Wall Street Occupiers Fear Drummers Will Be Their Undoing

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Tue Oct-25-11 10:54 AM
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Wall Street Occupiers Fear Drummers Will Be Their Undoing

Source: Atlantic Wire

The most pervasive sound at Zuccotti Park, and one of the neighbors' biggest complaints, is that of a group of drummers pounding the skins, and organizers now fear their inability to rein in the constant drumming will kill what support they've gotten and move the park's owners to ask police to clear them out. The occupation reached a compromise at its General Assembly on Monday night, with the drummers agreeing to limit their playing to four hours a day (from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.), but it's not the first time the occupiers have reached an agreement on limiting the drumming, and the fear now is that neighbors, already skeptical of the camp's ability to regulate itself, will decide at Tuesday night's meeting of Community Board 1 that they can't put up with it any longer.

The Zuccotti encampment had passed a regulation on Oct. 13 to limit the drumming to two hours a day, but drummers ignored it. Some neighbors at a community board meeting last week expressed skepticism that the encampment could regulate its percussion section. As one "trusted friend and respected activist" explained to the literary magazine n+1, the community support is crucial to keeping police off the back of the encampment.

"At this point we have lost the support of allies in the Community Board and the state senator and city electeds who have been fighting the city to stave off our eviction, get us toilets, etc. On Tuesday there is a Community Board vote, which will be packed with media cameras and community members with real grievances. We have sadly demonstrated to them that we are unable to collectively 1) keep our space and surrounding areas clean and sanitary, 2) keep the park safe, 3) deal with internal conflict and enforce the Good Neighbor Policy that was passed by the General Assembly."

The city backed off a plan to clear protesters out of the park earlier this month, in part because the protesters had the support of local politicians and the community. If they lose that, Zuccotti Park owner Brookfield Office Properties would have far less political opposition to asking the police to clear the protesters out. The problem is, the drummers don't necessarily go along with the general assembly. "This may have been because the drummers did not attend the GA and therefore did not know a consensus had been reached. This sucks for the drummers," one organizer said at last week's community board meeting, according to Firedog Lake. A thread on the group's organizing website nycga.net calls the drummers "poisonous," and from the description n+1's source gave of one disruptive individual, that's pretty apt in some cases:

Read more: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/10/wall-street-occupiers-fear-drummers-will-be-their-undoing/44085/

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