takes 2x longer than it should to get from astoria to city hall due to MTA total NYE FUBAR, so i don’t make it to the noise-in at metro correctional & go straight to zuccotti.

brookfield rent-a-cop politely checks my backpack for bottles. cops fairly low profile.

not too many people here at 10, couple-few hundred. an embarrassing pissing contest between two self-serving loudmouths goes on (and on) at the broadway-side staircase. these assholes make me sad, remembering the polar opposite of the energy in that exact spot during pre-eviction GAs. even after the NYPD ambush & property-theft of 11/15 there were glorious, even noble, hours and moments and days in the park (thanksgiving was a wonderful example of zuccotti at its finest).

at around 10:30 the noise-in group comes marching down broadway, banners and horns and chants to spare, and in the space of ten minutes our numbers triple. at least.

the mood’s positive, celebratory: not a rally, a party. noisemakers, lights, costumes and several big flags (both US & Adbuster-style) fluttering around the park. not much chanting.

out of nowhere, just a couple of feet from where i’m standing by liberty street, a commotion breaks out: two cops come in, knock a guy down and drag him out of the park. what for? if he was making some kind of a problem it sure was a quiet one. (someone tells me later he was “being an asshole”: if that’s cause for arrest, a couple million New Yorkers better get ready to assume the position.)

outside the barricades, two cops pick the guy up by his arms and legs and carry him (“shame! shame!”) to their wagon across the street. a bunch of people (30? 40?) jump the barricades, surround the van.

i’m holding my breath, because from here it looks like they’re gonna pull the cops right off this guy. NYPD’s hugely outnumbered, at least a thousand people in the park now, and far less than the usual number of babysitters in blue, courtesy of lady gaga tourists at times square. the cops aren’t wearing riot gear.

is this the beginning of the revolution? or the MMS-spun “rioting protestors” moment that turns the already brutal police handling of the movement into a complete KGB-style crackdown, sending us all to the newly legalized Gulag Guantanamo? i don’t know what i’m looking at.

all the cops are on the north of liberty now, none left on our side. from here, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on at the wagon. barricades are nudged, then shoved, forward–everybody’s trying to get closer to the action. all of a sudden a whole line of barricades gets pushed straight out of the park.

a light bulb goes off: nobody’s minding the fences. first we shove them aside, one by one. then start dragging them inside, to the center of the park — not out where somebody can just put them back up.

not sure how the situation at the copwagon gets resolved. i heard they let the guy (whose name i didn’t get) go.

what i AM sure of is this:
that one suprious arrest sparked everything.

i go south, over by the coffee cart, where Occupiers are playing a tug-o-war with a few NYPD for the barricades on that side. some brookfield supervisor runs by me telling all the rent-a-cops “that’s it, we’re outta here” and they disappear like smoke.

guess who won that tug-o-war?

single barricades become long lines of still-attached barricades dragged like toy trains to the center of zuccotti. piled & stacked, they are now Occupy Wall Street’s answer to the times square stage.

when i leave around 12:30, the park is still jubilant. some people are organizing a march, but i’m out of gas, after my new-years-eve-day supreme virgo housecleaning ritual.

now i hear that not going on the march is what let me to wake up in a sparking-clean apartment instead of central booking, because NYPD spent the rest of night making retaliatory arrests.

♣

ATTENTION NYPD STREET COPS:

you are not the enemy unless you decide to be; these protests are NOT about YOU, they are FOR you — don’t you have any idea how pro-union OWS is? don’t you know that OWS has already helped at least one cop to keep his family in their about-t0-be-foreclosed home, and that we’d do the same for you?

but no. i politely try to ask a cop a question and he says, loud, “back off! just back off!” as if i was all up in his face when i’m standing 3-4 feet away, my hands in my pockets, my voice low & friendly.

last night i hear, for the first time in … decades? people shouting “pigs” and other such slogans against NYPD — not against one officer in particular, but against NYPD as a whole. that is different. that is not the conversation OWS was having with the force a couple of months ago.

NYPD did this to themselves.

just go on dancing to bloomberg’s tune, officers. keep on turning a deaf ear to these protests, don’t bother reflecting on how the income inequality affects YOU, in YOUR life.