Punk picnic meets the Arab Spring

Quite some years ago, before the city became a shiny Mecca for mining and money, some young people in the Western Australian capital of Perth would gather to hold what became known as the 'Punk Picnic'.

Those scenes came to mind visiting the camp for Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement now into its second month in lower Manhattan.

These occasional gatherings were pretty much as described: teenagers (and some older) rebelling against accepted fashion, taste, politics, the status quo, sunshine, society, government, etc, etc. You get the idea.

The events were intended to be incongruous – a spiky-haired mob wearing tartan pants picnicking in the sun among gum trees and families. This was not normal behaviour (except for some of the participants perhaps falling over and asleep from drinking too much cider).

Those scenes came to mind visiting the camp for Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement now into its second month in lower Manhattan. Jammed between the former World Trade Center site and the Broadway headquarters of investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, Zuccotti Park now houses an army of apparently unfocussed inappropriate discontent.

The protestors have been criticised for not having a coherent agenda beyond dissatisfaction with, well, the world. A collection of discarded banners in the park, cardboard signs angry at everything from Wall Street greed to circumcision (“Stop Male Genital Mutilation Now!”), provided evidence in the affirmative.

It's easy to not take seriously a bunch of unwashed punk hippy-types wearing zombie make-up, holding circle meetings, and beating drums in the shadow of skyscrapers. Much media did so until a senior police officer was caught on camera needlessly pepper-spraying protestors at a related demonstration. Add around 700 people being arrested on Brooklyn Bridge last weekend and the movement has to thank the New York Police Department for inadvertently promoting its cause. Maybe these kids are on to something after all.

Zuccotti Park was not only full of the great unwashed. Police from several departments lined the bordering streets including officers from TARU, the “Technical Assistance Response Unit”, a little known squad who drive around in an unmarked white van and film things. One riot police officer took time out to read an information brochure from the protestors.

Zuccotti Park's location between Ground Zero and Wall Street has also made it a newly added New York City tourist destination and while camouflage and combat boots are the majority fashion choice, Wall Street suits are not uncommon among the crowd. There's nothing like cross-pollination of ideas.

Gandhi said words to the effect of “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The Occupy Wall Street gang might not win whatever battle they are fighting but they have captured a broad sentiment. “We are the 99%” protestors claim, suggesting the other one per cent is the greedy and corrupt super-rich that control politics and power. It may look similar but this is most definitely not just a picnic.

Similar protests have sprouted in other cities across the United States. It's a sentiment not unrelated to the more conservatively dressed Tea Party agendas and this is where it gets more interesting. Several unions are poised to join the protests. It might not be quite an Arab Spring, but it's a cold bookend to the end of a year of global discontent.