There is NO record in the park that anything historic ever happened there
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It has been 2 years since I travel down to the financial district. I realized that it was approximately the 10-year anniversary of
Occupy Wall Street. While I was too much of a coward to participate at the time I did travel down several times to record interviews and take pictures. Looking around brought back many memories of the community that had spontaneously been constructed.
There were no plaques, no signs to commemorate the event. People in power seem to want to obliterate the memory. I did encounter a
Voice of America news crew who briefly interviewed me about the lack of any commemorative markers.
When I had finished my interview with them I walked around the park a little more and encountered several teenagers, around 14 or 15, who had never heard of
Occupy Wall Street. Over the course of about 20 minutes I tried to give them some idea of what had happened but it isn't clear to me how successful I was. I urged them to look it up on the web and I did manage to pull up a few photos of that time on my phone.
Many people are willing to proclaim that it was a failure but I don't think that's quite true. It set a million conversations in motion and has ramified in the thinking of tens of millions of people since that time. It didn't change the substance of the world immediately but that kind of change necessarily involves long hard slogs over decades.
Occupy Wall Street helped focus our attention on the need.
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