This revolution has no focus. But it does have a class system.
On one end of Zuccotti Park, where the unorganized, unhinged Occupy Wall Street demonstration is entering its third week, sit the elite. They’re young, overwhelmingly white, college-age kids banging Mac laptops, and yelling into iPhones before bedding down in Brooklyn.
On the other end, mercifully separated by a mountain of tarpaulins, sleeping bags and human refuse I would not touch with a Hazmat suit, sleep the Smelly Ones. Standing downwind of this human biohazard isn’t pretty.
We’re here at the protest epicenter, the planetary point where bitchery meets bellyaching. And it makes no kind of cosmic sense.
Folks here are discontented! Angry about everything from greedy banks and corporations stealing their futures — for which they may have some kind of point — to, as one man confided in me, his alcoholic father,.
Three weeks into the revolution, there is no common theme.
At the periphery sit well-heeled thrill-seekers who’ve traveled from Virginia Beach, Seattle, Ohio and Portland, Ore.
Others come from Mars.
Like the guy who marched with a sign announcing that he was the “Fart Smeller.’’ Say what?
“It’s not a joke,’’ he said, as serious as open-heart surgery, showing me a photograph of his important work. “I go up to women and ask to smell their …’’
At the stinky end of the park, I met a smart man, Phillip Belpasso, 64, in a filthy Army-style jacket, who said he’s been in Zuccotti Park “pretty much since the Towers came down.’’ A decade?
“This all happened around me, sort of,’’ he said. “Say, have you figured out what’s going on here yet? I don’t even know if they know what they’re for. ’’
Ian K., who passed as an official — the word “Security’’ was on the “Hello’’ sticker on his chest — informed silly me that having a point isn’t really the point.
“There isn’t a coherent message,’’ said Ian, 30. “The fact is that we are individuals. You’d have to ask every single individual and you’d get varying answers.’’
The lack of what Ian called a “uniformity of commonality of message’’ was wearing on Calum McPherson-Smith, 23, who’d taken a bus here from Virginia Beach 10 days earlier.
“I came because I’m hopeful this will grow into something to combat a giant, vast disease affecting our society and socioeconomic system,’’ he said. “We don’t look serious! We look like a bunch of dirty kids hanging out!’’
He obviously doesn’t realize that if you need a point, you don’t belong here in the first place.