Wes Students Return to NYC Streets for May Day

“The boss needs you – you don’t need the boss.”

Looking for a reason to ditch class? It’s raining – what more do you want? About 20 Wesleyan students (and two Middletown residents) who went up to New York City last night and this morning are living theirs right now. May 1, or “May Day” for those in the know, primarily celebrates 1) pole dancing and 2) walking instead of working. So it seemed like a natural choice for one of the Occupy movement’s major bids for a return to mainstream prominence – a General Strike.  From the Occupy Wall St. website:

While American corporate media has focused on yet another stale election between Wall Street-financed candidates, Occupy has been organizing something extraordinary: the first truly nationwide General Strike in U.S. history. Building on the international celebration of May Day, past General Strikes in U.S. cities like Seattle and Oakland, the recent May 1st Day Without An Immigrant demonstrations, the national general strikes in Spain this year, and the on-going student strike in Quebec, the Occupy Movement has called for A Day Without the 99% on May 1st, 2012. This in and of itself is a tremendous victory. For the first time, workers, students, immigrants, and the unemployed from 135 U.S. cities will stand together for economic justice.

Hopefully, students who arrived at Grand Central this morning didn’t have to deal with the machine-gun toting National Guard…Christ.

The main purpose post is mostly a collection of just a few of the metric ton of online resources for anyone who wants to track today’s happenings. Onwards:

• Here’s the OWS May Day live blog, May 1 Twitter, and general twitter.
• For other news coverage, check out the Mother Jones liveblog, The Nation’s map of actions across the states,
• Livestream of worldwide actions (embedded above).
• What’s the NYPD up to? Yesterday: kickin’ down doors of May Day organizers. Every day: “Preparing for Occupy 2.0.”
• Enjoy some pretty posters in support of the strike.

There may be a sprinkling of updates to this post as the day progresses – many Wes students who went are in a text-message group to facilitate coordination, and I joined in so I could keep track from Middletown Home Base. If anything interesting comes up and I’m online, I’ll try to get it up here. As of 11 AM: WesKids who stayed overnight have rendezvoused with Tuesday arrivals, and are gathering in Bryant Park after marching along 51st St. That’s all for now; get back to work (or not).

Daniel Plafker ’15 (99% sure… get it?) has been spotted in the title photograph of a Guardian article on today’s protests.

After the jump: Ben “The Doernbeard” Doernberg ’13 is live-tweeting the events as he attends  them, as well as retweeting relevancies from the ground. Click through for highlights.Only one highlight so far, because I lied: