I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

I didn’t intend to go to Occupy Oakland yesterday. I knew there was a mass march but I was waiting for the delivery of our new cheap Ikea bed after our old cheap Ikea bed broke, and I had already resigned myself to a Saturday filled with fighting with confusing furniture directions and fingers made bloody by screws and hammers. But then I watched the disturbing video of police shooting pepper spray down the throats of peaceful student protesters at U.C. Davis, and I couldn’t just sit at my computer and watch anymore. I couldn’t just follow the Twitter hashtags or watch the livefeeds, I had to be there myself. The Davis video was graphic obviously, and outrageous, but somehow it touched something in me that the other reports of police brutality and civil injustice had been reaching towards for months. I haven’t been sleeping well, kept up at night stricken with worry about the direction of our country, fretting over the ease with which police have begun to apply violent force to law-abiding young people with legitimate grievances, worried about the future and if this really is a class war and if it’s even safe to have babies in this world anymore, which is maybe an over-exaggeration but at 3am in the dark under the covers it seems like a legitimate fear. So after seeing that video I knew what I had to do: I had to reschedule the delivery and I had to wrap a scarf around my mouth and I had to go down to Oakland and see what the movement was really about.

So I went. My boyfriend and I hopped the BART to Oakland City Center and immediately after emerging from the station were overwhelmed with loud cheering following a union worker’s speech. The march was focused on raising awareness around the defunding of public education that’s currently going on in Oakland. The city plans to close down five schools due to budget cuts, despite already existent problems with overcrowded classrooms. This is an issue that’s close to my heart because I went to an incredibly overcrowded elementary school, one that was so overcrowded that in 2nd grade my teacher actually had to teach 2nd and 3rd graders in the same classroom. It was called a “2/3 split” and there were over 35 kids in my one class. It was chaos.

So at the rally teachers and students, unionized nurses and longshoremen, spoke to the crowd about the importance of mobilization, of education, of the Occupy movement itself. The crowd was incredibly diverse: tons of children with their parents, old people, young people, black, white, Asian and Latino people. I was happily surprised at the diversity considering what I’d been reading in the news. There were so many kids there! It made the whole thing seem safe, which was good because despite minor police presence my boyfriend was freaking out about getting pepper sprayed and/or arrested. (Though at this point who can really blame him?)

Following the rally, thousands of people marched peacefully past the banks in downtown Oakland, hanging overdue notices on their front doors to let them know how much they owe the American people. Everyone was videotaping and photographing everything. Before we embarked on the march, the organizers emphasized how important it was for regular Occupy protesters to document everything, so that we could have the real news, not just the news reported by the mainstream outlets. It was an effective cry; aside from the credentialed reporters, it seemed like approximately 1 out of every 10 protesters was eagerly documenting the unfolding events.

After marching by the banks, we snaked up to Lakeview Elementary School, across from the historic Grand Lake Theater. The theater marquee read: “No one can evict an idea whose time has come. Shame on you Mayor Quan.” It was inspiring to see such a public display of solidarity from local businesses. I admit to welling up a bit when I glimpsed the marquee.

Outside the school, teachers and parents and kids spoke about the horrors of shutting down schools when class sizes were already topping 35 and public tax dollars were being funneled into privately run charter schools. My boyfriend and I were asked to help hold a big banner that said, “Tax the rich,” which we did dutifully for a while until an army veteran offered to fill in for us. By this time it was close to 4:30pm and starting to get dark and drizzly. We marched back towards 19th and Telegraph, where the more avid among us were going to pull down fencing at a vacant lot in order to set up a new camp. When we streamed beneath an overpass, chants grew more enthusiastic as protesters reveled in the booming effect the overpass acoustics lent to our voices. We were thousands strong but beneath the overpass it felt like hundreds of thousands. The triumph of that illusion was not lost on any of us.

As we made our way back downtown, police had begun letting traffic through, so we streamed through lanes of cars. I assumed the drivers would be angry with us for posing such a delay, but the vast majority of them smiled and honked and pumped their fists in solidarity. They were with us, even the people we were inconveniencing! It was kind of amazing, especially considering how much we all hate traffic in the Bay Area.

When we got back to 19th and Telegraph, the rain began to come steadily. The first police presence I witnessed was a string of cops, clad in their regular uniforms, ringing the lot. When protesters began to dismantle the fencing, the OPD let them, which I thought was strange. Children’s art that had been lined up along the fence of the vacant lot was collected and stored safely at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Café, a restaurant nearby that has shown immense support for the Occupy movement.

At this point it was dark and raining and my boyfriend and I decided to head back to San Francisco. We came home and put on warm socks and cued up the police scanner so we could listen to see if the OPD were going to infiltrate the new camping spot. We heard later that the sound truck, which had been blasting music during the whole march, was apparently impounded under the ridiculous sideshow law. The OPD did not confront the protesters until 8am the next morning, at which point they left peacefully.

The whole day was an incredibly inspiring show of solidarity, of sheer humanity, in the face of the greed that has overtaken our government. I actually consider myself politically moderate–I am by no means a socialist or a communist or an anarchist. I just want our democracy to return to its roots: I want my votes to mean more than corporate dollars. So I can’t help identifying with the Occupy movement, since so much of what they are protesting—corporatism, the shrinking of the middle class, the immenseness of student loan debt—has impacted me and my family personally, and often times on a daily basis. The first protest I ever went to was in 2004 for Bush’s inauguration. My dad took me and my friend Alyssa into Washington D.C. so that we could boo when his cavalcade of cars drove down the Mall. It was cool, but it was nothing like this.

Last night, even though I was sore and achy from marching and carrying signs, I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying and I didn’t have nightmares of police with nightsticks prodding my stomach and my back and my shoulders. I fell asleep easily, thinking of the poetry Occupy Wall Street projected onto the Verizon building on Thursday: WE ARE WINNING / IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING / DO NOT BE AFRAID / LOVE.

I slept deeply for the first time in weeks.

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