TruthoutReport presented a first hand account of the event.
"The brief re-occupation of Zuccotti Park and its swift re-eviction are both previews of the season to come. With numbers augmented by warm weather, St. Patrick’s Day’s festive atmosphere and the Left Forum conference (the hundreds of panels of which took place at nearby Pace University), the protesters who took to Zuccotti Park to celebrate six months of Occupy Wall Street sent out a mass text on Saturday evening, reading "OccupyNYC: Liberty Square is being RE-OCCUPIED! 500+ people and growing! Come on down! Bring blankets & food!""
The report goes on to describe a changed tone.
"Occupy Wall Street's message: prepare for a radical spring. Chants of "a-anti-anti-capitalista" were more frequent and more broadly based than I had ever heard at an Occupy ..."Anti-capitalism" may not be the most specific philosophy, but it belies proclamations like Bill Maher’s "they don’t hate capitalism; they hate what’s been done to it," whatever that means. The group also engaged in a raucous ... fortified human wall ... indicating a more militant, confrontational (yet still nonviolent) attitude brewing among the occupiers."
The description of the swiftness of police action that follows demonstrates that it isn't simply that some radical factions of OWS have changed the organization's agenda; it demonstrates that the newfound militancy of the protestors is responsive to the adumbrating intentions of the police and their avowed ferocity to quell democratic upswell. The protestors are not radicalizing; the state of affairs simply begins to exhibit its imminent character: tyranny.
From the OWS facebook page.
"Protecting and serving the corporate states of america, the NYPD's brutal response to our peaceful and nonviolent celebration last night. 80 plus arrests. The Gang in Blue has already gunned down 3 innocent black youth this year. And in between they crack heads for the 1%, trying to silence any resistance. We fight with and in solidarity with all people subject to the tyranny of the capitalist system. Their brutality against our peaceful assembly helps grow this movement as the world sees their hypocrisy. We take the streets again tonight at 8pm, meet at the red cude by LIBERTY SQUARE."
The mention of the YouTube documentary "Gangs in Blue" is exciting on its own. The grass roots filmmaking of independent, local activists is not just a moving and damning tutorial of life in the ghetto and incredible chronicle of voices from people who live through brutality and injustice; the movie also is precisely what make the potential of a radicalizes OWS so exciting, one that refocuses itself on truly despotic conditions in our country instead of just "campaign finance reform", that will hopefully widen the organization's scope to a "think local, ACT global" perspective for confronting globalization.
We should embrace this move toward a more definitive negation of certain principles of the status quo, loosely and widely coalesced and defined as "anti-capitalism" by recognizing OWS for what the protestor want it to be now: a radical movement to redfine our generations understanding of politics that is thus opposed to the limited spectrum of liberal democracy and its capitalist method of distribution.