Friday is already looking like it will be tense, as the city plans to clear out protesters, purportedly to clean the park, but also to bar protesters from bringing in sleeping bags and other gear when they return.
Fortunately, Mayor Bloomberg has backed off, according to NPR reports this morning. But what are the chances of OWS becoming a durable political force?
If you remember the '60's and '70's, Todd Gitlin's name may be familiar. He headed SDS -- Students for a Democratic Society -- early on. Now he's a professor at Columbia with a long, respected career as teacher, activist, and novelist. He and Mark Naison, a younger Gitlin and an organizer of Congress of Racial Equality, know protest. They know how to assess the future of a movement like OWS.
Both are basically optimistic.
Winter is coming, and with the ban on building structures the protesters will be pressed to hold their ground against the elements. "The most important thing is keeping the movement together in operational spaces," Naison says. "The space issue is going to be key. The movement keeps building, but you're running this race against time in terms of keeping something outdoors." He floated the possibility of squatting in empty luxury condos or commercial spaces, as occurred in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The protesters could also find housing with sympathetic church groups.
While the weather may seem like a trivial issue in the face of Occupy Wall Street's growing momentum and legitimacy, the biggest risk to the demonstrations' proliferation may be if "the middle-class kids just get tired and go home. That would take a lot of steam out of it," Naison says. "The only problem is they might not have nice middle-class lives to go back to anymore. The economy isn't improving. What do they have as an alternative?"
In Gitlin's view, "It's conceivable that the movement could hibernate like a bear for the winter months and reemerge. Then it might have a different agenda depending on political arrangements. But the insurgent energy will still be there."
Mark Naison would seem to confirm that view.
... He salutes the group's exponential growth: "This now has catalyzed a huge variety of people who are dissatisfied with the way things are going politically, rampant unemployment, the increasing concentration of wealth at the top, and with the Obama administration. What I see here is a coalition of a variety of different forces concerned with social and economic justice issues that I haven't seen since the sixties. And it caught everybody by surprise!"
Of course, the support of a huge and diverse American population will be the determining factor. How is OWS doing across the broader culture?
When even a Fox News readers' poll puts support for the Occupy Wall Street protests at more than 60 percent, it's safe to say we have something of a movement on our hands. The demonstrations are approaching the one-month mark stronger than ever, expanding beyond New York to cities across the world. ...Daily Intel, New York Magazine
