The “Occupy” moment gained news coverage and renewed attention in recent days, as rallies came to Sooner, including events in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. 

Some 300 people attended the founding “general assembly” meeting for “OccupyOKC,” a local effort to bring to the Sooner State a homegrown version of the activism that has secured news coverage in New York City (the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations) and other larger metropolitan areas. 

Although online communications had been frequent in preceding weeks, that first Occupy OKC event was held Friday, October 7. News9, the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City, covered that first event. One college student, Bailey Grogg, told a reporter, “I think it’s an outrage … the gap wealth and wage in this country is immoral and unjust, and I’m here to put an end to it.”

Another attendee, Maureen Dutton, said, “I feel nobody listens and nobody cares about my needs or welfare because I don’t have millions of dollars to throw around.”

“Occupy” events have since unfolded on several campuses, including at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

In Tulsa Saturday (October 15), some 100 people gathered for a peaceful demonstration that went through the downtown area, moving past BOK, other financial institutions and a variety of businesses. Demonstrators in the state’s second largest city carried signs saying, among other themes, “One Nation, Under Greed,” and “Dissent is Patriotic.” 

Back in the state’s capital city, Andrew W. Griffin, reporting for RedDirtReporter.com, said a mid-day rally at Kerr Park on Saturday, found activists continuing “to mold and shape their all-encompassing message. As one sign seen at the park read, there are many things they hope to stop: the wars, the corruption, the torture, the assassinations, spying on Americans, the monopolies, the bailouts, corporate welfare, electronic voting and much, much more.”

Griffin reported speakers included Lydia Polley of Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Nathaniel Batchelder of The Peace House, and a range of others with criticisms of the American political and economic system.

The eclectic movement has been characterized by diverse messaging and general unease about the state of the world economy. The most consistent criticisms have been aimed at the bank and financial bailouts of several years ago, although in recent days those themes evolved to feature criticisms about campaign finance disclosure, demands for higher taxes on the richest Americans, and assertion that the Occupy movement speaks for “the 99 percent” of Americans who do not have great wealth.

As a cultural phenomenon, the Occupy movement drew from “flashmob” models, in use of texting and mobile messaging to call people together, often for light-hearted events like snowball fights. Over time, on the political Left, such communications focused on sparking and sustaining the “occupy” model. 

Oklahoma themes have been peaceful. However, a call for social and economic revolution drew cheers at a Los Angeles event late last week. 

Despite widespread news coverage since the Wall Street demonstrations began in mid-September, columnist George Will has observed that all the “occupy” events through last week had drawn fewer people than the Tea Party rally of 25 months ago (September 2009) on the Mall in Washington, D.C. however, that may no longer be true, especially if the large rallies European rallies held recently are included. 

Perhaps a progressive response to the Tea Party phenomenon among conservatives, the Occupy movement thus far has evoked comparisons with the demonstrations at European summits over the past decade, the domestic nuclear weapons freeze movement of the early 1980s, perhaps the “sit-ins” of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s, and/or the community organizing work of the last two decades. 

President Barack Obama has sent supportive signals to the movement in recent days.

While some some observers assert the activist nature of the movement is eroding, a few thousand demonstrators gathered along Wall Street in New York City on Saturday, giving the cause fresh momentum and news coverage.