On Sept. 17, an estimated 1,000 people flooded Wall Street in what would become the first in a series of peaceful demonstrations touching over 900 cities in 82 countries.
The movement, dubbed Occupy Wall Street, models itself on the Arab Spring, a wave of demonstrations marked by revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya with civil uprisings and protests occurring in at least fifteen other countries in the Arab world. Thanks to social media, Occupy Wall Street rapidly spread to major U.S. cities such as Boston and Austin, and on Oct. 15, Occupy Lansing, an initiative organized by the Lansing Workers’ Center (LWC), carried 300 citizens into the Capitol streets in what some hope will be just the first step in a series of continuing protests and rallies.
This feature story, written in October 2011, appeared in the following year’s edition of Red Cedar Log, the award-winning yearbook of Michigan State University. Keep reading…
