In September 2011, Philip Arnone ’08 went to a protest in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. An experienced activist, he had seen nascent protest movements before – and he had seen most of them fall apart. Unimpressed, he didn’t think the one in the Financial District would last. “We had a few arrests that day, not much,” he said of what would become the Occupy Wall Street movement. “It was kind of anticlimactic.” A week later, protesters still held the park. That’s when impatient police officers swooped in to make arrests, and things got rough. “I’ve seen police violence before, but it had never been on the level that it was that day,” Arnone said. He fled, then found himself organizing others who had escaped. He led a march to police headquarters to demand that those who were arrested be released; then he joined the other protesters as they returned to the Zuccotti Park. “After I’d done that, I was hooked,” he said. “And things just escalated from there.” As protests … [Read more...]