Schneider writes: "Those of us whose social media networks swelled at the height of Occupy Wall Street have been inundated for more than a year now with a discouraging topic of discussion. Is Occupy dead?"
Is the Occupy movement over? (photo: unknown)
18 September 13
andy Nurse seemed to have lost what tolerance she once had for long meetings. Even though the basement of the DeKalb Library in Brooklyn was air-conditioned on an especially sticky July day, and even though the meeting's agenda was only partly finished, she told the handful of other eco-activists there that she was sorry, but she had to go build some compost bins, and she left.
Nurse never really looked all that happy in meetings. As one of the earliest members of Occupy Wall Street's Direct Action Working Group - as well as one of the last - she attended a lot of them, including a lot of quite horrible ones. She could often be seen sitting at the far end of the oblong circle, away from the fray but guiding it nonetheless with her formidable evil eye. Where she would come alive was in the streets, leading marches through the winding canyons of the Financial District or tricking the cops with an unexpected reversal of course to get the march to where it wasn't supposed to go: Wall Street.
Nurse, now 29, is tall, strong and accustomed to being in motion. Her father was an engineer in the Navy; she was born in Panama and graduated from high school in South Korea, with stints in a sequence of world capitals in between. Before Occupy, she organized relief shipments to Haiti with the United Nations' World Food Programme, and she was studying toward a master's degree in international affairs. But by the time a friend suggested they check out the protest that was happening on September 17, 2011, she was aching to do something more hands-on. She found it in the occupation.
Continue Reading: Breaking Up With Occupy
