Learning About Democracy at Zuccotti Park in the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Everyone at Zuccotti is encouraged to share their experience with others through conversations in their communities, sending letters or calling or emailing, preferably with photos, and posting on Twitter, Facebook, etc. (URLs available on the OWS website: www.occupywallst.org.)

Learning is a physical experience as well as intellectual, mental, spiritual, and emotional, as noted by Rev. Anoek van Praag Inbar, who has been doing volunteer counseling of occupants under stress.

"People here are willing to put their body where their mouth is and suffer all kinds of serious discomfort, just to make a point. I deeply admire that and find it very inspiring."

Friendliness, conviviality, comradeship, and fellow-feeling define the relationships at Zuccotti Park. The front page of an encampment newspaper, The (Occupied) Wall Street Journal, featured a photo by Stephen O'Byrne of a couple smooching. It echoed the famed WWII photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square.

I’ve been helped in understanding what I’ve seen there, as well as the widespread hostile reactions to it, by reading Christopher Hill's "The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution," viz.: "Upside down is, after all, a relative concept. The assumption that it means the wrong way up is itself an expression of the view from the top....The idea that the bottom might come to the top....that 'community' might cast out 'property'...such ideas are not necessarily opposed to order: they merely envisage a different kind of order." Ron Gross is the author of The Lifelong Learner, Socrates’ Way, and 20 other books on educational innovation and social change (www.SocratesWay.com). © 2011 by Ronald Gross – Non-profit Use Authorized.