Inside the Belly of the Beltway Beast

At the beginning of October, I met a couple of the folks who were in their first week of occupying McPherson Square, located along the corporate lobbying corridor of K Street in my hometown of DC. They were determined to stay and spread a message about income inequality, crony capitalism, and the wrong direction our government was headed. They stayed and they multiplied. At the time I was attending The Stop Machine multi-day rally at Freedom Plaza. I had earlier been associated with helping to organize this older, more strictly anti-war mobilization, but I had withdrawn from the steering committee both because of constraints on my time (busy work days and moving to a new apartment with my dog) and disagreements with the organizing style of others involved. I fell in love with Occupy DC at McPherson Square and even as I attended Stop the Machine at Freedom Plaza, I became even more disenchanted with them. This is my story about the two occupations in DC, and how one has always bee