Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, is unable to publicly share his thoughts on the Occupy Movement and instead suggested that we post those of his friend, Pavlov Katz. I received this post a few days ago, finally got a chance to read it, liked it and decided to start posting Pavlov's thoughts. I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of Steve and Pavlov's posts under the Occupy tag.

Hi everyone,

It's been a really long time since I last wrote. I left New York for a few weeks in early December, and returned later in the month. The timing wasn't too good, since very little happened around here during the holidays, and there was a lot of frustrating, idle time. One positive thing that did happen during that time, though, was that a lot of people worked on creating a sense of community among us who are staying at one of the churches in the upper west side. I'd originally thought of it as simply a place to sleep, and to simply leave in the morning and start my real day downtown at OWS. But some more insightful people saw it as more than that, as a chance to develop our identity as a group, a subsection of OWS. The original motivation for this might have been simple necessity– to reduce thefts and conflicts, but in any case, it's turned into an actual community, an opportunity to meet new people and work together constructively.

Otherwise, things were scattered and thin through late December, until New Year's eve. Earlier in the evening a few of us went around town, happy to get away from the uninspired atmosphere, but came back to the area and walked into Zucotti Park around 10 pm. Several hundred people were there, a low-level party. More people arrived steadily, and the absurdity of the situation became embarrassingly apparent. Here we are, 300, 400, 500 of us, in a park we lived in, a park from which we changed world history, until a mere six ago. And now we're surrounded by standing metal barricades which enforce arbitrary, stupid rules which are arguably illegal. Say, what about these standing metal barricades, anyway?

Eventually a few of the more daring–or bored, or angry, or crazy, who knows?– among us grabbed one of those barricades, detached it from the others, and pulled it away, dropping it ten feet away. Some private security guards contracted out by Brookfield Properties ran out and pulled the barricade back and re-attached it. A few minutes later on the other side of the park, someone pulls another, with the same result. Each time a barricade is removed, a crowd gathers and cheers. Some security guards appear ready to fight over them. As they grab the barricades back and swear angrily, it becomes obvious these people are not trained for this sort of thing. Soon enough the police pull them back and do the work themselves.

After a while a pioneering sort takes a barricade, but instead of dropping it in a random spot, drags it through the crowd into the middle of the park. Maybe no-one had done it before because they were afraid of accidentally hitting someone with it, but with some yelling the path cleared. Well, the police were not about to wade through the crowd to retrieve it, so they let it go. A few minutes later, someone dragged another to the middle. Then another. Soon enoughit simply became the thing to do. A sociologist would have loved it. I actually felt awkward and out of place because I wasn't dragging barricades. The ten-foot-long metal structures began piling up. Soon enough there were so many gaps that anyone could enter or leave the park easily. Someone climbed atop the barricade pile, then another. Soon a crowd of five or ten people stood on top of the five-foot mound, jumping rhythmically on it like a trampoline sort of. Drummers arrived. People were chanting, drumming, dancing, and bouncing on barricades. "Whose year? Our year!" "Occupy 2012!" More people arrived and the crowd became so thick the police seemed to disappear in the background. Someone set up a projector in the park and beamed images onto a building across the street. And that's how we brought in the new year.

It was indescribably fun. The numbers were on our side. We had a huge number of people, just as the police ranks must have been spread thin. I assume there were too many needed in Times Square and other areas. Bloomberg's "private army" (his term) couldn't spare one or two hundred troops, as they might have otherwise. So, we had our moment. The best thing about it was it was totally organic. I doubt anyone had planned it, and it didn't matter anyway. Through sheer inspiration and a little trial and error, we collectively hit upon a winning strategy, carried it out, and celebrated, all at the same time. This was the spirit that started OWS in the first place, and carried it through those early weeks in the park. Yes, there were working groups and on-line discussions even back then, but there was the crowd, the face-to-face contact, the infectious enthusiasm. Since the November 15th raid a lot of that had been lost. Through all our attempts to re-organize, we'd lost a lot of the human contact, so the New Year's party in the park reminded all of us who we are and what we're capable of. We broke the rules, showed the world we're still here, and hurt nobody in the process (and only a few of us were bruised by police).

Not long after midnight, though, the magic began to dissipate, and people decided to keep the energy going with a march around town. I bailed out after a few blocks, not seeing the point. Later, around Union Square, I think, nearly all the marchers left were detained and cuffed. Sixty arrested, some were simply detained and never processed, and all were out by early morning.

Over the next few days, sober reality began to settle in. I found out that Obama signed the bill on the 31st. Now anyone can be picked up for any reason, or for no reason, and held indefinitely. 2012 begins with the realization that the US is now under a state of martial law. Constitution, Bill of Rights, R.I.P.

There's an expression that says something like: "Don't sit and wait for the storm to end. Learn to dance in the rain." I'm starting to figure this out. There is an element of confusion nearly everywhere in OWS. About half of OWS meetings seem to include occasional shouting matches. How many arguments and potential fights have I helped defuse? We get visitors from other Occupy sites. They're surprised at all the conflict. The other night at a housing meeting, one such visitor said, "The rest of us around the country look up to you and try to emulate you. But you act like a bunch of children." Others say similar things.

I think a lot about this. Why is the New York occupation so much more chaotic than the others? Probably a number of reasons: We're a lot bigger. This is New York City, everything is more charged and intense here. The fact that we're a center of attentionn and that we're more dysfunctional seems like a contradiction, but in a way it makes sense. Things that happen here are more important, so people feel more strongly about everything. Also, we might attract people who want to be in the spotlight, whereas an Occupy site in the west or midwest might draw more quiet people who just want to work.

What I'm coming to realize and accept is that nearly every problem that could exist here does. I could write a book about the problems of nearly any group here. A bad decision here, someone who talks and doesn't listen there, a violent threat over nothing, an important task completely overlooked, young people over-relying on technology for communication, I could go on all day listing things.

I wonder, maybe every exciting, dynamic, important movement in history is filled with seemingly endless, ridiculous mistakes and problems. At other times I wonder if we're just a microcosm of American society, that we as a nation have become so detached from reality and common sense that we're incapable of correcting ourselves, beyond the point of no return. Or maybe I'd find the same problems anywhere. I don't know. In any case, I stay here because with all the problems, people still care, and most of are here for ideals, and with all the yelling and confusion and mistakes, we still manage to get things done, even in the winter, even without our park, and even with our money running out.

Thursday night a few of us were on the A train when five cops got on. They stood together for a few stops, then took up positions at different doors for a few more stops. They got off the train right behind us and seemed to follow us a way down the platform. It wasn't until we started up the steps that we noticed they were gone…I don't think they knew we were OWS. I think it's more likely that we looked freaky or poor, that we didn't fit in with Bloomberg and Company's vision of the new New York, and were letting us know.

Oh, one more thing: Police raided the Global Revolution building in Brooklyn a few days ago. Apparently they were the first group to livestream us. Someone I know was arrested for taking pictures of cops badge numbers. They're trying to take our "eyes" away. Okay, unfortunately I don't have a quite place to edit this, so I'll just send it out as is. Til later,

Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, has started emailing his thoughts from the front lines of the Occupy movement.  Since this blog has lain dormant for so long, I decided to lend it to him.  I will post the backlog of messages about once a day and then start posting them as they come in.  I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of his posts under the Occupy tag.

Hi everyone,

It’s been slow around here since my last post. Strange to say this, since up to recently things have been frantic.

We’re still hanging in, securing housing for ourselves and running meetings again. I went to a spokes council meeting the other night. It was kind of nice to see the process functioning. Spokes council is a cumbersome process, but it’s quite democratic. Of course, it’s a messy process, lots of arguments, and then the next day everyone else yells about the decisions made. Once you explain the reasons, they lower the volume of their yelling a bit. I suppose groups making decisions about how to conduct themselves is by nature complicated and controversial and always will be.

The past few days in particular have been difficult. A lot of people arguing, about all kinds of things. I think this is partly because we’re all stressed about not having a home, and partly because we’re confused about our mission at this point. With Thanksgiving coming up it’s unlikely much will be done about this in the next few days.

One on-going argument involves the kitchen and where to send food. I hear all kinds of rumors, and I don’t go to their meetings, so I’m not an expert on the subject, but it seems a big part of the conflict is about whether to send food to the park or not. Some people say eveyone needs to be fed, so send food to the park as well as the working groups and the churches where people are staying. Others say just feed the working groups and the churches and don’t feed the people at the park, because they’re not working, they’re just hanging around being unproductive. In a sense, this is a holdover of the old conflict that went on when we lived in the park, concerning the two “classes” of people in OWS– working group members versus homeless people accused of not being part of the movement but just hanging aroud for free stuff.

I think there’s another aspect to this conflict, and I’ve begun voicing it around here. The question of sending resources to the park underscores the fact that we haven’t really adapted to the raid yet. We have to ask ourselves this question: Do we want to “keep” the park, or not? If we keep it, we have to make a conscientious decision to do so, and make a real presence there, complete with political signs, tabling, a message, a point. Then when people show up they’ll see something of substance, something of us, a reason for being there. If we decide to abandon it, we should put the message out that the park is no longer ours, that that phase of our movement is over.

Of course, there are other questions within this larger one. If we stay there, just how will we maintain our presence, and if we leave, where will we go, how will we communicate our message. But these questions will be easier once we address the main question. Avoiding this question, I think, is a big mistake, because it leaves us halfway inbetween. It makes us look bad, and it wastes our time and resources.

The current scene at the park is really pitiful. The metal gates surround it, with entrances on either side street, not on Broadway. This discourages the public from entering the park, which surely is the point. I just walked by a few minutes ago on the way to the library here, and there were about 20 people inside, and 10 or 15 outside the gate on Broadway. The people inside were smoking or just sitting around, the people on Broadway had some signs, a 9/11 conspiracist, some religious speaker. There were almost as many private security guards, and a few police. Some tourists, a camera team.

It’s awful to even go by and witness this, which must be why so few of us do. It gives the impression the movement is dead, that the police succeeded in crushing us and that we’re simply gone. This is not true, but in the absence of a strong, focused on-line presence, this visual symbolism goes a long way.

Hmm, running low on time here at the library, so let me make this point: Losing the park a month or two would have been fatal to us, but by now we’ve implanted our ideas into the consciousness of the nation and the world to the point where that physical location isn’t so necessary. Just yesterday I talked with people who are organizing an occupation in Utah and heard about Occupy Newark starting up, to name a few. As one person’s sign said, “You can’t evict an idea.”

Okay, all for now, and hopefully I’ll have more substance for you all next time. Feel free to forward this around.

Steve

Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, has started emailing his thoughts from the front lines of the Occupy movement.  Since this blog has lain dormant for so long, I decided to lend it to him.  I will post the backlog of messages about once a day and then start posting them as they come in.  I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of his posts under the Occupy tag.

Hi everyone,

It's Saturday morning, things are actually quiet enough for me to sit and write. Here's what happened since my last, kind of frantic, message early Thursday afternoon.

I walked over to City Hall where I heard a rally was supposed to be held to demand Bloomberg's resignation. I just missed it, people had already left for Foley Square. On the way over I made another attempt to call someone here at the storage place, and by chance happened to catch him, and find out the space was open, so I turned around and came back here. Had I not reached him, I would have gone to Foley Square and then to the Brooklyn Bridge, and witnessed history, or gotten arrested, or beaten up.

You probably know better than me what happened there. I don't have video capabilities on this old computer. In any case, there were many, many people in Foley Square, and even more at the bridge, 5,000, I heard? Lots of pushing and shoving, hundreds of arrests throughout the day, I think. I was here helping restore the medical supplies shelf when one of the medics got a call that trouble was about to start, and we helped pack up bandages, etc. We were out of Maalox, which is used as an antidote to pepper spray. The shelf has thinned out considerably this week, since the police took the medical tent and all the supplies they had there.

Yes, for those who don't understand what this is about: the police confiscated and destroyed our medical supplies.

In an incident which got much more publicity than the medical supplies, the police also raided the library. It was quite a library. I found a number of really good books I don't usually see. (I'd taken out Matt Taibbi's Griftopia, the Battle of Seattle, and a Murray Bookchin book, all gone, since they were in my tent.) They had 4,000 books in the park. The police took them all the night of the raid. The library folks went to the Sanitation Department where all the confiscated items are stored, and recovered 1,000 of them, but many of them were in bad condition. All the periodicals, and tables to put stuff on, are gone. Their computers were smashed.

Interestingly, the day after the raid, they went back into the park and tried to set up a small version of the library. When it began to rain and they covered the books with plastic, the police said they weren't allowed to cover them, so they got wet and ruined. At another point they brought out some books and had them confiscated again.

I can vouch for the fact claim that the computers were destroyed. When I went to the Sanitation Dept to get my duffel bag back, I saw a few destroyed computers. They were actually bent in the middle, as if someone had tried to crush them. I found my bag and got some clothes back. The things in the pocket were pretty ruined, though. The lenses from my sunglasses had been popped out, and a container of powder had broken. I thought this could have been through carelessness, just the confusion of things being thrown into a pile. But someone else here got his backpack back, and a small computer tucked in the middle of it was smashed. He'd seled the pack with duct tape, which hadn't been open. The only explanation, then, was what we'd heard from others– that it had been run through a trash compactor. In retrospect, that must have happened to my bag too.

This information needs to be spread and understood. Anyone who believes the mayor had us kicked out of the park to protect the neighborhood or to protect our safety should understood that these stated reasons are simply lies. Bloomberg is trying to silence and destroy our movement. His troops attacked out headquarters, stole our supplies, and is doing what he can to see that we don't return. He has targeted high-profile organizers for arrest. It isn't just Bloomberg, of course. The crackdown on Occupy sites around the country has been co-ordinated on a federal level. This has been reported in the media.

I read an interesting editorial saying, essentially, that Bloomberg is helping our movement in the same way that George Wallace and others helped the civil rights movement, by attacking it in an ugly, clumsy, transparent manner and turning people who might otherwise not care into supporters.

This morning I actually took some time to read some newspapers. The NYT, as far as I could see, has absolutely nothing about us. The Daily News, which has been providing much more coverage, today has an incredible quote from Bloomberg. Says the Daily News:

The mayor, on his weekly radio show, defended his decision to evict the park protesters in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

"One of the surest signs we did the right thing is that nobody in the city, as far as I know, is calling for the return of the tarps, tents and encampment of Zuccotti Park, the mayor said.

"Now there are protesters that are probably calling for it. But I don't know of any elected officials who have stood up."

This statement is wrong in so many ways it's hard to know where to start. Nobody is calling for a return to the park? What? All kinds of people are, and what? Protesters aren't people? Only elected officials are? And even the last statement is wrong, since there was a city councilman arrested and beaten the other day. Presumably, he's calling for our return to the park. The statement demonstrates a total disconnect between Bloomberg and most of the city, an absurd level of arrogance, a cartoon character of the 1%.

I just overheard Zach from the library, with the big sideburns, who you might have seen photos of, across the room now, sorting through the mangled books. "You've got to love it when the books that are destroyed are really ironic." Like what, someone asks. "Peace in a World of Conflict… You can't get any better than destroying a book like 1984. It's almost like they did it on purpose because they thought it was funny."

Okay, as far as the movement in general, we were hit hard Monday night, and again on Thursday during the actions. This week has been spent on damage control. Most people, as far as I know, are still in jail. We're still scrambling to deal with housing for us. Four churches are putting people up. I've been staying in one on the upper west side. Kitchen has been sending meals to the churches, and we've been sending supplies.

The situation in the park is weird. There are metal police barricades around the whole thing, with one little area for entering and exiting. This morning I saw 20 or 30 people there, yesterday evening there were more. The police won't allow large things in, like pans of food, or shelves of books. Enforcement is arbitrary, keeps us off balance, and makes it, for the time being, impossible to build anything in the way of a movement there, which surely is the intention.

I can't imagine any possible legal ground for police policy in the park. What possible justification, how could the regulations be written? Lawyers are working on it now, but in the meantime, we can't do much. Aside from all the arguing and confusion over logistics, by people who haven't slept enough and have recently gotten out of jail or beaten up by police, people are generally positive about things. Everyone understands that Bloomberg and his police look awful now, in the eyes of most of the country. They made absolute fools of themselves, and despite media reports that "police clash with protesters," or of some reports of nearly equal numbers of injuries between police and protesters (???????), by media outlets which until recently refered to the mayor as "and advocate of free speech," most thinking people understand the truth. We stand for average people in the is country and against criminal banks and multi-billion dollar theft, and have been attacked for it, by a police force run by the 12th richest person in America.

We took some hits this week, but we'll be back. Just how, we haven't figrued out yet. In fact, last night we had the first meeting we've had since this happened. It took until then to even get the chance to get together and talk, and we'll need to talk a little more before we address some big questions: How much energy do we spend trying to take back the park and making it again our center? Do we look for another location? Or do we decentralize, with the idea that the park as a central location served the purpose of embedding the idea of our movement in the eyes of the country and the world, and is not needed any more. People have been talking about squats. Can we use squatted buildings as our new center, or centers? We've been thinking of Tahrir Square as a model, but every situation is different, this is not Egypt.

Riot police have been posted outside the storage space here. Building (teacher's union) security has been nervous, tightening up the rules some. I'd thought things would return to some sort of normal after the raid, but it looks like things have progressed to a new stage…It's funny, I always read these critiques of our movement, often by 60s left people and others often on our side, saying we need leaders to "emerge" from amongst us. They don't understand: Leaders are easier to target. Though we are officially leaderless, as in any collection of people, certain ones take on more responsibility and receive more attention than others. And this week, such people have been targeted for arrest. And doesn't anyone remember what happened to Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, and others? Thanks for the advice, but we're going to do it this way.

I hear another argument brewing. It's been quiet for almost an hour! Til next time,

Steve

Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, has started emailing his thoughts from the front lines of the Occupy movement.  Since this blog has lain dormant for so long, I decided to lend it to him.  I will post the backlog of messages about once a day and then start posting them as they come in.  I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of his posts under the Occupy tag.

Hi folks,

A quick one, if I can finish in 14 minutes.

Got back into the city around 8 a.m., and spent the morning running around Broadway, Wall Strreet and surrounding streets and intersections. Kind of reminded me of DC demos around'00 and '01, but without the tear gas, fortunately.

People blocked entrances to Wall Street, and there was a huge crowd behind the NYSE, on Exchange Street. Cops only allowed people with work IDs through the barricades, but at times there were so many demonstrators that the police blocked everyone in, which was a victory for us. Someone said the start of the 9:30 NYSE was delayed, but it looks like that was not true. So we didn't actually prevent the official start, but did delay a lot of people, presumably, cause a lot of headaches, and made headlines again.

The scene in Zucotti Park is crazy. Barricades everywhere, police keep changing where you can enter and exit. All kinds of commotion. Cheers of victory, shouts of anger, irritation at this barricade and that. After a while I wonder, where is all this headed, what are we accomplishing, what should we be doing?

But we're temporarily disoriented, three days since our eviction, and where do we even go to talk with each other? Hopefully over the coming days we'll answer some questions: what do we do next, etc.

Police are being annoying, at times brutal, most of us have been able to avoid direct confrtonttation and arrest. Just move when they tell you to, then go back ten seconds later when they've walked away. Cat and mouse.

Storage unit closed today, hopefully we'll be in tomorrow. Okay, 6 minutes to go, will try to send to as many people as possible. Send this report anywhere you like.

–Steve