Protesters Hold ‘Spring Training’ at Zuccotti Park
15 04 2012About 100 people were gathered inside Zuccotti Park on Friday as Zak Solomon stood on a granite bench and offered instruction on protest tactics with names like “Melt,” “Wall,” and “The People’s Gong.”
While demonstrating the last, Mr. Solomon, an Occupy Wall Street organizer, was joined by Jason Shelton, 28, from Greenpoint, who contrasted the People’s Gong with the bell that closes the New York Stock Exchange.
The bell, Mr. Shelton declared, symbolizes “the validation of greed over mutual aid,” whereas the gong is a “call to fight against this injustice.”
With that, the crowd raised their voices in an approximation of the sort of deep, reverberating tone that a large gong might produce when struck by a mallet.
Last fall, Occupy Wall Street protesters exceeded their most ambitious aims, establishing an encampment in Zuccotti Park that became a model for more than 100 others across the country and making financial inequity part of the national dialogue. The group has been mainly quiet during the winter and their movement has faded from the headlines, but organizers are planning a springtime resurgence that they hope will be launched by marches and other actions scheduled for May 1.
To prepare, organizers have held weekly practice sessions, called “spring training,” inside Zuccotti Park, where participants learn about the gong and other tactics, some of them adapted from a British activist group called the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.
Over the course of an hour on Friday, protesters practiced several tactics, including “hup,” which involves a knot of people jumping up and down (and can be used to coalesce a scattered group) and “melt,” in which protesters drift to the ground (used for a ”die-in” or to de-escalate a confrontation).
One tactic, known as “wall,” involved ranks of protesters locking elbows and trotting forward in close formation, and could be used, organizers said, to move quickly while making it difficult for the police to physically break up the group.
Organizers said the sessions, which have been followed by short marches to the stock exchange for the closing bell, are meant to teach participants to work together and instill a sense of camaraderie.
As the protesters hone their tactics, the police officers who watch them and who follow the weekly marches appear to be absorbing lessons and engaging in their own preparation.
For instance, Mr. Solomon said, one week four marches had simultaneously left the park from different points. The next week, the police had posted scooters at each corner of the park.
On Friday, the protesters divided one march into three segments, two of which broke off in different directions soon after leaving the park. The remaining segment, which included about 30 people, sometimes slowed to a near crawl and other times began jogging, as officers followed. At several points, the group executed an abrupt about face and marched in an unexpected direction.
At Broadway, the police blocked access to Wall Street, but many of the marchers made it to a spot near the stock exchange, some employing a tactic called “civilian,” in which a block dissolves into individuals who then try to blend in with nonprotesters. There, the protesters executed a performance of the People’s Gong, but word soon spread that one of the march segments had been stopped blocks from the exchange.
As the training participants streamed back into Zuccotti Park for a post-march meeting, an organizer, Sandra Nurse, said that the practices provided a sort of laboratory to see what tactics worked best in different situations.
“What feels good and what works well is something that continues to be used,” she said. “And things that we feel like are less effective we end up dropping.”
Categories : Dissent/Rebellion
