“I want us to be the country’s moral touchstone. Its unofficial conscience. Its model for what is good.” (Katie Davison, a filmmaker in her early thirties who had been active in the occupation since its inception)
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It was part of the movement’s overall effort to show the world a better, more humanitarian form of democracy, and to do so on an inhospitable apron of concrete in the middle of the nation’s premier financial district.
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The day after the snowstorm, I had coffee with Alec, a young medical doctor. At various points during our conversation, he quoted Virginia Woolf, the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, the futurist Filippo Marinetti, and the scientist John Holland, developer of “genetic algorithms.” Talking with him, as with Katie, I was reminded of the so-called Tercer Mundista priests I met in Mexico in the early 1970s, who broke with the Vatican and actively supported revolutionary movements in Central America. Both Alec and Katie possessed that calm sense of devotion to a higher calling—not a certainty of belief so much as a certainty of purpose. They both spoke of the movement in unabashedly spiritual terms. And while neither talked explicitly of religion, they seemed to have faith that they were progressing toward the kind of social system that would provide participants a measure of peace and “mental fulfillment.”
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