Occupy Wall Street: Newcomers bring their worries and hopes to New York protest

Eli Saslow

The Washington Post

October 9, 2011 ET

The three newcom­ers trav­eled from across the country, part of the lat­est wave of aggrieved Americans who hoped their prob­lems might be solved here.
The re­tired lawyer used her di­min­ished savings to come from California. The union boss caught a morning flight from Chicago with his staff. The un­employed televi­sion produc­er, just evicted from his apart­ment, put his be­long­ings into a stor­age locker in Harlem and hitched a ride with a friend.
All three arrived in the early morning at a small park in Lower Manhattan, a concrete square edged by skyscrap­ers and hot-dog carts that has become a des­tination for thou­sands of       

people who are enraged by un­employ­ment, greed on Wall Street and the increas­ing wealth gap. What began three weeks ago as a small col­lege protest and then grew into a circus of hippies, mis­fits and an­ar­chists is now trying to grow into some­thing else: a populist move­ment for eco­nom­ic change.

The Occu­py Wall Street protests have spread from here to hun­dreds of cities and towns,               

including Wash­ington, but the epi­center re­mains in this downtown park. It is the spectacle here that has earned the at­tention of activists, celebrities, la­bor orga­nizers and Pres­ident Obama. It is here where hun­dreds more disenfran­chised people have been arriv­ing each day, hopeful that they might find a voice in the nightly general as­semblies that address the fu­ture of these protests.

Now, a move­ment that started with no concrete goals as a simple protest of power must decide what to do with some power of its own. Can a leader­less group that re­lies on consensus find a way for so many people to agree on what comes next? Can it offer not only objections but also solutions? Can a rad­ical protest evolve into a mainstream move­ment for change?

Over the week­end, three more people came to New York City to find out.
'What am I wait­ing for?'
Brenda Barnes arrived first, from Santa Mon­ica, Calif., and she set down her backpack next to a concrete bench at the entrance to the park. She had just turned 67, and she had not partic­ipated in a protest since the end of the Vietnam War. Now her husband is disabled, and she worries about their fixed income of Social Secu­rity and re­tire­ment savings.
"The govern­ment is go­ing broke, and who can trust the stock mar­ket?" she said. She and her husband had consid­ered moving to Eng­land. "There's not much left to rely on here," she said.
She had hoped Obama might bring stability