Michelle Gienow

The revolution is what you say it is: Josef Hoeder of Baltimore thinks Occupy Baltimore is boss. Or maybe that he’s his own boss. Or something else entirely: It’s up to you to to decide.

Occupy Baltimore kicks off its occupation around noon on Tuesday, Oct. 4., as a few dozen people arrive at McKeldin Square next to the Inner Harbor, some with small hand-held signs, a few with paintbrushes and bed sheets, to stake out space for the revolution.

Melissa Rowell sits on the edge of the fountain smoking a cigarette. She says she’s here in solidarity with the protesters. She also says she has a friend on the New York City police force who “spent the night in central booking” after arresting some people at the New York protest. Another friend works on Wall Street and had accompanied Rowell on a trip to New Orleans the week prior to celebrate their 40th birthdays, Rowell says. “She made a comment that the protesters are dirty hippies, and I guess some of them are,” Rowell, who has a sign that says why isn’t wall street in jail, adds. “So we don’t talk about it.”

Rowell says she’s here on her lunch break from a job at Johns Hopkins. She has to take a cab back to work soon, but “might come back here with my son.”

The Occupy movement got rolling in New York on Sept. 17 with an inchoate and broad coalition of people attempting to “Occupy Wall Street” in order to push back against the rampant capitalism that many feel is overwhelming/undermining American politics and American society itself. Calls for the end of corporate personhood, the repeal of the Patriot Act, and a laundry list of other causes animate that crowd, though the demonstration of cruelty and alleged trickery by New York City police officers against the first wave of protesters (documented on video and uploaded to YouTube, like so much of the Occupy movement so far) seems to have had the greatest effect on recruitment efforts.

The Occupy Together web site (occupytogether.org) went up with calls to coordinate “occupations” around the country, claiming meet-ups in 1,294 cities as of Oct. 11. “People recognized that not everyone could go to New York,” says Cullen Nawalkowsky, a founding member of the collective that operates Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, “and that there were local concerns not being addressed by the national movement.”

The Baltimore offshoot started on Saturday, Oct. 2, with calls to Nawalkowsky, who helped arrange the first public meeting at the Red Emma’s collective’s 2640 Space on St. Paul Street. The Sunday and Monday evening organizational meetings were attended by between 150 and 200 people, who debated the wheres and whens of the protest (Will it be in front of Wells Fargo? The Washington Monument?) as well as key logistics.

The call for tents went out over the Facebook page and Google group. It was unclear on Tuesday afternoon if any actual campers were going to pitch them. Baltimore Police spokesperson Detective Jeremy Silbert, watching over the scene at McKeldin Square Oct. 4, said police were on patrol as usual, with no special plans for the demonstrators. “We want to make sure this group is safe,” he says.

Silbert said that his understanding of the law was that as many as 25 people could gather on the brick-paved triangle in front of the fountain and demonstrate without need of a permit. He allowed that, subtracting media personnel, about 25 actual occupiers were present. (This reporter guesses it was close to double that.)

“No one’s really sure” if camping can happen, says Ryan Mitchell, a student at Baltimore City Community College who says he plans to transfer to Morgan State next year to study architecture. “I was in New York this weekend, and we had all kinds of crazy restrictions.” Among those, he says, was a directive that demonstrators could not wear masks.

Asked what the goals might be, Mitchell says he’s not sure. “I think it’s interesting that there aren’t any coalescles yet,” he says, defining that term as a “fully formed list of demands.” Ending corporate personhood might be one; mandating labor representatives on corporate boards, as is standard practice in Germany, might be another.

Asked whether people will be camping here, Nawalkowsky says the question came up at the meeting. “We believe it was legal,” he says, but “ultimately the question is whether they will enforce it, which is a political concern, not a legal one. A cop can arrest you for walking on the sidewalk and say you’re obstructing traffic.” He says he was busted last summer after trying to snap a photo of a man being arrested in Hampden and spent 16 hours in Central Booking.

Nawalkowsky stands over a cardboard box containing bleach, rubber gloves, and paper towels. That and a case of bottled water are serving as the medical kit in the occupation’s early hours. He laments with a laugh that the only people here with premade signs and leaflets seem to be the LaRouchies.

Jeremy Batterson, leafleting a dozen feet away, is one of them. He’s got a big sign that says bring back glass steagall, the Depression-era law that separated deposit-taking banks from investment banks and insurance companies. Prominently near the bottom of the sign is the name Lyndon LaRouche.

“He’s been against this all along,” Batterson says of the perpetual presidential candidate, convicted tax cheat, and self-proclaimed inventor of the Strategic Defense Initiative. He hands out not one but three leaflets. They are full of references to “the bankrupt British imperial financial system,” a “fixed exchange rate credit system,” and “the original United States Hamiltonian credit system.”

A guy named Jerry, with a cross of orange tape on his back, walks over to Nawalkowsky, who tries to get him to take over guardianship of the box of medical supplies, but Jerry wanders off.

> Email Edward Ericson Jr.