Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

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In the photo above, dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters sleep in Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan this morning.

For nearly a month, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been plastered over New York headlines, as well as on television and numerous Web sites. Many comments printed in the press have been highlighting the ambiguity of the protest's message, especially considering their extended stay in a cramped urban park two blocks away from the World Trade Center site. Several friends of mine from the New School for Social Research have visited and taken part in the protest; one is living in the park himself. I have no call to go downtown anymore, but it was hard to deny the gravity of the event. I finally went there this morning.

Most people who work on Wall Street have a bone to pick with the protestors because it is hard to get around the area now. A few uncharitable banker types went as far as to call them a bunch of lazy useless people who screwed up their days. One of Manhattan's free commuter papers has made a habit of bemoaning some problem or other surrounding Occupy Wall Street, like the $2 million city tab for police officers to be stationed there around the clock or the traffic entanglements when the protestors go on a march (the soon-to-be-ex-head of the city transit authority also stopped cars and ran up a huge bill with a farewell visit on the Verrazano Narrows over the weekend). It's easy to ignore this babbling because New Yorkers love to complain, especially about their commutes. Put a bunch of straphangers in a burlesque show with free drinks and they will still find a way to cry about overcrowding on the 1 train or rising tolls on the bridges. So I went down at morning rush hour to see exactly how bad it is.

It's not exactly bad. Zuccotti Park, the block in question, is between Broadway and Trinity Place (Wall Street itself is on the other side of Broadway). Police barricades line Broadway except at certain pedestrian passes (anyone not used to that after 9/11 services, ticker tape parades, and elevated threat levels should leave town anyway). All the sidewalks around the park and for blocks in every direction from it were prefectly passable, even if a little trimmed by the barricades. There was even room for an hysterical cyclist to ride in a circle around the park screaming "Hey! All you a--holes who think you're doing something good for America! F--- you! All of you! Get the f--- up and get a f---ing job!" He did not look dressed for the office.

That would bother me, but the same yahoos were screaming "U.S.A.!" at the 9/11 service while relatives of the dead were reading names and crying. So I think they just like to yell at inappropriate times. He wasn't getting much of a rise out of the occupiers, most of whom were still asleep. They were lined up neatly in rows of sleeping bags and tarps, leaving aisle spaces for each other and passing businesspeople, never letting a leg or a bag outside of the proscribed line of the park. A man at the information booth on the west side of the park told me that patrollers go around 24 hours a day, making sure that no one is setting up in an unauthorized space. To this, a bearded giant next to him hollered "Do we f---ing look like we need authorization?"

They may not look it, but they do. These trend-bucking revolutionaries are there at the behest of the City of New York and its affiliates. Previous eras have proven that the city has no trouble sweeping such troubles off its doorstep when it wants to; some argue that they have already tried, with mass arrests during the protest's first few days and its disruptive outings. But the truth is that the city and Occupy Wall Street are engaged in a sort of stalemate. No one wants the protest there, but no one wants it anywhere else and no one wants to leave. No one likes what they came to say, but no one minds it much either. And, most importantly, no one has any problem with anyone else there. The cops joke around with the occupiers and the occupiers treat them with respect, even if they may not mean it. There is a great war being waged, but the sides aren't defined enough to pick one.

At 8:45 a.m., most people were just rousing. I circulated through aisles, saying hello to people and responding when they said it to me. I stopped by the medical station, where a decent spread of donated supplies (including a crash cart) was being manned by a nurse. He told me that most of the few medical problems were topical infections and athlete's foot, as well as a few cases of strep and worries about STDs. The FDNY medics came by during each shift to make sure nothing was getting out of control. "We all understand that we're on the edge here," he said. "One step out of line, someone gets hurt over something stupid, and it's all over. Everybody's being careful."

The breakfast line, made up of donated carbs from local muffin joints, was getting into gear in the center of the park. Bins of compost waste sat under a little grey-water reclamation box, like the kind we used to build in Haiti out of old crates and patches of grass. Donated clothing and shoes sat sorted and ready to be given out. Bins of books, mostly high-brow academic texts, sat in the northeast corner as a makeshift library of political thought. The northwest corner and its lonely sapling was decorated as an altar, covered and filled with best-wishes tokens from passersby and self-styled mystics, encouraging love and understanding. A salon was set up around a WiFi hotspot ("closed until powered") in the southwest corner. It all seemed quite pleasant, and everyone seemed to be respecting boundaries.

Each corner had half a dozen cops standing around, idly watching the inner workings of Occupy Wall Street. All of them had been there for days, and most of them had yet to make an arrest, issue a summons, or even tell someone to get out of the street. The profane cyclist was their only excitement so far that day. "Hell, I'd fight for my sh-- if it had all been taken away," one officer said. "But I also got through school without $100,000." Most of the occupiers were not interested in discussing such personal things. The fact that many of them are from privileged backgrounds and are too young to have much work or life experience stands in the way of the message, and that is. . .

That's the problem. Are they trying to make the whole world look like this open-air festival of an occupation? Are they trying to get jobs on Wall Street? Do they want the collapse of the capitalist economy and the forced redistribution of wealth under a government gun? We know a lot about what they don't like. We don't know much about what they like, or how they would get it. That is what scares so many people about Occupy Wall Street. Many of the protesters are the same people who thought it would be a good idea to raise a black flag over the New School in April 2009, scaring the hell out of a lot of people. They are perceived as destroyers, subversives, the gods of death. But their dreadlocks are so cute! I've seen protests turn mean, inside and outside the United States and even New York, and this one is not here to destroy anything. In the minds of most protesters, the thing that must be destroyed is something that should never have existed: wealth. And no one in Zuccotti Park is empowered to do so.

When today's Metro equated Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring (the two-page headline declared "American Spring"), I almost launched my tea across William Street. Arab Spring began with a self-immolation! It had spread across seven countries by its fourth week, the same time that Occupy Wall Street is entering. It was certainly not a pacifist movement, and the protesters had very concrete demands. Those demands included the death or imprisonment of their leaders, so I am fine (and so are the occupiers as well as the cops) without that parallel. Metro substantiated their sensationalism by going into the new use of online social networks and the occupiers' solidarity with similar protests in Britain, Spain, and Greece. It's hard to claim that revolutionaries stay one step ahead of the law using Facebook; the New School protests were cut short because security officials knew where to look for information: online. As far as solidarity goes, the occupiers should try to claim solidarity with some movements that have been the two things they want to be above all: nonviolent and successful.

And so, in classic THHL fashion, the view from the ground is that Occupy Wall Street is not as good as its supporters think it is and not as a bad as its critics say it is. It is harmless to those who seem to hate it the most, unless those people are disgusted by their own hypocrisy. Despite its status as a spectacle and its A-list visitors, it has yet to create any meaningful dialogue at the level the protesters should be at after nearly a month on Wall Street. With winter coming, they should be figuring out a way of getting above the street - for everyone's good.

That's the view from the ground.