Occupy Isn't 'Back': It Never Left

Well, shit. Just when the hacks had almost entirely given up on all those lazy, disorganized, white, middle-class college kids collectively known as the Occupy Wall Street movement – I mean, the Republican primary circus is rolling through town, people! – those same stinky, bearded and hoodlum youths were busy raising hell over the weekend in what was the largest domestic OWS flare-up in months, and arguably an ominous precursor to what the movement’s core supporters swear will be a mass spring resurgence.

While the NYPD’s finest were busting up a boozy, livestreamed, almost taken-to-the-streets Occupy Williamsburg brouhaha on Saturday, Oakland's finest riot squads were arresting more than 300 people (or was it 400?) after demonstrators spent the day storming various municipal buildings. Somewhere between their brief occupations of a YMCA, a convention center (sorta), even Oakland City Hall, from which American flags were snatched and set ablaze, the tear gas, bean-bag projectiles and flash grenades began to fly.

A number of demonstrators maintain that the OPD fired rubber bullets into the crowd, which at times hovered around 1,000 civilians. One pregnant demonstrator claims to have been nightsticked in the kidney. As paramedics whisked her away, she was heard screaming, “Police did this to me!”

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan tells the Oakland Tribune how this particular Occupy satellite is "very violent." Authorities claim that during the melee Occupy Oakland members injured three cops by hurling bottles, rocks, metal pipes, spray cans and small improvised explosives. Once inside City Hall, demonstrators apparently smashed display cases and severed electrical wires.

In a communique, Occupy Oakland’s media committee says that contrary to the OPD’s own policies, the police “gave no option of leaving or instruction on how to depart” the tensest areas of Saturday’s events. "These arrests are completely illegal, and this will probably result in another class action lawsuit against the OPD who have already cost Oakland $58 million in lawsuits over the past 10 years."

Mayor Quan, who’s no stranger to disturbing the peace (in 2010, to protest a soft verdict given a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer who fatally shot an unarmed passenger, then City Councilwoman Quan supposedly linked arms to help block a riot squad from sweeping through a major thoroughfare), says she’s going to be “asking for a lot more mutual aid” to deal with Oakland’s Occupy problem. According to the AP, Quan wants Occupy Oakland to quit using the city “as its playground.” Quan, you may remember, blabbed late last year about being on a semi-secret phone conference with leaders from 17 other major U.S. cities to discuss the nagging Occupy “situation.”

You can be real clever, then, and call the weekend’s skirmishes Reoccupying Occupy, or whatever, but you’d be missing the point. Despite all the attention fatigue, all the bust-‘em-up raids on Occupied spaces for what seemed to be the express purpose of removing the movement from the public’s eye and smashing its digital-historical records, Occupy is still here. Occupy never left.

OK, sure: Save one off street battles, Occupy Wall Street has its head down for the moment. Occupy is cooped up indoors, organizing, licking wounds, hacking away at the tools to unleash when the weather turns for the better. So much of the media continually mistakes this temporary out-of-sight face for having thrown in the towel. So much of the media just can’t seem to wrap its head around the fact that this thing, this stubbornly persistent band of stinky, bearded hoodlum youths, plans to stick around. The Occupy story is not over; if anything, the OWS meme is just beginning to catch fire.

Since mid-September, I’ve spent countless (countless!) hours trailing OWS folk around New York City, first beating feet from one park or plaza to another, then from one clandestine media squat to another. And if there’s one thing I keep hearing from all these lazy, disorganized, white college kids, it’s this: “You’re here too early, man.”

I’m really starting to believe them, now.

• Who Smashed the Laptops From Occupy Wall Street?
• Inside Occupy Wall Street’s Information War
• The Occupied Motherboard

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson