He/she tells me, tweets at me, that the NYPD took baseball bats to their laptops and hard drives. They raided Zuccotti Park and just smashed everything.
The Twitter handle is @OccupyWallStNY, but that doesn’t mean much. Anyone can be anyone on Twitter.
Yet, when he/she DMed me this morning, asking me to spread the word about the #BloombergDrumCircle, I didn’t give it a second thought.
Something must be done about the book slaughter of the @OWSLibrary.
I sent out the Tweet calling for a mass of people, drums, and other noise makers to gather at Bloomberg’s apartment mansion, conveniently located across the street from Central Park—the perfect place for the Zuccotti refugees to drum into the night. #TheBloombergDrumCircle started at 2 PM today and, as of this writing, is still going, according to reports from @OccupyWallStNY. 24 hours of noise for Mayor Bloomberg, that’s the plan.
My Tweet containing the #BloombergDrumCircle announcement was retweeted by @OccupyWallSTNYC [Justin Wedes]—a source I trust, because I met him. I shook his hand. I sat in the media tent and helped him find the Twitter handle for Chase Bank.
“Rumor has it,” Justin told me, “that Chase Bank just made a huge donation to the NYPD, and we want to tweet about it.”
This was weeks before the raid, before the mainstream media stopped acting like pompous assholes. #OWS, to many, was still just a joke. They don’t have a message! You remember.
As Justin and I tried to tweet Chase—“Dude! I think they deleted their Twitter account!”—some 700+ people started marching toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
I remember thinking about Justin, as he ran from laptop to laptop, smiling, friendly, “this guy’s just trying really hard to do some good.”
Since that day, I’ve relied on Justin Wedes [@OccupyWallStNYC] and Bill Buster [@BusterBNYC] to be my credible sources, anchors of reliability in the storm of #OWS rumors and misinformation.
Bill Buster was on Charlie Rose, listed as a spokesperson for #OWS, long before I really knew him. To me, that made him reliable. Bill was slightly nervous, clearly overwhelmed at the Charlie Rose table, and yet infinitely humble and composed. He has become a friend of mine. We communicate often.
So, when @OccupyWallStNYC or @BusterBNYC tweet something about #OWS, or RT something I tweet about #OWS, I take note: this information, this source [Twitter handle] = strong evidence of reliability.
And so today, when I tweeted the @OccupyWallStNY announcement about the #BloombergDrumCircle, @OccupyWallStNYC [Justin Wedes] retweeted, which led to hundreds of other retweets, and this NOTE: @OccupyWallStNY = strong evidence of reliability. TY for the RT @OccupyWallSTNYC.
Which brings me back to my original point.
“@OccupyWallStNY reports that the NYPD smashed their laptops and hard drives with baseball bats,” I told my wife.
She went pale. All of our work, our art, our writing, is stored on our laptops and our external hard drive.
“What would you do if someone smashed our laptops and our hard drive with a baseball bat?” I asked my wife.
She didn’t hesitate.
“God, I’d just want to attack them,” she scoffed.
“Right!” I screamed. “So would I! And yet these people from Zuccotti Park just took it in stride. The police brutally destroyed their property, their work, right in front of them. And they remained, still remain, mostly nonviolent and peaceful. They’re down there right now, across the street from Bloomberg’s mansion, just banging on some drums to vent their anger. Think about that.”
