"We're not a leaderless movement, we're a movement of leaders"

By aaroncynic in News on Oct 6, 2011 2:00PM

Walking south down LaSalle Street from the Chicago River, there were few signs anything was happening outside the normal mechanics of an average Wednesday. Commuters carried their usual baggage towards their transit points home and the city lights slowly began to glow as the night crept into day. Even at LaSalle and Monroe, where the columns of the Federal Reserve began to show themselves, sights and sounds of the Occupy Chicago movement were faint, amounting to a handful of handbills I spotted roped to street poles much further north. Freshly printed signs reading “No Parking” lined both sides of the street, and when I arrived, I found only a fraction of the nearly 200 people I sat with on Saturday.

Occupy Chicago has gone mobile.

According to a press release, Occupy Chicago demonstrators cannot remain grounded on the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve unless they're willing to face citation and possible arrest. Those I spoke with told me police said that they must keep moving. Now, demonstrators can no longer keep anything on the sidewalk that can't be stowed in a backpack or pushed away in a small cart.

Micah Philbrook, a demonstrator who has spent the majority of his days and nights on Jackson and Lasalle, told me that while going mobile was slightly disheartening, he still felt the movement would grow. In fact, he felt it could be an opportunity to spread the message further and encourage others to join in.

“I've been telling a lot of people - this movement is bigger than any one of us...for any reason somebody has to leave, someone will step up. We're not a leaderless movement, we're a movement of leaders.”

Though the crowd may have amounted to two dozen or so activists the moment I arrived, that soon changed. A stream of marchers poured onto the corner, returning from passing through the Loop spreading their message. Plenty of new faces were among them, but Sarah, a 26-year-old legal secretary, has been there, like Micah, since the beginning. She too, felt that the movement has made strides in the past two weeks and seemed undeterred by the changes.

“I work 45 hours a week so I can't be here all the time. What I originally wanted was for Americans to come out and speak to each other about these issues and engage each other. Everybody's having conversations, they're talking to each other, I think it's great. I would like to see more people out here. But what we have from what we started, I think it's amazing.”

Unlike New York, which has seen a coarse crackdown with plenty of police brutality towards Occupy Wall Street, the Chicago demonstrations have remained peaceful, aside from a random act of vandalism by a single protester whose actions were quickly shunted by the movement at large. Demonstrators have complied with police orders, and have changed and adapted in order to remain peaceful at large, but continue to spread their message.

Even the message from the Board of Trade on Tuesday didn't deter demonstrators. In fact, it proved their point. Micah told me that while it felt antagonistic, it showed “what we're talking about - they're disconnected, they don't know what's going on,” he said. “They think this is a joke...and it's all going to back to the way it was. It can't go back to the way it was just like we can't go back to the American Dream. The good ol' days don't exist, and they weren't that good to begin with. The economy is falling apart and this country is being ripped apart by money and our politics. We're in 240 cities worldwide now as of this afternoon. It's spreading, not diminishing, it's spreading.”