“I’m going back,” said Jesse Le Greca, who’d become one of the movement’s most visible members after a video of him debating a Fox News reporter went viral. “I feel it is important to claim a space, but if we are not allowed to use the First Amendment at Zuccotti we will certainly find another visible location. The First Amendment is not up for negotiation, even if mayors like [Mike] Bloomberg or [Oakland’s Jean] Quan decide to treat their respective police forces as if they were their own personal praetorian guards.”
Thousands of people who want to resist the state and the capitalist system aren’t going to stop doing it because the system pushes back. It’s an encouragement. That was the tone at Occupy D.C. Nobody I talked to wanted to hear about the crazy “stop occupying” theory…
“It’s a symbol to show we have the right to be here,” said Ball. “It’s the people’s land. Also, for political reasons, it’s a slap in the face of the people in power to be here. We’re not above the law here, but we don’t agree with a lot of the laws here. Trespassing. All the little things—you can’t put your bike on that fence.” He pointed to a fence that guarded the statue of the Civil War general who leant his name to the park. “We’re not lawless, but there are no laws. That’s our goal, to create a new form of society, a new form of community, where we don’t need external laws to tell us how to live.”
No quick political strategy there. To some protesters, the camps have becomes ends unto themselves. The presence of homeless people in the park was a feature, not a bug.
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