Mindful of the Chicago ordinance restricting loud noise early in the day and late at night in public spaces, a trio of drummers waited quietly in the Loop Monday morning before banging out the sounds of protest.
Then shortly after 8 a.m. boom, boom, boom echoed through the city’s canyon of capital and finance like distant thunder.
Day 25 of Occupy Chicago at the corner of Jackson and LaSalle had begun.
Yet beyond the immediate strategy of doing more of the same – more marches through the Loop, more drumming, more civil disobedience, more raging against the machine of corporate money and economic inequality – what is next for the mostly young men and women who makeup Occupy Chicago remains unclear.
They were jailed by the score early Sunday morning after trying to turn a small patch of Grant Park into a permanent base camp for their non-violent struggle.
“The number one thing on the Occupy Chicago agenda is finding a home,’’ said a member of the group’s media committee, Evelyn Dehais, 24, who graduated from the University of Chicago two years ago. “Finding a permanent location will dramatically expand our numbers.’’
They are looking at and researching the law and location of several spots – public and private – to call home. They want to try again to set up camp within a few days. In the meantime they are also debating — on the sidewalks, in the parks and in their mass meetings called a “general assembly” — the best way to advance their movement. They hope to spin their chants into change, their protests into policy.
“Some people are interested in reform through policy, some people are interested in more drastic action,’’ Dehais said. “Personally, I’m one of those people who think that changing the policies of our government can make it better.
“But,’’ she added, “we all agree on the same thing: that for too long the people of this country have been told to be quiet and take it, have been told that their voice doesn’t matter, that an individual doesn’t matter.’’
Politicians and pundits have watched over the last month, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with alarm. What began early in the autumn with New York’s Occupy Wall Street has spread across the globe, and people are trying to figure out what’s next.
Indeed, the whole world may not be watching yet, but a huge chunk of it is.
“I think they’ve tapped a public sentiment that is concerned about the inequality of wealth in America and the struggles of working families as well as the power of Wall Street,’’ U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in an interview with the Chicago News Cooperative.
“But as yet they are unfocused in terms of an agenda,’’ he said. “That is a difficult task to draw together all of this emotion and all of this political sentiment into an agenda. So many of us, when asked, say we support many of the things they stand for but really don’t know the entire agenda or what they’re setting up to do.’’
With the 2012 presidential election rapidly approaching, the questions about the agenda and intentions of the Occupy movement here and across the country will only intensify, said Don Rose, a longtime political strategist, who was the spokesman for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966.
“There has to come a time to focus,’’ Rose said. “It is fine that it’s diffuse now. In a sense you get a chance to test slogans, to find yourself as long as the energy doesn’t go out it.’’
He said there are two stages to political effectiveness: mobilizing and organizing.
“They’re mobilizing right now,’’ Rose said. “But if they don’t take the next step to organize there is relatively little potential for accomplishing a political goal.’’
Durbin said it is unclear to him where the Occupy movement stands politically and if it will help or hurt the Democrats next year.
“The Tea Party really came out of the ranks of the Republican Party,’’ Durbin said. “This group represents a more independent group, certainly coming from the Left, that’s for sure. But I’m not certain they would have been card-carrying Democrats going into this.’’
But Rose said that if Obama “handles this moment the right way, it will work to his benefit.’’
He said that John F. Kennedy, for example, “never exactly co-opted the civil rights movement but created a tacit alliance that ultimately worked to his benefit and later to Lyndon Johnson’s benefit.’’
As 2,000 supporters of Occupy Chicago marched from Jackson and LaSalle to Grant Park Saturday night, there was a sea of signs, including a picture of President Obama with the word “Hope’’ replaced by the word “Hoax.’’
Willie J.R. Fleming of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign walked in the front row of the march as he thrust his fist in the air and the protesters chanted: “One, we are the people. Two, we are united. Three, the occupation is not leaving.’’
Fleming said many of the marchers had lost faith in Obama and the Democrats.
“They promised us change,’’ he said, “and all we got was chump change.’’
Still, Fleming said, Obama could yet win them over.
“I bet 90 percent or more of the people out here voted for Obama,’’ he said. “The grass roots organizations that put him in the White House are here. He’s in trouble if he does not address the issue of poverty – and soon.’’
On Monday, as Occupy Chicago moved into its fourth week, Peter Diebold, 23, of Glen Ellyn, stood at the corner of Jackson and LaSalle, trying to be heard over the nearby drummers.
Diebold was one of the 175 Occupy Chicago supporters arrested Sunday morning for refusing to leave the park after the 11 P.M. closing. On Monday, he carried a handmade sign: “How Many Protesters Will Be Arrested Before The 1st Bankster?’’
“We don’t know what’s next yet,’’ he said. “We’re still young, still trying to figure things out. Right now, our group is like a teenager, just coming into his own.’’
Sunday morning’s mass arrests came at the end of nearly a week of protests, marches and civil disobedience by Stand Up Chicago, a more mainstream coalition of 19 labor unions and neighborhood organizations.
They too are trying to determine the next step.
The Rev. C.J. Hawking of Arise Chicago, a faith-based group that works with the poor and working families, said, “Stand Up Chicago has this incredible momentum with a shared vision and purpose with Occupy Chicago.’’
“But what we do next?’’ she asked. “I’m not exactly sure.’’
Hawking said she thought the coalition was more interested in organizing around issues than around politicians.
“I think like Egypt and Tunisia, the strength of this is it is grass roots,’’ she said, in reference to the regime change brought about by protests in two Middle East countries. “I think it needs to stay at the grass roots to keep the strength. Just as the civil rights movement changed an unjust system, this movement is going to change an unjust economic system.’’
Annie Harris, 76, the Sunday school superintendent at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church on the South Side, said her organization, Action Now, intends to work with the young people of Occupy Chicago in the future.
“We have a lot in common,’’ she said.
Last Tuesday, Harris was one of five members of Action Now arrested during a “trash-in’’ at a downtown Bank of America. The group emptied on the lobby floor and window sills several bags of trash taken from a foreclosed and abandoned home on the West Side.
They were protesting the flood of foreclosures on the South and West Sides of the city and demanding that the banks hire people from the neighborhood to maintain and secure the property.
Harris’s bag contained “used condoms and a whiskey bottle,’’ she said.
Handcuffed behind her back, Harris paused on the top step of the paddy wagon. She was scared. “I never been to jail before,’’ she said. “But then I thought about the cause, about all the people put out in the street and I stopped being scared.’’
She said she did not march during the 1960’s for civil rights or to end the war in Vietnam.
“I was raising my children,’’ Harris said. “But I’m marching now and I’m not going to stop until things start changing for all the people. We can’t serve God without serving one another here on earth.’’
