Occupy Wall Street has moved far beyond Wall Street. It's in the public spaces - the parks and plaza - from New York City to Portland, Oregon, to Dallas to Oakland and more, cities and towns across the country.
The sight of actual occupiers camping in the actual physical public spaces has its benefits - visuals on the news, coverage in the newspapers, and a forceful intrusion into the consciousness of the citizenry. But there is also a disadvantage to occupying actual physical space: law enforcement at all levels knows how to break up such public demonstrations. Police units all across the country, from the smallest of local forces to large cities such as Los Angeles and New York, have been collecting the most technologically advanced riot gear manufactured, all funded by grants from Homeland Security. They are prepared to deal with the actual bodies of political protestors: breaking heads, gassing, handcuffing, detention for days without arraignments, and legal charges of potential felonies that can strip the voting rights from a convicted citizen for life. Bloomberg and Quan think they can get rid of the OWS movement by moving the people out of the actual public spaces. They cite their laws unfairly; they pass dead-of-night, secret resolutions; they send in black-helmeted, armored storm troopers with batons, gas grenades, and sound bombs.
What the law-and-order forces don't understand is that they can't control public space with actual riot squads. They can't stop the OWS message "We are the 99%" from reaching the public. That's because "public space," which has has been defined as physical space by the city governments, is now also virtual space. The public square now exists wherever there is a public debate happening on newspaper comments boards or blog spaces. These forms of public space reach hundreds of thousands of readers. The drumbeats are much louder in virtual space. These are the hundreds of virtual public parks and squares that we must now occupy, and thousands and thousands of our fellow citizens pass through them every day. By standing up and bullhorning our messages in these spaces, we testify to the entire community that, yes, we are here, where they live. We are their neighbors. We believe that the 99% deserve to have power in this country, not the 1%. We want them too know that they, too, are in the 99%, and that we have mutual interests.
How do we create an "Occupy Wall Street - Virtual Public Spaces" wing? We do it by flooding the comments and LTE pages of every on-line version of our state and local newspapers, new virtual publication, every internet magazine, and every blog in the country. By broadcasting our message into virtual public space, we can even begin to get the message into the ultimate "space" of the public: the space in their heads, the space in their consciousnesses.
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