Hopefully by now you’ve seen pictures from some of the Occupy movement rallies. They show average citizens energized, angry, and marching. But what about the rest of the time? What do protestors do when they’re not protesting? How do you sustain passion for a cause when you’re living it 24/7?

I had the chance to go to the Occupy STL camp in Kiener Plaza and was moved by what I saw. It’s not just some conclave of dirty hippies or college students trying to skip out of class. It’s a group of people inspired by the events of the Arab spring who want to bring similar economic changes to our country. To take back the American Dream from corporate greed by raising awareness and by demanding reform in the next election cycle. How do they do this? By more than just marches. They host general assemblies, economic seminars, film screenings, and they issue policy statements. At 1:00 pm on a Tuesday the crowd was sparse, but to quote one of the organizers Paul, “We may look like we don’t have anyone here, but there are hundreds of thousands of people behind us.”

[cincopa AIEAuxaDJUMS]

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It’s possible that the biggest obstacle to justice is the kindness and generosity of charity. No example can better illustrate this than St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay’s stance that Occupy STL will have to leave its “home” in Kiener Plaza because the Salvation Army’s Tree of Lights will be moving in.

The Tree of Lights, in fact the Salvation Army itself, represents the failure of our society to put in place a strong enough government safety net to protect individuals from the abuses of runaway capitalism or just plain misfortune.

The Occupiers are reminding us that the balance between the benefits of capitalism (honoring creativity, autonomy, strategic thinking, and optimal use of resources) and the regulations that are necessary to keep it in check has tilted too far in the direction of runaway capitalism. As is evident now, we have an economic system that in many ways is more like a slot machine in Vegas, which produces nothing but rearranges wealth in a way in which “the house” makes a profit on all transactions. Conservatives mistakenly think that “the house” is the government, but if that was so why would the government be in such debt while many large corporations on sitting on mountains of cash.

Does Mayor Slay really believe that there is no other location in a metropolitan area as large as St. Louis where a signature Christmas tree could be placed? There are dozens in and around the modest downtown St. Louis area.

What could represent that dominant culture in America more than all the pomp and circumstance that goes with a public Christmas tree lighting? The dominant culture will always survive; it’s too big to fail. The needs of the disenfranchised, i.e. those represented by the “Occupiers,” cannot be met without strong societal support. That help can come in small ways such as moving a Christmas tree rather than protestors making a point, or in large ways such as curbing the power of financial institutions, embracing a full-employment economy, and protecting consumer interests.

The Salvation Army and its Christmas tree is a minimal “feel good” for the recipients of the charity. It is a major “feel good” for the donors who can pat themselves on the back. Each community can brag about how generous it is while poverty remains unabated.

The Occupy movement is a healthy step in the evolution of the American economy from business-centric to being responsive to labor and consumers. To place petty and symbolic obstacles in its way shows a crass insensitivity to the actual quality of life for people in pain. The dominant society will remain. The trick is to make it do so while being inclusive.

Mayor Slay, gather your brain trust and figure out another place to put the Christmas tree. Then, when you have some free time, put your main focus on the issues of importance to the Occupiers.

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When you’re a parent, there is plenty to feel guilty about.  My kids don’t eat enough vegetables, I don’t always  keep my cool during temper tantrums (I’m pretty sure there is surveillance footage from the parking lot of Shop N Save to verify this), and there will never be enough money in their college fund to ensure they don’t graduate with a mountain of debt.  But one item on my own parental guilt list that I’ve been dwelling on lately is that we haven’t done a particularly good job introducing our daughters to current events.  When I was growing up, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was on our breakfast table every morning, and Tom Brokaw was on our television every night at 5:30.  It wasn’t the New York Times or the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, but it was enough to, almost by osmosis, make me think from a very young age about what was going on in the world outside my neighborhood.  One of my first vivid memories was watching the American hostages being released from Iran on TV.  I was five.

But the way we get news has changed radically since the 1980s.  My husband and I never watch the nightly newscast on NBC, ABC, or CBS, and we stopped having the newspaper delivered a few years back.  We get our news in a very solitary way, reading articles on various websites and then reading longer, more in-depth articles in the New Yorker.  Our daughters (ages 4, 5, and 7) don’t see or read news coverage on a regular basis themselves.  We talk about politics or world events at the dinner table or at family gatherings, but they don’t have daily doses of news in the same way my husband and I did as children.

So, when we had the unusually lucky circumstance last Friday of both my husband being off work and my daughters being off school, we thought it would be a good idea for the girls to see some news firsthand: we headed down to Occupy St. Louis at Kiener Plaza.  My husband and I had followed the spread of the Occupy movement from New York to cities worldwide, and supported the idea of a populist movement from the left.  But we hadn’t seen it for ourselves, so we picked up a case of bottled water and some snacks to donate to the Occupiers and headed down.

On the way, we talked to the girls about what Occupy St. Louis was about and how it was part of a larger movement.  In language we hoped at least our oldest two would understand, we talked about why people would take the time to set up camp in the middle of downtown St. Louis and what exactly it was they were trying to draw attention to.  The girls asked some good questions, “What are taxes?  What do they pay for?” “Who decides how much money people get at their jobs?” and it was humbling to fumble around trying to give clear explanations to them.

Parking was easy, the weather was nice, and when we got down to Kiener Plaza the mood was…serene.  Subdued.  Peaceful.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but Occupy St. Louis was a far cry from the angry, smelly mob of loud-mouths that certain parts of the blogosphere had written about.  There were a lot of tents set up, and posters and signs were on just about every available pillar.  Most of the occupiers seemed to be meeting in the center of Kiener Plaza and talking calmly about strategies and ideas; they were holding what they called their General Assembly.  No one rushed over to us to ask us why we were there, but there was a welcome table with a couple brochures explaining what the movement was about.  We brought the water and food we were donating to a tent set up to accept donations, and then we walked slowly around the periphery of the plaza, looking at all the posters.  We got pretty bogged down trying to explain a poster about CEO pay to the girls, but they were definitely interested in what was going on.

The internal organization of Occupy St. Louis was impressive—in addition to a welcome table, there was a kitchen/food area, a media/work area, and (as I mentioned before) a tent set up to accept donated items.  The people who were not participating in the General Assembly sat around enjoying the fall day, said hi as we walked by, and made casual conversation.

Kids being kids, my daughters were drawn to the steps by the fountain at Kiener Plaza and immediately began running up and down them and playing.  While they did this my husband and I had a strange, rambling, but pleasant conversation with a man from Oregon who, like us, seemed to be there just to see what was going on.  After a while, we decided to head back to the car and get some ice cream at Crown Candy before heading home.

There was little doubt in my mind that my daughters would remember the ice cream at Crown Candy more than our relatively brief trip to Occupy St. Louis.   But I was pleased that the girls’ first trip to a demonstration was a positive one.  On the news, demonstrations seem loud and scary, but Occupy St. Louis was a model for “peaceful assembly.”  I hoped the images of people sitting, talking earnestly about issues, saying casual hellos to those walking by would stick with them.

But you never really know what lessons your kids will learn from a particular experience, or if they’ll learn any at all.  I doubt my parents were conscious of the fact that I was riveted by the video of the hostages being released back in 1981—they were too busy taking it in themselves.  And so it is with Occupy St. Louis.  I was gratified, though, when I listened in on a conversation my sister had with my oldest daughter later that night.  She was asking my seven year-old what she had remembered from the visit to Occupy St. Louis, and my daughter said, “I remember a poster of a skinny bald guy that said, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’  That was cool.”   If my seven year-old can retain the spirit of that famous quote from Gandhi, then our little family field trip to Occupy St. Louis was time incredibly well spent.

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It’s not easy to compete with baseball for participation, media attention and parking spaces in downtown St. Louis when the Cardinals are in the National League Championship Series. So you have to count it as a significant victory when the leaderless, grassroots, pro-democracy  group known as Occupy St. Louis announces a rally and draws 1,000 people to the best rallying spot in St. Louis—Kiener Plaza.

Mingling with the crowd, I saw retired people, union members, pro-choice activists, teachers, nurses, university students, office workers, lots of media [about time!] and many individuals—like me—who share a sense of outrage at the corporate greed, anti-democratic attitudes and economic injustices that are wrecking America.  Okay, so it wasn’t the biggest turnout of all time—but, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said in an editorial today, this is a startup, grassroots movement, and this is a good start.

It was a low-key event, with none of the star-power speakers, religious invocations or confrontational tactics that one might expect. The only speech was delivered by a young woman who said she had never before been an activist, but who had visited the Occupy St. Louis encampment and had been inspired to stay.  She spoke movingly, as one of the people—a person who is struggling economically and who is being left behind as wealth continues to be ever more concentrated in the tiny, top sliver of the super-rich.

We chanted as, I’m sure, other Occupy [your city here] demonstrators did, in what I’m told is 120 U.S. cities. We held up homemade signs. We wore union t-shirts and slapped on buttons that identified us as the 99%.

And we marched. A local drumline led the way, giving our march a pulsating rhythm. One block away, we paused at Bank of America, which was ringed with barricades and police [who were the model of restraint, even though they came prepared with plastic handcuffs, just in case.]  And, as we walked the rest of our downtown route—peaceful and uncontested—I had a few thoughts…

-Many people, clearly visiting St. Louis for the baseball series, came out of their hotels and watched the march. They seemed bemused by the demonstration. I’m sure some of them saw us as crazed communists and hippies, but I hope that we raised at least a bit of awareness. Among the onlookers were hotel workers—I hope they knew that we were also marching for them and for everyone who’s in a low-wage job [or more than one], or underemployed, or unemployed, or reaching the end of his or her unemployment benefits, or in foreclosure, or living on a relative’s couch, or facing a giant medical bill, or disabled by an injury or psychological trauma caused by a pointless war.

-I also noted that some of us seem to be the same people who have been protesting some injustice or war or another for the past 40 years. I couldn’t help but ask myself why we keep having to do this, and why it has become politically and socially acceptable for lawmakers and individuals to be selfish and callous and hateful toward people whose only sin is to not have achieved wealth.

-As we marched across the busy intersection of 4^th St. and Market, we held up traffic—probably a lot of people coming downtown for the ballgame. I’m sure we inconvenienced more than one wealthy person in an oversized, gas-guzzling luxury SUV. Did they know that they were the people we were demonstrating against? Did they care?

Once, when we paused in front of St. Louis’ Old Courthouse [where Dred Scott lost his plea to remain a freed slave], I stood next to a woman cradling a six-month-old baby in a wraparound sling. Amid the din, he was sleeping peacefully.  He and his mother reminded me of my own adult children and their kids, and the threat to their futures that today’s inequalities, injustices and insensitive policies pose—and the reason that I’m still marching after all these years.

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The Wall Street protests have entered a new phase, finally beginning to gain mainstream media recognition (though still faulty and limited), while growing and spreading across the nation.

The Daily Kos broke the story that the New York Transport Workers Union has voted to join the Wall Street protests currently proceeding in New York City. The entrance of a large organized body in support of the protest firmly takes the movement out of the “few wild eyed crazies” category that some media have attempted to portray and landed it firmly in the significant movement to watched column. Already, Airline Pilots have shown up to support the protests, in full uniform. This adds not just bodies (necessary for any popular movement) but respectability that will be difficult, if not impossible to ignore.

The spread of the movement across the nation was covered last night by Keith Olberman listing on a US map more than a dozen cities in which supporting protests are being organized, including Saint Louis Mo. Keith was one of the first media figures to note the dearth of coverage of the events and speculate what media reaction would have been had a mainstream media outlet like Fox News and billionaire supporters like the Koch brothers been supporting the effort. As it is, the now infamous macing of several female protesters who were fenced in and seemed to pose no apparent threat to police or anyone else, forced coverage of the events.

If you follow the “macing” link in the previous paragraph, you will note that the ABC headline reads “Occupy Wall Street Protests Turn Violent” failing to note that it was the police who turned violent, not the protesters. Despite many accusations by police, many videos are surfacing showing authorities acting in a heavy handed manner but few to none of protesters getting violent. This coverage of the events is to be expected given the nature of America’s mainstream media corporations today.

Major media have been stating that the message of the protesters is “unclear” or “confused.” This is only true for those so insulated from the reality of the everyday person that they cannot understand popular resentment at the bankers and financiers of this nation who are directly responsible for the current economic downturn. Protesters have clearly stated that they are part of the 99% of America that did not gain anything from the Wall Street bailouts and has suffered disproportionately as a result. These are people who are disgusted by the corporate control of our Government through unlimited campaign spending which cannot be matched by ordinary citizens. The protesters realize that the best time to begin to exercise their rights of free speech to demand change, that will otherwise never materialize, is now.

Chris Hedges’ “Calling All Rebels” (video version) called for exactly the type of civil unrest that the Wall Street protesters are carrying out. Hedges went on to demonstrate approval for the action by participating and noting that “the power elites are very, very scared” of this movement and “do not want to see this grow.” Although the elites currently exercise disproportionate control of the levers of power, they are perfectly aware that a strong enough popular movement could unseat them, or at the very least upset normal operations that they rely upon.  Mr. Hedges wrote in “The Death of the Liberal Class” that “professional liberals” have sold out by accepting high paying jobs in academia, journalism, etc., and acquiesced on many of the topics that used to define liberalism. This only leaves the possibility for leadership of a new liberal social justice movement to come from ordinary people willing to take risks, even if that is because they have so little to lose.

In St. Louis, the protest is being called “Occupy Saint Louis” and will begin on October 1^st at Soldier’s Memorial Plaza in downtown St. Louis. Those in other parts of the nation should go to http://occupytogether.org to find a local protest or organize one of your own. The St. Louis Facebook page for Occupy Saint Louis is another important method of getting in touch with those organizing and participating in the movement. Further support can be shown by calling local media outlets to demand evenhanded coverage of events that are  important to local citizens. If people say they want to see it – then there is a better chance that they will. Of course the biggest thing that anyone can do is show up to the event! It is unfortunate but true that, a large part of people’s impressions of the event will be based upon how many people are there.

Full Disclosure: The author, Mike Davis is a local community organizer who will be participating in the Occupy Saint Louis event.

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