The day after I arrived in NYC for a two week visit, I met with Sue M for a late breakfast, then went to the anti-fracking rally and DEC hearing in Tribeca. After that Sue was my guide down to Zuccotti Park where we saw two "OWS grannies" knitting
outside the barricades
per police orders, not a tent in sight,
just a few people inside the crowd control metal barricades and lots of cops. I would think that trying to sleep there, with not a stick of grass on soil anywhere, would be like trying to sleep on a granite gravestone. But then again, perhaps a "park" in the Wall Street area being more like a graveyard than a true park seems very appropriate.
Sue then led me over the the WS Atrium where a GA was in progress.
On a later day I went down to the area again, this time carrying four shopping bags of books, hard and soft cover, that I had rescued from my sister's building's laundry room where someone had apparently cleaned out their apartment, leaving piles of books on the floor in front of the shelving for books to read while doing laundry. I heard the books were slated for dumping so I thought taking them to OWS Library would be a good idea. So I did, by foot and subway to the UFT Bldg on Broadway, two blocks up or so from Zuccotti Park. Somewhere in the UFT Building was serving as temporary? site of the OWS Library. On another day, I took another two bags
full. It felt good. A woman on the subway looked interested about me carrying the bags so I told her my mission. She told me that in her building they throw out books all the time. Wouldn't it be great for those books to all go to OWS or some other similar site instead of to the landfill?
On these later trips, I saw a constant presence of cops, police cars, ambulances, the blue on white police buses for transporting arrested people. The lengths NYC goes to in order to "protect" itself or protect banks etc. impressed me including their inserting these street blockading metal ramps on Wall St. and other side streets like this one, under which trash collects. A metaphor.
Although Rockefeller University has an impressive campus on the edge of and blocking view of the river, with some solid old stone buildings and the glassy new one that held this talk, the speakers were disappointing. Hosted by SWINY (Science Writers in N.Y.), the speakers came across as cliquey with each other and most in the small audience, arrogant and, in the case of the woman on the far right, downright sniping. She revealed she takes a particular drug for depression but I felt it seemed like she was on speed. She was very, very critical and hostile to those who express concern about pharmaceuticals and Big Pharma so, of course, I wondered how much money she gets from them. Oh wait, must be not enough and she wants more, as she is a freelance science writer.
The nicest person I met at this entire trek to hear this talk was the guard at the front gate.
