Tomgram: A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age?

If you had followed May Day protests in New York City in the mainstream media, you might hardly have noticed that they happened at all. The stories were generally tucked away, minimalist, focused on a few arrests, and spoke of 'hundreds' of protesters in the streets, or maybe, if a reporter was feeling especially generous, a vague 'thousands'. I did my own rough count on the largest of the Occupy protests that day. It left Union Square in the evening, heading for the Wall Street area. I walked through the march front to back, figuring a couple of thousand loosely packed protesters to a block, and came up with a conservative estimate of 15,000 people. Maybe it wasn't the biggest protest of all time, but size-able enough given that Occupy, an organization without strong structures, but once strongly located, had been quite literally pushed or even beaten out of its camps in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere across the country and toward oblivion. It's true that if you were checking out the Nation or Mother Jones, you would have gotten a more accurate sense of what was going on. Still, didn't the great protest movement of our American moment, on a planet still in upheaval, deserve better that day? And no matter what you read in the mainstream media, here's what you would have known: This country is increasingly an armed camp, and those marchers, remarkably relaxed and peaceable, were heading out into a concentration of police that was staggering and should have been startling: Cops on motor scooters patrolled the edges of the march, which was hemmed in by the usual moveable metal barricades. Police helicopters buzzed us at rooftop level.