.”
Aubin said he made a deliberate choice not to spend any nights on the Green because “I’ve been basically cited as an influential person, and I want to keep my influence out of one of the strongest communities in the Occupy New Haven movement.”
At 11 a.m. Wednesday, he circulated a Google Document among around 10 Occupy organizers to help draft a position paper addressing some of the protocol matters surrounding the demonstrations and occupation, as well as to discuss the message of the movement.
At 11:30 a.m., an excerpt of the document read: “Perhaps if [the movement’s] participants would spend the same energy they are using to protest against something on instead creating something, they would move themselves from a position of submission to a position of power.”
By 2:30 p.m. that was eliminated and an excerpt read: “We acknowledge that when one is focused on where their next meal is coming from, they will have a harder time coming to the discussion table. We are discussing the creation of a self-sustaining local economy, which encourages job-creation, so that as the general comfort of New Haven rises, so too will the population of our General Assembly. “
I Just Want This Mess To End”
In the early pre-dawn hours Wednesday, Jess Bachinski reflected on the drug encounters. She said she’s waiting for her friend Amber Oestreich, a student at St. John’s University who helped organize the protests in New York, to come up to New Haven this weekend with some fellow Wall Street occupiers and share their wisdom.
“Today I called Amber and I said, ‘You need to get here now,’” said Bachinski. “I just want this mess to end.”
Despite the tensions that arose on Tuesday night, visitor Ollie Stevens, a waiter in Hamden, said things were still better here than in New York.
“They’re roughing it compared to here,” said Stevens, who was at the Wall Street protests before he came to the Green on Tuesday. “That was all crowded, and there’s people living in tarps.” Many of the tents on the upper Green are sturdy and spacious, fitting at least three people. And the police here are far more friendly with the protesters, encouraging them to demonstrate on street corners and even buying them coffee.
To be sure, “there was a lot more group activity” in New York, said Stevens, including meditation and drum groups. Still, he said, “This is way more fun than that was.”
For those who occupy the Green 24/7, the days pass quickly with the amount of sign-making and protesting the group does.
“The demonstrations during the day kind of take it out of you,” said Rachel Marcotte, a 22-year-old from Norwich. She gets plenty of fuel from donations, too. On Tuesday for dinner alone, people dropped off a wedding cake, boxes of pizza and Popeye’s chicken, fruit salad, and other goodies. Marcotte even got an offer from a passerby to use the shower in his downtown home if she needs to.
Occupiers demonstrate at the corner of College and Elm Street around 11:30 p.m.
Given the ruckus on Tuesday night, the campers got less sleep than usual. Kiley was still going strong at 3 a.m. explaining the ins and outs of derivatives to seven shivering fellow occupiers.
He was livid over the latest news about Bank of America’s transfer of derivatives from Merrill Lynch to a “subsidiary flush with insured deposits,” a story written by Bloomberg News that was circulated among various Occupy Wall Street-related web sites.
Kiley was discussing the finer points of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 when this reporter went to bed in Tent #12 around 3:15 a.m.
The inside of Tent #12.
Previous Occupy Wall Street/ New Haven coverage:
• Emergency Session Poses Democracy Test
• The Password (The Password) … Is (Is) …
• 1,000 Launch New Haven’s “Occupation”
• Klein: Occupation Needs To Confront Power
• Whoops! Movement Loses $100K
• New Haven’s “Occupation” Takes Shape
• Occupy Branford: Wall Street Edition
• Anti-Bankers’ Dilemma: How To Process $$
• Labor, Occupiers March To Same Beat
• Protests’ Demand: A “World We Want To See”
• Protesters To Occupy Green Starting Oct. 15
• Wall Street Occupiers Page Verizon
• New Haven Exports “Free”-dom To Occupiers