I couldn't get to the occupation of San Jose until after the Green Party of Santa Clara County meeting. When I got there there weren't many people around, and half of them were too involved with something else to spend time talking to me. The rest of them are shown below.

        

The couple speaking out in favor of Scott Olsen said they come by frequently, when they can fit it in around the other stuff they have going on.  He said that if I'd have come by a few hours earlier I would have seen more people there. She said that they'd had lots of signs with sticks before, but when the cops busted the event and carted everything off the other night they'd all been stolen. So now the replacements were a bit more "add hoc."

The woman with the 99% sign was new to me. We got to talking about the many ways oil creeps into our lives. I despaired about how there is no substitute for chain oil for bicycles that is made from petroleum base. She told me about the time she had been at Occupy LA and this guy had oiled her chain with soy based oil. I gather that was a recent event, and the oil is still working great on her bicycle. She surprised me with that.

     

The guy with the OCCUPIE THE WORLD sign said that several people had put a day into getting that sign to look good. The back had autographs from many different people.

I talked to a guy that said he had been there every day since the beginning. The occupation is doing okay. They were moving their tents and so forth across the street to see if that would keep the cops from hauling them off at 3 AM. Several people gave me the impression that they were doing duty as part of the occupation as part of their ongoing commitment to social justice. A rather casual "I need to put five hours a week into something, so I'm spending some of it here standing up to the government" attitude.

     

Below is the back of that bank transfer day flier. It's a list of local credit unions, where hopefully your money will server less exploitive purposes than it would at some big Wall Street bank. I think the message behind the campaign is that part of taking back the public places is dis-empowering New York by taking back your money.



  

On the way home I showed the above pictures to this guy on the bus with me. He liked the "No more police brutality against peaceful protest" sign. He said that in his day job he had to go by the protest regularly, and many of the signs made no sense to him. He wanted to know what he could do! Objecting to corporate person-hood? He just didn't get it. We talked about this and that for a bit, and then he told me his father had gone to Vietnam as a US soldier. He'd called the guy a war criminal and mass murderer to his face. Then looking at the future with his teenage son, he said "If he dies over there I get a folded flag and the memory of a hero. If he comes back I get a war criminal." He sounded like he didn't want either of those options. For some reason that conversation is haunting me.