If they’re willing to tolerate the occasional rape in the name of occupation, why wouldn’t they tolerate the occasional four-year-old wetting himself in fear?

They knew the financial district was crawling with reporters today and they must have had some sense of how it would look to have an angry horde forcing little kids to run a gauntlet on the way to class, so the only explanation for this is that they were, to some degree, truly out of control. (Safe to say with nearly 200 arrests today in NYC.) That’s a bad omen for which way the movement is going.

In the middle of thousands of protestors yelling and chanting — some kicking and screaming – CBS 2’s Emily Smith found little school kids trying to get to class. Nervous parents led them through the barriers on Wall Street. The NYPD helped funnel the children, anything to ease their fears while some protestors chanted “follow those kids!”

“These guys are terrorists, yelling at little kids,” one father said.

“For them it’s horrible. They’re afraid of all the crowds. We’re not even able to get through. They’re just, he’s … very afraid now,” a mother added.

One protester followed a father and his little daughter all the way down the block. As the school day ended just after 3 p.m. children trickled out of Leman Manhattan Prep on Broad Street. Smith heard a 4-year-old boy telling his mom he was scared. He told Smith it looked like a parade.

Two cops are in the hospital tonight, one for a cut on his hand that he got when something sharp was thrown at him and another for eye injuries he received when a substance was thrown in his face. No video of that yet or of the kids braving the crowd on their way to school, but watch this revealing CNN clip via Greg Hengler in which a guy who claims he’s sympathetic to the movement reports protesters flicking lit cigarettes at cops in an attempt to provoke them. This is what democracy looks like, I guess.

Update: There’s no such thing as “too soon” when it comes to indoctrination. Maybe these little guys will be tasked with heckling schoolkids at the next protest?

“We have power, we have friends, nothing will stop us, we fight till the end!” hollered Patrick Inosanto, a 10-year-old fifth grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 261. Inosanto was dwarfed by the throngs of protesters he marched with — but they repeated his chants and amplified his cheers through the people’s mic.

Inosanto’s group calls itself the “children’s brigade,” after a similar protest action in Oakland, Calif. It is part of the 99% School, according to the group’s spokeswoman Rivka Gewirtz Little, a movement started on Oct. 3 by parents in East Harlem that works in support of Occupy Wall Street by holding teach-ins for children and families.

After an afternoon of speeches in Union Square that focused on educational freedom for college students, the 99% School conducted its own march to Foley Square. “We’re here to show that college isn’t separate from K-12 education, it’s all connected,” said Marissa Torres, a fifth-grade teacher at Brooklyn’s P.S. 261 and an organizer of the march. According to Torres, teachers and students from at least 15 schools participated.