OccupyPeoria makes a splash

It was a surprisingly large rally, by Peoria standards.

I hung out at the Occupy Peoria rally on Oct. 15. What you have to understand is no one really occupied anything. The rally was held at the corner of West Main Street and University. This particular corner of Campustown has seen a lot of rallies over the year. In fact, the Occupy Peoria crowd kind of merged with a regular end-the-war rally. No one seemed to mind.

The rally started off small, but there’s another protest planned on Saturday, November 5 at 2:00 it grew to more than 400 people by the time it turned into a march around the Bradley University campus and then downtown.

Another way this was a bit different than other rallies in the “occupy” movement: No harassment by the fuzz. “The Man” left us alone. I spotted one campus cop parked in front of Soo Kim, keeping an eye on things.

Everyone was friendly. Not to say that there wasn’t a lot of anger under the surface. All of us were pretty much POed at the way the government is run to the betterment of the banker and brokers.

“We the people will not be silenced” and “Level the playing field. Where is the bailout for the middle class?” — Signs carried by an OccupyPeoria protester.

I saw and heard from people who could have passed for 1960s hippie radicals. I also saw people wearing their union jackets. I saw elderly people. There were Ron Paul libertarians — quite a lot of them, actually — with their “End the Fed” posters.

I mentioned the diversity of ideolgy that the crowd represented to one young protestor names Andrew Englebrecht. “Yeah,” he said. “Thank God we’re all pissed about the same thing.”

The biggest common denominator was a hefty dose of anger at the staus quo. “I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one.” — Sign carried by an OccupyPeoria protester.

People are POed. The average American feels powerless, battered about by forces beyond their control. It’s not that the Occupy Peoria or the entire Occupay Wall Street crowd doesn’t understand what’s going on. They do. And they understand that the people who caused the economic crisis we face got a bailout, then laugh at suggestions that they ought to act in the public’s interest.

“I can’t afford a lobbyist.” — Sign carried by an OccupyPeoria protester.

The organizers seem to know what they were doing. They had plenty of people going around taking pictures. They kept the group happy by starting songs. I noticed that they also put the prettiest girls in front of the V-shaped protest line.

Passerby seemed to like that they saw, judging by the number of honks.

Not that there weren’t some idiots out there. One dude in a van had a single finger salute.



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.