WILMINGTON — Down in New York last week, my wife Laura Richardson and I spent a day among the citizens of Occupy Wall Street.
What a live group of everybody. The best pacifism of the 1960s prevails in an even loftier incarnation, the sort of powerful silence that Martin Luther King Jr. meant everyone to express, because he then and they now understand that the basic social structure must be replaced.
There's no point whatever in protesting this figure or that, this business or that, this political party or that.
Grateful for the support shown by others and for the small-time and big-time help given, these people - young, middle-aged, old (“Grandmas for Peace”) - are enacting their moral truths by putting their bodies on the concrete pavement and marble benches under the ginkgo trees on Liberty Plaza (now Zuccotti) Park.
Ironies are everywhere, including the 700 arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, whose cases will probably be dismissed, and the 30-foot-high police surveillance box in one corner of the square looking over a crowd so peaceful that no one snitches anything, no one eats someone else's lunch, no one bothers a man with a sign calling for death to Turkish dictators.
Additions to their poetry anthology in the People's Library are inserted every Tuesday evening, with readings on Friday at 9:30 p.m. The so-called governing body is the General Assembly, which convenes every evening at 7 to forge consensus.
Daily life is assumed. (Everyone's healthy.) The purpose holding it all together is so pervasive there's no need to try to define it. There's no need for the next step yet. The focus is here. And the more “here” we are, the stronger our truths. Our presence speaks.