How Occupy Wall Street Still Explains Politics Today

The date is October 15th, 2011, and it’s the height of Occupy Wall Street. The movement had launched barely a month earlier, when hundreds of activists with sleeping bags descended on Zuccotti Park, a small public space blocks away from Wall Street, to protest growing income inequality, brutal government austerity measures, and other signs of a seriously unjust economy. Around midday thousands of us stream out of our home base and hit the streets, heading uptown.

As the cops stretch their line to block us, people pour through the gaps like streams of water, forcing them to race us and try to regroup at the next intersection. There are just too many of us, and we’re too fast, too relentless, so they give us the streets, deciding to simply follow us as we snake our way between cars like waves around boulders. Soon, the march breaks up into different groups, each going to a branch of a different bank, and blocking their entrances. We shut the banks down for hours, until dozens are arrested.