As far as I can understand it myself, hereâs why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp. I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. In other words, the 99 per cent. I saw conversations taking place between people and groups of people whom Iâve never seen talking with such openness and sympathy in all the years (which is to say, my entire life) Iâve spent in New York: grannies talking to goths, a biker with piercings and tattoos talking to a woman in a Hermes scarf. I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of âvaguenessâ one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarityâclarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities. I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, Iâve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which Iâve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that weâre all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it. In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing weâre being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralyzing us until just now. I kept feeling these intense surges of emotionâuntil I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitmanâs âSong of Myself: âI am large, I contain multitudes.â And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.