Hi,

I just had a thought or two regarding what's going down. Right now, things are looking up. People are showing up. Pizzas are flooding into the protest on Wall Street. People are pissed off in L.A. People ain't happy in Philadelphia, and the beat goes on as our parents once said.

However, there are a lot of key protest sites that are going to be vulnerable to winter weather. By the end of October Chicago is going to get rather chilly and you can be sure that by November the snow will fall, so time is running out there. New York should get hit with the cold weather in November but shouldn't see snow until the month after, but it's still vulnerable to blizzards. So is Philadelphia, so is Boston, and to a degree so is Washington DC. It would look silly if protesters abandoned Wall Street because the "weather sucks" because it makes the protesters complaints look skin deep; it is also too important a target to abandon.

If you look at old photos of the folks from the 60s, there really aren't a lot of protesters hanging around in winter and a lot of the big dates happened in the spring, summer, or early fall (Montgomery bus boycott, March on Washington, even Woodstock itself happened in August.) Off the top of my head I can only think of one protest movement that stuck it out through winter, and they usually worked in shifts in nice warm houses-the suffragists, Alice Paul. What is about to be attempted has not been done before as far as I can tell, and though absolutely necessary, undoubtedly a must, it is going to require some forethought. When that thermometer gets below 50 F, people are going to start disappearing because standing on a street corner for hours in weather below zero sounds less appealing than hot cocoa in Starbucks. I suspect the goons in corporateland and on the street expect this to come, so they might just wait us out instead of lifting too many fingers.-They need to be proven wrong, that we can go the distance and we will camp out in the cold.

Which is why we need supplies for the cold weather coming soon in the East. We have to approach it like squirrels hiding acorns for winter.

Not having enough electrical supply for the computers will be a trivial matter when some hundred plus people present with hypothermia, pneumonia, influenza, etc. and wipes out the protesting for the next couple of months.

People are going to need hats, gloves, mittens, socks, thermal underpants or the equivalent, scarfs, and earmuffs. They are going to need to raid army surplus stores for extra tents and sleeping bags meant to put up with the cold. They are going to have to find ways to set up space heaters in the tents and power them off car batteries or (even better) solar power kits (I saw some online that could work and they won't break the bank: $200-$400.) They are going to need to get lots of trashbags and or rolls of tarp to keep computer equipment DRY let alone powered up. Right now people can sleep under the stars, but that is not going to last (somebody even took a picture of a fat man on a mattress in the middle of Liberty Square-if it were December, he'd be a dead fat man because he would have no means to guard against the chill.)
People are going to need drugs stronger than echinacea to meet certain medical needs: I am a little alarmed that the NYC website doesn't ask for first aid kits or things like cough medicine, unused antibiotics, aspirin, and so on. These are issues for the each of the committees to consider.

I am deeply concerned. Right now, money is coming in, support from unions is coming in, and though there is no reason to believe as yet that this will stop, it might be wise to play it safe and start planning now, start buying some of the things I have mentioned or soliciting for them online. (I have heard on this site a few people grousing about using batteries because they are trademarked-it ain't ideal, sure, but considering there is little alternative other than making people run on hamster wheels to generate a charge, or buying more expensive solar chargers, I'd stick with the batteries: Goldman Sachs is a much bigger fish to fry than Energizer and that is something that can be worked on later.) Many I have spoken to think that doing this is not yet necessary. However, the unions in NYC gave their support. But they can just as easily take it away if they see this enterprise not bear fruit or waver in its ability to attract attention. Losing people to cold weather would be a disaster and an embarrassment and it just cannot, must not happen. Remember the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant-Grasshopper did not plan for winter and died. The Ant and his kin stored away for winter
and won the day.

It would be an awful sad day if the mother of all Grasshoppers (the banksters) who destroyed our economy and got bailed out had the last laugh because, just like them, we did not plan ahead