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Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles.

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The discussion all got started with a talk of origin stories after Gessen invited those who'd had the earliest involvement with the occupation to tell the audience of its genesis. These stories were already old hat for myself and others in the room who have obsessively followed OWS since its inception, but it turned out to be a valuable introduction nonetheless since—as we were to discover later during the Q&A period—there were a number of curious people in attendance still unfamiliar with what OWS is all about.

After this round of introductory niceties, in which panelists offered their take (or, in some cases, lack thereof) on how the movement came to be, what it meant and where it was going, Gessen showed a pair of videos seemingly arranged as a sort of point-counterpoint: first, a video of the October 25th occupation of New York City's Panel for Educational Policy; and second, the now-viral footage of the October 26th arrest of a Citibank customer at her local branch shortly after having closed her account.

The videographer of the latter clip, who was seated on the panel, was invited to narrate the choppy footage, and her narration injected an eerie presence into a video much of the audience was already well familiar with, something that only served to reactivate that initial horror of watching public police forces step in on behalf of private business interests.

Gessen then invited the organizer of the Department of Education occupation—also sitting on the panel—to discuss those events at length, although the invitation came with a leading question: Gessen asked, in effect, to justify this thing he had found "disturbing." And it was a fair question! Albeit one inexpertly answered: Bloomberg's Panel for Educational Policy is a sham democracy, its members are unelected and unaccountable, mayoral appointments outnumber independent appointments, and therefore (therefore!) it was a meeting ripe for an occupation and a hostile takeover by the people's mic. Members of the audience fidgeted, squirmed and pecked at iPhones as she hijacked the panel with a twenty-minute digression into the wonky minutiae of New York education policy and history; I fidgeted and squirmed at how her logic necessarily meant that every one of the tens of thousands of unelected and unaccountable executive staffers who head to Washington after we elect a president every four years should also be subject to precisely the same treatment (occupy next week's FEC hearing! occupy the State Department! occupy the Supreme Court!).

The panel then followed with a lot of talk of the burning question: the subject of demands. There turned out to be so much to say on this subject that it dominated the rest of the evening right up until the Q&A period.

There would be no demands, the audience was reminded, most notably by Sarah Resnick, who offered up the boilerplate but still very eloquent explanation that to make demands of elected officials or of an established political system is to concede to either asking permission of those in power or to implicitly accepting to merely agitate within a system one deems improper, incorrect or otherwise less than preferable. And that's a good thesis! The other panelists followed up with allusions to Mubarak ("The people in power always ask your demands first because they have the resources with which to pay you off"), standard issue conspiracy theorizing ("They've tried arresting us, they've tried scaring us off, they've tried pepper spraying us, and they've tried taking away our generators but now they're running out of responses so their next tactic will be to turn us against ourselves and against each other"), and finally an effort to reconcile the demands of the movement at large (OWS as an umbrella makes no demands) with the demands of its constituent members (individuals and working groups of individuals can—and do!—make demands, demands that simply don't reflect on OWS on the whole).

And it was when these individuals spoke, individually, of their individual demands that I began to worry, because despite how radical Resnick's formulation is, the specific demands that did get tossed out by other panelists were, sadly, not so much: student loan reform, higher tax rates for billionaires, a job for everyone, and so on. And this is a problem! Because this very honorable formulation of why the movement cannot make demands (a refusal to cooperate with existing rulers and the structural status quo) was being trumpeted by people who will very happily talk out of the other side of their mouths in specifics that couldn't possibly pertain more to existing economic and political structures and leadership ("We won't make demands of our elected leaders because we don't want to ask their permission, but we will ask our corporate leaders to give us all jobs").

Moreover, the reasoning behind not making demands most certainly does not preclude making demands of our collective imagination, and yet the majority of these panelists demonstrated very little willingness to think big, to think long-term. On the contrary, contributors took pride in not discussing ends, because ends in themselves are as problematic as demands are in this complicated relationship between the movement and the status quo. The one occupier on the panel, Haywood Carey, who'd spent the past month sleeping in Zucotti, returned on numerous occasions to the merits of "small-'d' democracy," "leaderless movements" and "consensus based decision making," emphasizing them with sufficient frequency as to solicit at least a couple of visible eyerolls in my immediate vicinity. He even went so far as to suggest—confusing for a moment the temporal and the teleological—that were the movement's end to come tomorrow it would already be a success, because now the people were talking, the people were busy doing their small-'d' democracy.

In a twist on the old Machiavellian traditional, the means had become the ends, and in the process he exposed two enormous problems the movement faces.

First, while its refusal to make any specific demands is admirable, that stand becomes problematic when a movement's constituent members demonstrate a worrisome lack of courage to imagine any alternatives or to conceive of the mere possibility of making demands outside of existing political and economic structures. Only one panelist last night even got close to enunciating an alternative, when Meaghan Linick, the videographer behind the Citibank arrest, mentioned that she and her friends, ideally, would conceive of the movement's end as a more equitable system fully re-architected from the ground-up (she did not, unfortunately, have a chance to go into specifics).

Secondly, the movement faces an enormous organizational and operational hurdle in the way it fetishizes its working groups and horizontal structure and lack of leadership and rejection of narratives, because this granular, piecemeal approach not only limits the movement's prospects but necessitates that whatever change it effects remain local in three dimensions: the geographic, the chronological, and the ideological. It will only ever—by its own insistence!—make baby steps; it won't (and can't!) be starting the revolution. And this exposes a massive internal inconsistency, because a movement so committed to not making demands of the status quo because of its Bartleby-esque refusal to participate has also imposed an arbitrary upper bound not only on what it can accomplish but on where, exactly, and in what sort of world it may be accomplished.

Now one of the great promises of the Occupy movement (that is, at least, for me, someone who willingly admits to projecting his radical leftism on a movement at least nominally uninterested in having any of it) is where it stands in the historical trajectory of post-'68 organizing, a sort of soothing synthesis to the thesis/antithesis of the now-clichéd fracturing of the Seventies left and, later, the violent ineffectuality of the G8 protests. Here now is (at last!) a peaceful movement offering a uniquely simple, comprehensible and, at least according to public polling, widely agreeable message: the problem is money. Which is a lovely and long-awaited contrast to the history of the left over the last four decades, a time defined by internal battles among leftists to determine which issue would sit atop the movement's pantheon rather than uniting against the material conditions in place that adversely affected all of them.

And yet from what I saw last night—and, frankly, what I've seen from a lot of the movement thus far—the majority of these panelists were content to just go through the same old motions, to patch the leaks on the sinking ship until the next time the moneyed elite slowly punch holes in the hull once again.

Slavoj Žižek editorialized in The Guardian recently that "one of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves." I was reminded of those words last night, worried that this danger had already been realized as panelist after panelist congratulated either the movement's commitment to "little-'d' democracy" or its unwillingness to issue demands. The movement has already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's got a great short game, but I worry those tactics can't survive the long haul (not to mention the fast-approaching winter). I worry if a group of people generally either unwilling or unable to think beyond the status quo can ever drastically alter it. Mostly, though, I just worry that this uniquely and enormously promising moment will go to waste because a movement so busy falling in love with itself for being horizontal and leaderless will forever remain a movement in which no one person speaks as a representative—and, as a result, will ultimately remain a movement in which anyone who speaks at all speaks representatively—because by and large I'm not convinced the representatives I've seen so far could answer the only real question: "What is to be done?"

Matt Langer is a technologist and writer living in Brooklyn who really just wishes Keith Gessen and Astra Taylor had talked more last night.

Photo by Timothy Krause.

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Suckers! On the afternoon of Friday, October 4th, a former Walker donor submitted a petition to recall the governor under the committee name "Close Friends to Recall Walker." The filing, which noted it was done "to fulfill my friend's last request," triggers a rule allowing Walker unlimited fundraising during the 60-day period and comes, magically, days before Walker begins a fundraising trip to, amongst other places, California, Arizona and Wichita. (Gee, what's in Kansas?)

In late October, Public Policy Polling assessed the prospects of a successful Walker recall as "dimming." The PPP called Walker "still not popular" but noted that 49 percent were opposed to a recall. Further, the group could not find a single challenger who would best him. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, his 2010 challenger, falls short, 48-to-46 percent. That's down from a 50-43 advantage in May. Democrats' last great hope, Russ Feingold, has declined to run for either governor or Herb Kohl's senate seat, happy instead to martyr himself in a doomed crusade to convince both parties to stop accepting so much campaign cash.

An October Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) poll of Wisconsinites found 49 percent did not support a recall, while 47 percent did.

But that same poll found that though 42 percent "strongly" or "somewhat" approve of how Walker "is handling his job as Governor of Wisconsin," a full 45 percent "strongly disapprove."

WPRI is one of those conservative "free market" organizations that puts "Institute" in its name so dim people think it's research extends beyond hypotheses like "How much money can we get for this study?" PPP, meanwhile, is a leftist pinko propaganda organ. With the sampling error basically washing out any meaning, these polls tells us nothing about what's to come, except more polls.

In liberal Madison, yard and window signs calling for the governor's recall are commonplace. But then, as the governor himself has said, “You’ve got a world driven by Madison, and a world driven by everybody else out across the majority of the rest of the state of Wisconsin." (This idea that a state's major metropolis is not a "real" part of its state is not just for New Yorkers anymore! A Minnesota supreme court judge recently said the same about the Twin Cities.)

In what the governor considers "real" Wisconsin, Recall Walker bumpers stickers and signs are not as common, but not completely absent. In part, this is because Walker enjoys a lot more support outside Madison (and Milwaukee). It is also because, in smaller towns, residents forced to live in proximity work hard to avoid open conflict. When petitioners go door to door and small-towners are given the private opportunity to speak, anything could happen. Just be careful out there petitioners: Wisconsin's new concealed carry gun law was just complemented by new "castle doctrine" legislation. Were you just asking for a signature or did the homeowner act reasonably against you with deadly force? Who knows!

To listen to state Democratic Party Chair Mike Tate is to believe Walker's defeat is a foregone conclusion. Many Recall Walker supporters are realistic about their enthusiasm. Yet four or five of the state's politics bloggers I spoke with privately expressed skepticism about the uphill battles of both getting all of the signatures and then actually beating the governor.

While all of the attention is on Walker, Democrats will likely try and recall a number of state senators and representatives as well. The governorship may be the jewel in the crown. But with the 17-16 control of the state senate, the successful recall of one Republican would put Democrats in position to counter and block all Walker legislation going forward.

If mutually assured destruction was good enough for the Cold War, it's good enough for Wisconsin. Republican state leaders have also expressed interest in recalling as many Democrats as possible. In November, 11 Republicans will qualify for recalls. Six Democrats in office for more than one year, the requirement for recall, will also be vulnerable. Another four Democrats and two Republicans who saw recall efforts against them fail for ample signatures will also be eligible. That is all in addition to the nine senators (three Democratic and six Republican) who were recalled this summer.

Meanwhile, Republicans, who still control both houses even after the successful recall of two state senators this summer, have become the Natasha and Boris of legislative bodies. When not hemming and hawing over where Wisconsinites will and will not be able to pack heat, Walker's allies are scheming up any dastardly plan possible to trip up the recall effort. In this respect, the Wisconsin legislature has become an M.C. Escher drawing of strategic incompetence.

Mary Lazich, R-New Berlin, has become a one-senator anti-recall superstar. NFL commentators would say she's "got a lot of motor."

First, she proposed a new law requiring petitions with recall signatures be officially notarized. Then, Lazich proposed another law that would activate the new district maps for senators, but not for the Assembly, effectively setting up different recall rules for the state's two legislative bodies. Proving herself a budding satirist, Lazich said of the proposal, "We can't have disenfranchisement going on." No, we cannot, which is probably why, back in 2000, Lazich voted for a bill that deleted the requirement that circulators of nomination papers or election-related petitions make an affidavit under oath.

But that stipulation is nothing next to the Republican interpretation of its own recently-passed electoral redistricting plan.

The gerrymander bill passed this summer clearly states, "This act first applies, with respect to special or recall elections, to offices filled or contested concurrently with the 2012 general election." But now, Republicans are pushing to use the redistricted map for the upcoming recall battle, well prior to next November.

The Government Accountability Board has taken the outrageous position that any recalls take place under the old district maps, just as the new law states. It's a decision that has brought the wrath of the state chapter of the Club for Growth, which called the board's decision—a decision that follows the very bill Republicans passed just months ago—a conspiracy of "The Saul Alinsky school of political vandalism" to create chaos so that "the radicals take what they want."

This Keystone Cops slapstick suggests the possibility that the Republicans will take legal action against their own just-passed law in order to make any recalls more difficult. As Wisconsin politics and law blogger Illusory Tenant put it: "Wisconsin Republicans Get Set to Sue Themselves."

Then, on Halloween, Senator Lazich did everyone one better. The senator suggested the new districts be enacted immediately only for senators, with the assembly districts left to follow the rules as Republicans wrote them earlier this year. But wait, there's less! In her case for a batty re-sorting of district rules, Lazich repeatedly cited, to make her case, a pending federal lawsuit against the entire redistricting bill on the grounds of its unconstitutionality. To be clear, to obstruct the recalls, a Wisconsin state senator was citing a lawsuit against a bill that she had authored and passed.

But then, how is a humble state Senator to keep so many elections rules straight? It's not as if Lazich is the chair of the state senate's elections committee. What's that? Lazich is the chair of the elections committee? Oh my.

Lazich's effort was defeated by the one vote of Senator Dale Schultz. Schultz, a moderate Republican who came out against the governor's union-busting budget bill earlier in the year, has come to be known as "Governor Schultz" because of the tie-breaking vote power he holds following the recall loss of two GOP state senators in August. (One of those recalled state senators, Randy Hopper, recently celebrated his new unemployment with a post-Packers game DUI, during which he told the officer, "Never run for office.")

"Time for him to be thrown out of office," wrote conservative Victor Janicki on Facebook, about Schultz's vote. The night after the vote, the windows of Schultz's Capitol office were hit with eggs. (It was the latest salvo in Wisconsin's battle of ingestibles. In September, a GOP man wearing a dress poured a beer on a Republican state senator in a bar. Conservatives later auctioned the dress on eBay for $255, which was donated to a Walker campaign fund.)

The Government Accountability Board meets on Wednesday, November 9th, to discuss how redistricting will mesh with any recalls. Activists are worried a fast-one will be pulled favoring the new districts. Reid Magney, the Board's public information officer, assured me that since Schultz blocked Lazich's bill, no changes will be made at the meeting and any recalls filed in the immediate future would go forward under the old districts. But Magney noted that should recalls against individual senators be filed, say, next June, the new districts may go into effect to avoid mass confusion with the 2012 general election.

While the unions and activists for the Walker recall have been preparing their effort, a small group of activists have maintained a constant protest presence at the Capitol. At the Facebook page "Shit Scott Walker is Doing to My State," videos are posted nearly daily of some activist arrested for videotaping in the legislative chambers. When a 12-year-old was threatened with arrest for doing her homework in the gallery, with a message scrawled on the back of her notebook, it was seen as the height of idiocy. That idiocy is either the police state that's been created inside the Capitol or young children used to make a political point. Pick your poison.

November 1 was "Concealed Camera Day," when 18 were arrested in the Assembly gallery for possessing photographic equipment. The event coincided with the first day concealed handguns were allowed in the Capitol. When he took a photo of another demonstrator being arrested, the editor of The Progressive, Matt Rothschild, was himself arrested (meta-arrested?). The subsequent court hearings for those arrested have been an embarrassing circus, with prosecutors not always sure what the charges are. These actions have helped maintain some momentum through the dry months after the first recalls. But the actions have also hardened pro-Walker forces, who don't necessarily see any difference between the anti-Walker activists and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Whether or not the Occupy Madison movement will join with the recall effort is unclear. Quite honestly, the Occupy efforts in Madison have, if anything, handicapped the recall's reputation. The peak moment of face-in-palm embarrassment was when the Occupy Madison protesters were denied a fresh permit. Now, to have a protest permit revoked in the People's Republic of Madison takes an extraordinary act, like, say, jerking off in front of people or something. (Handily, public masturbation was cited as one of the complaints about the protesters. )

And the logistics facing the recall are daunting. Currently, volunteers are being trained to collect 540,206 signatures, according to the rules, in 60 days across 72 counties. The recall movement has the distinct advantage of a massive existing activist infrastructure from the spring protests as well as the subsequent summer recalls. This foundation—its lists, phone banks and volunteers—will be leveraged quite quickly to gather signatures. As the movement stretches for the sprint, some inside have begun grumbling about what they see as a Democratic Party highjack.

Several major groups have spearheaded the recall drive, amongst them political action committees United Wisconsin, the Committee to Recall Scott Walker and We Are Wisconsin. Recall activities are being coordinated by the coalition group United Wisconsin, a group some "grassroots" activists feel has been taken over by the state's Democratic Party.

One gripe is that the party is being less than open about the process. One example an activist gave me is that "They are now running a recall training program that is less than transparent. One can not even write about it after leaving the meetings."

One of those upset with the Democratic Party's "highjacking" told me that certain other groups were considering filing their own recall petitions. A sort of protest filing, these groups would trigger their own 60 day windows. So, by the time the United Wisconsin files on Nov. 15, there could be as many as three, four, or even ten different official recalls.

This is important because while different recall groups can combine signatures, those signatures must all have been collected in the same 60 day period. And since any recall submission is sure to involve every lawyer in Wisconsin, it's just another way things could go wrong.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party did not respond to requests for comment. Nonetheless, the activist who spoke to me about dissension about the recall's new top-down management style is optimistic about the recall's chances. He told me all involved might "just 'kill' each other" but added that "we'll get the signatures—all the drama aside."

Speaking of killing each other, did I mention that Wisconsin has gone gun crazy? After being one of only two states left without a concealed carry law, as of November 1, visitors can just assume all Wisconsinites are packing heat. (No joke, that is the NRA's logic for the increased lawfulness provided by concealed carry.)

By just the fourth day, 20,381 had applied for a permit. Originally, the emergency rules for carrying a concealed gun required four hours of instruction with a weapon. Those rules were suspended soon after by a legislative committee. That means pointing a gun at someone now fulfills the time requirement for concealed carry training.

Amidst all the gun talk, some dope on a recall Walker Facebook page wrote, “Rather than recall him… Can we kill him instead? Just curious." Despite a toxic atmosphere of partisan spite, hope for a cooperative future Wisconsin was evident when parties on both sides had a good laugh at the single doofus remark on Facebook. Just kidding.

"Governor Walker Target of Online Death Threat" read the MacIver Institute headline. No question mark. A day later, Capitol Police said they were interviewing the poster. Literally 30 minutes after that statement came another, announcing that 200 rounds of live ammunition had been found at a Madison elementary school playground. "This will only end in something," said everyone.

The one sure thing is that nobody in Wisconsin seems particularly concentrated on "job creation" right now. Even the hopeless Democrats seem far more concerned with the noble, if cloudy, First Amendment battle over allowing cameras in the Assembly gallery. The failure to create jobs may ultimately torpedo the USS Walker. The governor promised 250,000 private sector jobs in his first four years. After nine months, he's at just 29,300.

Wisconsin may be struggling to bring jobs back to the state this year, but one industry the state has excelled at is the process by which a dollar bill is manufactured into a TV issue ad.

The nine Senate recalls cost state and local governments just over $2 million to facilitate—but more than $44 million was spent on campaigns and third party issue ads.

The petition to recall the governor by a former Walker donor follows a summer when Republicans ran fake candidates to force Democratic primaries , bleeding out more fundraising time. Walker is now free to raise unlimited funds through all 60 days of each recall filled against him. This fundraising can continue through the GAB's 31-day signature certification period—a period Magney more or less promised me would take at least twice that long. Any other recalled politician will also be allowed unlimited fundraising during the petition period.

One detail Magney stressed is that while those threatened with recall may raise unlimited funds during the signature collection process, any of that money beyond regular limits ($10,000 per individual or $43,000 per committee) must be spent to combat the recall. After the certification process, funds raised over the usual caps can only be spent on legal fees pertaining to the recall petition. That means all those unlimited funds are like Cinderella. After midnight it turns back into plain old limited funds. For example, if David Koch gives Walker $10 million next week, Walker can only use $10,000 of that during any recall campaign. The governor must spend the other $9,990,000 on anti-recall ads—or what Magney called "positive image ads."

With a flood of unlimited money for more ads, the governor may be able to afford the real Morgan Freeman.

Then again, recall candidates may not get spit. The trend in Wisconsin is entire elections controlled by third-party messaging. Hell, why give money to a candidate for messages not absolutely under one's control when messages that you're absolutely sure to control can be bought directly?

For the last few weeks, Americans for Prosperity and The MacIver Institute have teamed to sponsor the pro-Walker campaign "It's Working." Consisting of a website, banner ads and TV commercials, "It's Working" is "committed to providing the facts to Wisconsin taxpayers."

A nicer term for "lipstick on a pig," a "positive image ad" is any that aims to positively spin an issue. In countries we joke about with leaders who wear sunglasses and/or a lot of medals, these ads are called "propaganda" and often come from an arm of government with the term "ministry" in its name.

So far, most of Walker's supporters believe his reforms have magically transformed the state into a budget-balanced job-creating juggernaut in the space of just six months. To back this up, Walker has leaned heavy on how reforms have saved school districts millions of dollars. The Kaukauna School District has been the poster child for Walker's reforms, which the governor and "It's Working" claim left the school with a $1.5M surplus. Closer examination proves the school district maybe saved nothing and almost certainly handicapped itself forever. Meanwhile, the Elmbrook School District Walker claims as a savings success actually achieved those savings by closing one of its popular schools. It's working!

Getting Walker supporters and those on the fence to believe "it's working" long enough to beat the recall is the current goal of the administration. And that's working. But Wisconsin has always been a state where political winds change first and this cycle seems to be going faster than ever. The first crack: State Tea Party-endorsed Rep. Reid Ribble (R-8) has begun working with House Democrats . Then the former roofer hauled his huge testicles over to the Christian Science Monitor and trashed Grover Norquist's tax pledge.

If the governor is fazed by a state that's so divided by his existence that his very name is now a battle call or profanity, he's either too confident or too dim to show it. Walker's reply to all of the criticism about flailing jobs promises, animosity and a pending recall effort: The capitol tree's official name will change from "holiday" to "Christmas."

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com. He is also on Twitter. His book How to be: NORTH DAKOTA is out this month.

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So I didn't go to Occupy Oakland during the two weeks it was a camp in the Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. My partner, who doesn't share my qualms, went frequently. He would come home and tell me about what he'd seen: the media center powered by an electricity-generating bicycle, the daycare center, the full-time kitchen, which fed all the members of the camp, many of them homeless. He told me about the library and the tiny “community garden” of potted plants. He told me how interesting it was to watch this small impromptu community struggle, not only with the police and with the city, but also, because it refused to shut anyone out, with the problems that characterize Oakland itself: mental illness, health and environmental issues, poverty, racial tension, need.

I listened with enormous interest, but I still didn't go. At the risk of making this too much about me, I need to make my beliefs and reasons clear, such as they are (and were):

• I do not believe the police are evil.
• I do not believe in utopian societies.
• I distrust extremists of whatever stripe.
• I believe inflammatory rhetoric shuts down rational thought.
• I was (and remain) afraid of nighttime Oakland—the desperate Oakland that Occupy Oakland insisted on caring for and actually living with.
• I am lazy, prone to migraines, and unwilling to be cold, wet, uncomfortable and in constant danger of arrest.

In short, I'm a moderate: small, fearful, skeptical, selfish, with privilege aplenty. I have health care through the university, where I'm both a student and a teacher. I'm half-Hispanic, but I scan as white. I'm a not atypical Bay Area type: liberal, taxpaying, cautious, law-abiding (maybe to a fault), trying to hang onto the things I have. I have an iPhone, for heaven's sake.

I am, moreover, a liberal with a lifelong habit of opting out of the political conversation—and out of most kinds of activism—because I find its language dishonest, combative and unjust. I understand perfectly that our politics proceed according to a kind of barter system where each side continually overstates its convictions. I understand that the nation is a behemoth, and that to shift it, however minimally, requires the kind of herculean effort that very few people can muster. No wonder there's so little moderation among the grass-roots organizers on right and left alike; it takes an unhealthy obsession to even want to participate in a system that can't and won't hear you unless you scream.

That said, not being (for example) an anarchist myself, I can't in good conscience profess a commitment to anarchist principles in hopes that the country will shift slightly to the left. It's not how I'm built, and I hardly think I'm unique.

So I was fascinated by Occupy Oakland, but my interest was—I frankly admit this—more anthropological than political. Out of respect for the people whose commitments were real, I stayed away and wondered privately, maybe even smugly, when the movement that was trying so idealistically to remain democratic and leaderless would have to regulate itself and generate a leadership, a security force, a justice system—all the accoutrements a society needs in order to function.

But I listened, and I read about it, and I followed the relevant Twitter hashtags. I remained a spectator, which is more or less how I've felt and behaved my entire life.

Then the camp was disbanded. People in the camp knew this was coming and took care, the night before, to remove the wooden pallets they'd set up as walkways to protect the grass from being trampled. They removed the stove that had been donated by a union. The police came and tore down the camp at 4 a.m. A bigger crowd assembled that afternoon at 4 p.m. in front of the public library and began to march through Oakland.

I watched the ABC livestream and kept up on Twitter as the crowd got bigger and bigger. People downtown started joining. The crowd headed for Snow Park, the site where a second camp had started.

Now, I had seen Snow Park by accident the day before—I parked nearby without realizing it, and as I walked to my destination, I started seeing chalk outlines on the sidewalk. They were outlines of shadows: shadows of meters, trash cans, bicycles, all traced in blue chalk.

It was as if someone had decided to make all the city's objects into sundials for a very specific time of day. A bored and creative protester, I realized, when I looked up from the sidewalk and saw a cardboard sign that said “Welcome to Occupy” in front of the pretty green park dotted with tall oaks and a few tents. That would be the last day of the occupation; the next day, the chalk outlines were still there, frozen in time, but the tents and bicycles were gone. It's hard to imagine anything more ephemeral than a chalk outline of a shadow, so it's strange when such a thing outlasts a social experiment that included people and food and tents and signs.

This is as good a metaphor as any for the reality Occupy Oakland represents, at least to my mind: shadows that persist even without their originals. And, to a lesser extent, words at odds with their meanings.

Behold, for example, what Snow Park looked like during the “occupation”:

and from the other side:

This is what it looked like after the police “evacuation”:

The “evacuated” park is packed with bodies, the “occupied” park is idyllically empty save a well-tended camp of some ten to 15 tents, and this all makes a kind of sense in our embattled country where corporations are people, special people who have the same rights as we do but none of the responsibilities. (Immortal people who won't be troublesome and go to public parks; clean uncomplicated people without hands to cuff or eyes to teargas or bodies to arrest and jail.) They're people, moreover, whose right to bribe politicians is protected as “free speech." Without getting dramatically Orwellian, it's reasonable to say that our words have lost some of the concreteness that made them useful.

Anyway, the protesters left Snow Park and marched through the streets, turning unexpectedly (or as unexpectedly as a huge crowd can), confusing police, who were trying to split the crowd and start arrests. Then it came: hundreds of police officers, comprised of 15-17 different agencies including Palo Alto and San Leandro, in riot gear. I watched on the ABC livestream and read on Twitter as the police charged the crowd with “unlawful assembly” and warned that they had five minutes to disperse before they'd release a chemical agent. I watched as the crowd refused to move. I watched as the police pulled on their riot masks.

And then the ABC livefeed went dead.

My Twitter feed went crazy with reports of tear gas.

I refreshed the livefeed frantically. “This broadcast has ended,” it said.

ABC claimed that it ran out of fuel (see the caption under the image), so those watching quickly switched over to the CBS livestream. Then this happened:

To clarify: the Tweet on the right, offering CBS as an alternative, came seconds before the row of Tweets on the left. When the ABC livefeed went down, everyone watching switched.

Then the CBS feed turned into a picture of the Capitol.

To sum up: the only two mainstream media live-feeds switched off at precisely the same instant—the minute before fifteen police departments working together engulfed a peaceful group of protesters in tear gas.

That crucial minute, when the media (whether by accident or in compliance with police orders) enabled the police to tear-gas peaceful American citizens untelevised, shares something with the time of day recorded by those chalk shadows on the sidewalk. It's an ephemeral moment, but it lasted much, much longer than a minute should. It's a shadow whose original has disappeared, and it's all the more significant for that.

Given our image-saturated society, it's hard to explain how the absence of an image can be more dramatic, a bigger scandal, than the hundreds of disturbing videos of citizens being attacked by police. We're used to thinking of surveillance as the enemy. Big Brother abides, and I can testify that there's something undeniably eerie about the news helicopters hovering over my neighborhood. But for those helicopters hanging in our sky for hours and hours, waiting for a story, to disappear precisely when the story breaks—that's a different kind of sinister, a different kind of wrong.

Police brutality is, on the other hand, overly familiar. It's a phrase we know too well; part of what should shock us about it is the easy way it rolls off the tongue. But we're used to shock by now; “shock and awe” is in our national lexicon and we're no longer either shocked or awed by it. People observe, sagely, in comment threads across the Internet, that yes, sometimes the police use excess force, but this is what happens when people don't obey police orders (however unlawful those orders might be). Honestly, what did they expect?

Those people tend not to know Oakland's history with the police, or the police's history with Oakland, they've probably never experienced anything remotely like police brutality themselves, and they also tend to let a winking cynicism about how the world works disguise their resignation and passivity. (I should know—I'm not too far from being one of them.)

Underpinning those fatalistic, head-shaking comments is a faith that the world works more or less the way it's supposed to. Don't do anything wrong and the police won't bother you. Vote and you'll be represented. Do your job and you'll be able to live in relative comfort. And if you want to change things, go through the proper channels. Start a petition! Write to your representative! If something really important happens, the news will surely cover it.

The rightness or wrongness of that sentiment varies wildly depending on what you look like and where you live. That's an incredibly unoriginal observation, but it's not the sort of thing you really understand until someone decides you look the wrong way. I, for example, am extremely unlikely to ever be accused of loitering, no matter how long I stand outside a certain building. The fact that I can stand in a public place for as long as I like and someone else can't means that I have more freedom than an equally deserving fellow American citizen. I have never had to fight for my right to stand in a public park, for example, or in a public square.

It is no coincidence, in other words, that the people who started Occupy Oakland in a public plaza know what it's like to have to fight for rights the rest of us don't spend much time thinking about. Nor is it a coincidence that they're comfortable facing down a police force whose willingness to use force is legendary. The people who started this are extreme; you have to be extreme and dedicated to be willing to risk your personal safety, your record and your sanity to organize a functioning mini-society right in front of City Hall.

My admiration for the grit and energy and idealism of those people doesn't change the fact that I, personally, am not extreme. So what do I, a citizen watching this encounter between a city and its police from the sidelines, do with what's happening in my community? What can I do? Can I participate? If so, how? How do I make my objections known?

The kind of person I am defaults to the ordinary channels. In the long-term, for instance, I can vote against someone in an upcoming election, or participate in an effort to recall someone. Not that this will change any of what's basically wrong, since the immortal corporation-people will always be able to outbuy (and therefore outspeak, and therefore outvote) me, you and everyone we know.

But in the short-term, I can write (again) to my representative. Or phone. Which, I realize, is about as effective as sending a message in a bottle.

Here's the thing: technology tilts the political machine so that only that which is public matters. Letters, phone calls, once the instruments of an engaged citizenry, used to function as public documents. That's not true anymore; the letter is quiet, nostalgic, quaint, difficult to reproduce or witness. Phone calls are unrecorded. A letter or phone call from a voter is like the tree falling in the forest: the question of whether or not it makes a sound is purely academic.

In fact, a letter or phone call to my representative is exactly the opposite of the chalk shadows on the sidewalk: it's an original that never even had a shadow, let alone an aftermath, or an effect.

But surely, the moderate within me insists, that same technology can save us. Email! Online petitions! The trouble is, the skeptic counters, that emails are incredibly easy to fake, and online petitions are ignored because they're so easy to generate and so difficult to verify. The electronic age has not helped voters. The ordinary channels are sort of like local channels on TV: they're still around, but nobody's really watching.

Except for those of us who are watching, and then the ABC live-feed goes dead.

At the moment when I understood that the police were pulling on their gas masks and I couldn't see what was happening, I got what was already obvious to so many: if I wanted to see the reality of Occupy Oakland, teargas, flash bangs and all, I couldn't rely on the ordinary channels. They weren't working. They'd run out of gas. I needed to go to Occupy Oakland. With all my reservations, resistance, reluctance, and inertia.

So I went.

The General Assembly took place at Oscar Grant Plaza (née Frank Ogawa). I was one of the 3,000 people spilling out of the Plaza. (The green spaces had been fenced by police.) The people I spoke with were warm, yet also distressed, strained. One woman said she'd voiced her concerns to two police officers at a coffee shop earlier that day. They told her she should go speak to the Chief of Police. When she asked that they stop joking, they said they meant it: the Chief of Police was giving a press conference across the street. They asked her, in all seriousness, to speak to him. So she crossed the street, found the press conference, and spoke to him.

As the crowd got bigger, the organizers made sure to keep aisles clear so that people could move back and forth. I watched as the fences the police had erected around the green space came down. Too quickly, at first. There was a chance people could get hurt. The crowd booed the group that took them down too violently. Dozens of people came forward to make sure it came down safely, then stacked the fences into a neat, organized pile:

Then the proposal was announced. I held my breath; this would determine whether I could sign onto this thing, whether this was the way for me, personally, to try to make my city and my country a better place. Amplified by the human microphone, the proposal called for a student walkout, and for people to refuse to go to work. The endeavor was framed as a “liberation.” It included the phrase “shut down the city” and an ultimatum to banks and corporations that unless they remained closed that day, they would be marched on.

Well, I thought, feeling my heart sink, there it is: a proposal I could get behind, couched in language I can't accept. Much as I admire the courage and idealism in evidence here, this isn't a place where my perspective would be welcome. And that's okay—I'll go back to my colorless middle ground. (There are worse tragedies than not having one's moderation adequately represented.)

I was getting ready to leave when they announced that the crowd would break down into groups of twenty people to discuss the proposal, which would be put up to a vote. A 90% consensus was required for anything to go forward. My plans to leave were thwarted by the spectacle of 3,000 strangers neatly subdividing themselves into groups of twenty, sitting in circles in front of city hall, and sharing their ideas about how a civic action should be conducted.

Feeling like an interloper at this point, I was back in my anthropological mode, and planned to just sit back, listen, and learn what I could. But as people in my group spoke—a schoolteacher, a lawyer, a very young woman who might have been an undergraduate—it emerged that I wasn't the only one with reservations. This wasn't the group of hardline visionaries I expected; like me, they had questions. And, just like that, I found myself voicing the concerns I'd assumed my group was too radical to hear with any interest.

I explained that I found the language alienating rather than inclusive, combative rather than nonviolent. That the messaging of the 99% was powerful because it was so broad, and resisted breaking people down into familiar factions. That it was counterproductive to label citizens protesting an effort to “shut down the city” when we are the city. I argued, afraid that this eager coalition would collapse when it tried to grow because the 99% it claimed to represent would find the rhetoric needlessly aggressive. (As I would have, if I hadn't come.) Having seen how much people's sympathy for the police attack on protesters waxed or waned as a function of how they perceived protester nonviolence, I worried that hostile language would lose the public relations war, which is, and remains, Occupy Oakland's second front.

A fellow group member crystallized what I was trying to say by suggesting a prepositional change: rather than strike “on” or “against” Oakland, why not strike “for” Oakland?

My partner disagreed: the greatest danger, he argued, was losing momentum. With the camps gone, he felt there was less danger in extreme language than there was in letting all this civic energy disappear into apathy once again. Whatever was tried would be a learning experience, and would help improve the next effort. Another person in our group felt that the aggressive language was actually essential to the movement's success. Another worried about people who needed to go to work or might lose their jobs. Another worried about hurting small businesses.

Never in my life did I imagine I'd be sitting with a group of adults seriously debating policy as if our decision made a difference.

One representative from each group was invited to come up and address the General Assembly if they needed to express any concerns. One representative after another detailed their group's support for the proposal as well as their worries—from the timing of the strike to conflicts with other movements to concerns over student safety to the inclusion of the 99% who do in fact work for corporations and should be included, not alienated. My group chose me. I was nearly last in line, by which time the organizers asked us not to repeat any concerns that had already been voiced. And so I found myself standing in front of 3,000 people, saying out loud every word I'd planned to take home with me, tight-lipped and disappointed, resigned to watching silently from the sidelines. And every one of those words was repeated by the hundreds of people that make up the human microphone, while some people booed and most cheered.

And that's how I—a mealy-mouthed moderate visiting Occupy Oakland reluctantly, and for the very first time—was not only welcomed but spoke, was listened to, and was heard. I'll note here that the proposal passed, unamended, and the planning committees are open to anyone who wishes to be involved. The debate continues, and you can participate as much as you want to. After three decades as an American citizen and years of leaving messages for my representative, only last night, speaking into the human microphone, did I feel for the first time that my political participation could matter.

The best answer I can muster for the question of what an engaged citizen tired of being a spectator can do is this: try the ordinary channels and try being one of the 99%. It is not perfect. Nothing is. But there is room for more than your vote or your money: there is room for you, your body and your brain. It offers something our political system (increasingly peopled as it is by disembodied, bodiless, shadowless “corporate” persons) doesn't. It's this: talk into the human microphone, and your voice doesn't disappear. It's amplified. Talk, and you stand a chance of leaving, not a mark—nothing quite so permanent—but a chalk outline of a shadow that shows that you, too, were once here.

Last night Oakland Mayor Jean Quan released this video statement expressing how "deeply saddened" she was "by the outcome on Tuesday." A Take Back the Plaza event is scheduled for 6 p.m. tomorrow, and the General Strike & Mass Day of Action will happen Wednesday, Nov. 2.

Related: The Night Occupy Los Angeles Tore Itself In Two
Why Should We Demonstrate? A Conversation
Occupy Boston: The Glory And Imperfection Of Democracy
What Does The Bonus Army Tell Us About Occupy Wall Street?
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Lessons For Occupy D.C.
Why the Tea Party Hates Occupy Wall Street

Lili Loofbourow is a writer living in Oakland. She blogs as Millicent over here.

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And don't forget we're making new friends all the time! Likely "10,000 financial-services job cuts in New York City by the end of 2012," and then they'll be out there on the streets protesting too.

Meanwhile, in other upcoming events, mark your calendars, if you like (either to be present or to be out of the way): today at 3 p.m., it's a march on Chase bank; Saturday, people march from Liberty Square on Chase bank again to support customers closing their accounts; and then, later Saturday, at 5 p.m., it's the occupation of Times Square. (Spoiler: that's not going to end well!)

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At one point it looked like a decision was about to be reached. After hours of legislative meandering, the facilitator's excitement was palpable. “Are there any points of information? No points of information. How about strong objections? I'm not seeing any strong objections. Are there any friendly amendments?” There was a long pause. An individual raised his hand, which indicated an amendment proposal. A moan rumbled through the crowd. The facilitator chuckled. “This is democracy,” he said. “Everyone has a voice.” The crowd began to cheer. “This is why we do this. Because we all have a voice!” You could feel the sense of frustration, of fatigue giving way to elation. I thought: Perhaps the essence of democracy is somehow entwined with the procedural humdrum of a Cambridge zoning board.

But then, late last night, the police made a sweep through one of the Occupy Boston encampments, making somewhere between 50 and 100 arrests. A bit of business, which, as far as I know, has never happened to a Cambridge zoning board.


Over the last week, I've made several trips to the Occupy Boston camp, including an extended visit last Friday. “My initial reaction is that Boston is better organized,” said Laura, a young woman who had just arrived from the New York protest. But, she noted, there were fewer people here too. The taxonomical classification of the protest''s many “working groups” is an example of this organization; each “department” is devoted to a specific cause, a la the proposed Urban Youth collective being debated Friday, and each is responsible for its own maintenance. They include, among others: media, direct action, logistics, medical, legal, arts and culture, spirituality and a Queer Caucus. All group proposals are subjected to a stringent democratic process before approval.

“Also, in New York, there are no tents," she noted. Here in Boston there were at least 60 tents housing some 200 people on any given night, but those figures have been growing since occupation began on September 30. For legal purposes, protesters can thank the fact that Dewey Square is owned by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, who have also allowed occupiers to siphon electricity from an adjacent maintenance building and give power to the media tent and PA system.

On Monday, a second encampment went up at a nearby park along the Rose Kennedy Greenway. This second camp was the focus of Tuesday morning’s police sweep, although reports are emerging that the protestors had permission to camp there.

The arrests and treatment of the protestors mark a strong shift in the Boston Police Department's approach to the protestors. Up until last night the relationship might have been described as cordial, with no arrests and a seemingly shared interest in keeping the peace. Indeed, at a rally in front of the Boston Fed last Friday, a demonstrator with a bullhorn called for a thanks to the Boston Police Department, members of whom were standing in a neon-outfitted phalanx at the bank's entrance. The request was met with fervent applause. “Because you’re one of us!” shouted a young man in a bandanna, pointing squarely at the stoic police officers. I detected a few grins among the cops. Later, when I spoke to a few of them, BPD officers told me they had respect and were even in agreement with a few of the protesters’ grievances.

Around Occupy Boston, the phrase “I can’t speak for anyone else” is something of a prelude to conversation, like saying thank you or shaking someone’s hand. It’s symptomatic of the movement’s staunch commitment to diversity. Before the General Assembly started, I had a conversation with a Marxist who seemed to be pitching outright revolution, then listened to a soapbox speech from a man touting anarcho-capitalism. Later in the night I spoke to a crew of Ron Paul supporters, while another group told me about their attempts to further include libertarianism in the discussion. Of course, this parade of ideas is not without consequence, and you could discern a bit of a cold war among the different parties. One Ron Paul supporter told me he felt he’d been “eighty-sixed” from Occupy Boston. I overheard another conversation between a couple of anarchist punks complaining about how much the libertarians were speaking during the General Assemblies. This was right before a drunk girl screamed “Get off welfare!” from a passing party bus.

The Occupy Movement has been much criticized for espousing varied or inconsistent objectives, even by sympathetic observers. (Fox News contributor Dan Gainor's criticism that the movement has "no stated goals, no public spokespeople and many of the most ridiculous attendees you could imagine" is typical. But hark: This bigness, this fluidity, this multiplicity is the point.

During an open-mic session at the end of the night, a 20-something construction worker with a vowel-rich Boston accent took the knoll and praised Occupy’s reluctance to commit to any one ideology.

“Numerous people have said to me that the best thing about this whole thing is that we haven’t released any statement yet, so people don’t know what the fuck is going on,” he said, to great fanfare. “They have to come down here and talk to individuals and meet us face to face!”

At Friday's General Assembly, everyone seemed to understand this, even as they bickered over the use of the term “prioritize.” The point in question was a statement to be published by Urban Youth and ratified by Occupy Boston. Some members disliked the idea of prioritizing one segment of the 99 Percent over another. Others viewed it as the natural state of things. Indeed this exchange sent a chill of silence through the crowd:

“Mic check.”

“Mic check!”

“I would like to propose.”

“I would like to propose!”

“That specifically naming.”

“That specifically naming!”

“Any group.”

“Any group!”

“Will introduce.”

“Will introduce!”

“Classes.”

“Classes...”

A mild sigh echoed through the crowd with that last word. A few more friendly amendments offered similar points with lukewarm enthusiasm. Then a mic check from behind me, with the observation that "I am hearing from amendments … a lack of undertanding … of the realities of race, class, gender!"

The person continued: “And the reality that the ninety-nine percent IS divided!”

This set off a large applause, which is unusual given protesters’ insistence that clapping is noise pollution and makes things difficult to hear, a reason for the development of the intricate system of hand gestures used to indicate votes and questions and comments.

“My friendly amendment is.”

“My friendly amendment is!”

“Even stronger language.”

“Even stronger language!”

“Recognizing the realities.”

“Recognizing the realities!”

“That the ninety-nine percent includes.”

“That the ninety-nine percent includes!”

“People with privilege.”

“People with privilege!”

“People who experience oppression.”

“People who experience oppression!”

“In varying and different amounts.”

“In varying and different amounts!”

Occupy Boston’s recently endorsed Statement of Diversity of Tactics articulates this thinking:

Our solidarity will be based on respect for diversity of tactics and plans of other groups. As individuals and groups we are committed to treating each other as allies in the struggle. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space to protect the autonomy and safety of the movement.

We realize that our detractors will work to divide us by inflaming and magnifying our tactical, strategic, personal and political disagreements. Therefore, any debates or criticisms must stay inside the movement to avoid any public or media denunciations of fellow activists or events.

Despite the array of concerns among the protesters, few of them seemed as passionate or angry as Jason, an Iraq veteran who now works as a roofer in Jamaica Plain. Later, he would tell me he comes from a family with a long tradition of military service; despite his own service, he has had trouble paying medical bills in recent years. He took the knoll at the end of the night, when the finicky P.A. was put up for open mic. His hands quivered as he read from a scribbled piece of notebook paper, eyes fixed permanently downward with his voice bouncing off the skyscrapers framing Dewey Square. He wore a sweatshirt that read “Iraq Veterans Against the War.”

“I don’t care if you wear a fucking suit to work, or if you own a fucking yacht or if you own a successful small business—you’re one of us! Or even if you’re a banker. Yeah, they can afford better vacations, nicer cars and a better education for their kids, but can they snap their fingers and influence foreign and domestic policy?

“I don’t care if it’s ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven-point-fucking-six percent—I don’t give a shit. Republican, Democrat, Independent, Socialist, Libertarian, redneck, hippie, college student, union worker, banker, baker, lawyer, police officer, firefighter, teacher, stripper, fireman, farmer, preacher: Come one, come all! Join in Operation American Freedom!”

Later, Jason would tell me that his use of "Operation American Freedom," besides a jab at the Iraq War's tactical name, was also recognition of a resolution, proffered by a previous speaker and since adopted. Titled “Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples," the resolution committed the group to "Decoloniz[ing] Boston with the guidance and participation of First Nations Peoples."

Whatever Occupy Boston chooses to call itself, the group is characterized by its commitment to organized democracy. Consider how they make a decision: All proposals and subsequent amendments are subjected to an inventory of democratic motions that include clarifying questions, points of information, strong oppositions and friendly amendments—in that order. Then, the process is recycled, in its entirety, until no comments or objections remain. After that, the facilitators check for blocking procedures, then move to consensus, take a vote, which must carry 75 percent approval (votes are recorded via hand gestures called “temperature checks”), and only then can the group claim they’ve reached a collective and democratically obtained decision.

At different points on Friday I found myself wondering, Why this structure? Why such inflated policy? But over the course of the grueling three-hour meeting, I realized that this is democracy—in all its glory and imperfection. In watching these operational flubs mixed with youthful vigor and determination, I was reminded of a certain Winston Churchill quote: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried.” The process is long and frustrating and sometimes inflammatory, but the jubilation of a group decision is infectious, and you can’t help but feel part of democracy in its rawest form. Yes, it’s messy and bureaucratic and sometimes inefficient, but this is the point: Everyone has a voice.

It'll be interesting to see how much longer those voices will be allowed to be heard in Dewey Square. Yesterday Mayor Thomas Menino told the Herald that "[t]here will be a time when they’ll have to leave that location."

Tyler Wells Lynch is a young writer living in Boston. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Nerve and a number of blogs throughout the innerwebs. He has red hair, if you see him.

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