"We don't move! No retreat! No retreat! Occupy Wall Street!" said the young man.
"Mic check!" said the woman.
"Mic check!" said the crowd.
"There are people massing in Union Square! We need to move en masse! We need more people!" said the woman.
"We need to stay here and bring the Union Square people south! No retreat! We need to hold this corner!" said the young man.
About half the crowd moved a half block north on Broadway with the woman, then looked confused and came back. The police were unloading more and more steel barricades to pen the demonstrators as armored school buses drove toward the park to pick up all the arrests.
"Have no illusions!" yelled a tall older man who was holding a wrinkled red flag with some gold stars on it. "The ruling class is afraid of us! We have unleashed a worldwide revolution! They must try to crush us! That's who they are! Tell me what a police state looks like!"
"This is what a police state looks like!" said the crowd.
After the chant died down, I asked the guy what country his wrinkled red flag represented.
"f*ck you," he said. "Tell me what a police informer looks like!"
I told him I wasn't a police informer or with the corporate press.
"I don't care who you're with. Do your homework, a**hole," he said. I noted he was holding a copy of the China Daily, so the flag was probably from the People's Republic.
"Lenin said the police are the iron fist of the bourgeois state!" the guy yelled at the crowd. "Any time the workers go on strike, the police are there to support the boss. They are not your friends! Freedom in America is a pile of crap!"
***
The purpose of a park, said Fredrick Law Olmsted, is to give the public "a sense of enlarged freedom." He thought that people who live in cities need their freedom enlarged because being separated from nature by cement and large buildings makes them feel oppressed.
Olmsted was America's first and most visionary landscape architect. He designed Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, among many other projects. He also wrote one of the primary historical documents about slavery, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1953-1861. So he knew something about parks, and he understood that, along with separation from nature, being oppressed also makes people feel oppressed.
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