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It’s sunny now in the city of Atlanta, and with nicer weather has come a more festive atmosphere in the park. There are people splayed out all over the place, playing music, talking, or working. The Occupation continues to grow substantially; from sixty-one tents on Friday night, I count seventy-one tents today. The park’s actually started to look crowded.

At some point the city caved on sanitation and delivered seven porta-potties to the edge of the park. I wonder if, when an inevitable court case comes out of the eviction, the fact that the city provided the Occupiers with logistical resources will be used as evidence that the civic government accepted their presence.

Two tents have taken up the village square, and are being used as an impromptu church, with an altar set up and a congregation singing. To the west side of the park, a frame of PVC pipe has been built and dyed patterned fabrics hung from it to make walls; here, people are commemorating Sukkot, a Jewish holiday that marks the time that the Israelites were supposed to have spent in the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt.

There’s a new screen tent attached to the Media tent, with a colorful sign on it that says “Child Care”; on Saturday, apparently, the General Assembly reached a consensus that they would provide free childcare at the park.

From somewhere, I can hear Spanish guitar music playing over a stereo.

There’s a length of wood fencing on which people can share their stories; on it someone has pinned Dilbert cartoons.

There are dogs everywhere now.

The Tea Party’s Most-Wanted Communist

I’ve been hearing rumors about an adversarial relationship with the police fostered by CopWatch, and so I’ve come to the Occupation today with the intent in mind to find a CopWatcher and interview him or her. CopWatchers are identifiable by bright orange shirts, cell phone cameras, and a slight air of anarchism. Most of the protesters are marching down the Martin Luther King memorial for a rally; luckily, I find a CopWatcher that’s staying behind.

Erika has black hair and classically styled tattoos, and tells us that after a photo of her with a sign from a rally appeared online, the Tea Party named her one of its “most wanted” Communists.

She hasn’t done any CopWatch for the Occupation; in fact, this is her first full day out here. She went to a “Know Your Rights” training some time ago, which was followed by a CopWatch training – and she has acted as CopWatch for some of the Troy Davis marches. She believes that CopWatch exists to hold the police accountable and prevent police brutality.

“I’m probably not the best person to talk to about CopWatch,” she tells me.

Erika hasn’t seen much of the police at this protest, but everyone seems to believe that they’ll be coming on Monday.

At least, everyone is saying they will.

“They say they are peaceful and they are peaceful.“

I’ve been interested to see how the homeless are doing with their usual haunts occupied; the two older homeless gentlemen I speak to, though, only tell me that they think it’s a very fine thing that these people are doing – and that’s about it.

Instead, I stop and talk to an older woman I see passing by, who has a shock of dyed red hair, bright pink nails, a floor-length skirt, and a thick accent. Her name is Lucy, and she is from Colombia originally, but she has lived in Atlanta for 37 years.

Lucy is a lot like me, in what she gets from this protest: Lucy is a curiosity-seeker. She’s been out here most days to see what’s going on, including the Friday of the first General Assembly. Most of what Lucy cares about are our wars overseas: adamantly, she tells us again and again that we must stop the wars, and that she hopes that the protesters will force politicians to finally do something.

She likes the protesters, though – as long as they are peaceful. If things ever get violent – which, she is quick to add, she doesn’t think they will – she will be gone as quickly as she can be.

Good homeless and bad homeless

I see a skinny kid in a baggy hoodie, torn up chucks, and ripped jeans, and ask him if he’d take a moment to talk to me. His name’s Michael; he’s 21 years old, and homeless – he’d been living and sleeping on the streets before he found the Occupation – literally found, as he stumbled across it while he was walking to the hookah bar on Sunday afternoon.

Michael’s here because he wants to establish change; he says that the government keeps people brainwashed, and because he knows the system is corrupt. The first time he was ever arrested, he tells us, he was 12 years old, and it was on false charges. He tells us he went to juvie because the system is corrupt.

Michael says he’s been arrested 11 times since then, and only twice has he ever been guilty.

Michael works with Tactical Unity these days, and Tactical Unity “basically keeps the peace”. He says to me that the homeless in the park aren’t the problem: there’s good homeless and bad homeless. The bad homeless are the problem, he says; they bring in drugs and liquor, steal, and get in fights. On the other hand, a lot of the people most involved are “technically homeless”, and they work pretty damn hard.

Mostly they try to politely discourage the “bad homeless” from hanging out in the park; if they get to be a real problem, TU fetches an Ambassador – fancy title for a park police – to escort them out. That’s an interesting relationship. This is an organization squatting illegally in a public park; they are at odds with the city; a great deal of their rhetoric is anti-cop; and yet, their own mediation specialists call in the police or their equivalent when they reach the end of their capacity to solve a problem.

Michael is actually thriving here. He’s sleeping well, and he’s sleeping a lot; normally, he tells me, he has to sleep on MARTA trains. He’s been eating well, too. But he doesn’t imagine the Occupation will last.

“If we got the help like LA did … ” he says, referencing that the mayor of LA has allowed protesters to stay indefinitely. Instead, though, he gives it a week.

I ask him what he’ll do then. LA, he says. I ask him if that’s for another Occupation.

No; he’s going to LA to train in fiber optics, just as soon as Bank of America will unlock his account.

CopWatch, round II

As I’m walking back to headquarter, I pass a young guy talking animatedly to a man about the ideals of the movement and about CopWatch. I listen a while, then ask if I can interview him. Sure, he tells me – as long as I don’t use his name.

CopWatch’s work is pretty simple: they monitor the police, get badge numbers and names, and tape interactions. They hold police accountable.

I tell him I’d heard there was an altercation between a CopWatcher and a policeman that came to file a report when three volunteers had their laptops stolen from HQ. He alleges that the person that called the police in was actually an informant; the CopWatcher, who was a potential witness to the theft, simply absolutely refused to give the police officer any information.

That’s standard CopWatch policy, he informed us. Since CopWatch wants to operate in risky neighborhoods, they maintain legitimacy through total non-cooperation. When pressed, he says that a CopWatcher would cooperate in the event of a subpoena or a warrant.

I ask him whether he believes the police have any part in this movement, and – after insisting that this is his opinion, not CopWatch’s – he tells me that the police’s role is to protect the upper classes; in a society where the workers controlled the means of production, he believes police would be redundant.

“Historically,” he says, “the police are last to join a revolution, because their duty is to enforce their own oppression.”

All oppression can be removed, he believes; he is an anarcho-Communist in the school of Kropotkin. He wants to see a true revolution, in which workers take over the means of production and manage them themselves.

He’s also got the most realistic idea of what the Occupation can and should accomplish of anyone I’ve spoken to yet.

He doesn’t see it lasting more than another two weeks. But the Occupation represents a break from capitalist society, he says – an existential break, if not a temporal one. He believes that its purpose is to get people involved and get them talking to each other, to forge new relationships, and to help them break out of the mindset of the capitalist system.

That’s a pretty good point to hammer in. He doesn’t believe that this Occupation will do much of anything, in the here-and-now, and he doesn’t believe it will last much longer. But out of the community they’re building in Woodruff Park, there will be strong enough bonds to begin building a real movement that will go much further.