Franklin Reeve

The ideals that drive the occupiers of Zuccotti Park

Down in New York last week, my wife Laura Richardson and I spent a day among the citizens of Occupy Wall Street.

What a live group of everybody. The best pacifism of the 1960s prevails in an even loftier incarnation, the sort of powerful silence that Martin Luther King Jr. meant everyone to express, because he then and they now understand that the basic social structure must be replaced.

There's no point whatever in protesting this figure or that, this business or that, this political party or that.

Grateful for the support shown by others and for the small-time and big-time help given, these people - young, middle-aged, old (“Grandmas for Peace”) - are enacting their moral truths by putting their bodies on the concrete pavement and marble benches under the ginkgo trees on Liberty Plaza (now Zuccotti) Park.

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