This evening as I walked through Washington Square, it was clear that something was up.  At the bottom of the arch, where Fifth Avenue reaches its dead end, two police vans and three police cars sat in a line, as a sort of metaphorical barricade of red and blue lights.  The cops were nervous and moving quickly, while the park stood eerily empty.  Most ominous was the sound of at least three helicopters overhead, one of which was circling low and tight over the perimeter.

I assumed immediately that the commotion was related to Occupy Wall Street, which was swept out of Zuccotti Park by the NYPD riot cops on Tuesday.  Occupy Wall Street had announced a city-wide protest for today, threatening to blockade the New York Stock Exchange and take over the streets of Lower Manhattan.  A block away on Sixth Avenue I came upon the protestors marching downtown.  Those marching were moving at a brisk clip, with jubilant confidence, in massive numbers that justify use of words like “parade” or capital-M “March.”  They weren’t dirty, they weren’t homogenous college students, they were people from all over the city who were protesting peacefully and ardently.

The countenances of those among me on the sidelines mostly fell into two camps.  There were the great many who stared blankly into the smartphones held in front of them, thumbs hovering over camera apps, bound to post their pictures onto Facebook within the next second or so.  Then there were those who looked perplexed, assuming that the tabloids and the pundits had sold them bad information about the recent neat and clean end of this protest.

When confronted with this scene, right at the heart of the fundamental debate about the future and viability of our great city and nation, I greeted the parade with the most non-New Yorker set of actions.  I smiled.  I clapped.  I cheered.

For those who haven’t lived in New York, you might not really know what I mean.  New York City is a giant whirlwind, best understood as close kin of the tornado that carried Dorothy on her trip from Kansas to Oz.  You learn pretty quickly that everything is here, and everything wants your attention, from the guy selling knick knacks spread out on the sidewalk to the TV blathering at you in the back seat of a cab.  In order to stay sane, you reserve your attention and emotions for the few people and things you have time for.  You learn to tune out the external world, just as much as you learn to tune yourself out of it.  I have lived in New York for most of the last fourteen years, since I came here from Texas to study at Columbia College in 1997.  As I watched the protestors cheerily march past the cops and executives and the regular people, a song popped into my head.  It was the Columbia fight song: “Who Owns New York?”

So there I was, cheering the protestors on, and why?  Well, despite what you hear from the pundit class–love that term, BTW–this movement is a powerful representation of a consensus that is building in our nation.  In fact, I argue that this consensus is not just building, it is already here.  Even the apolitical, and that’s most of us, recognize and freely admit that our political system is critically wounded.  We all know that our laws are bought and sold by the powerful few, while the many voices of our democratic republic have been drowned out by the din of the money changers.  For every angry Tea Partier upset about the cost of Medicare, there is a 99 Percenter angry about the fact that GE made billions last year but paid little or no taxes at all.  For every Republican who believes that our country is being strangled by labor unions, there is a Democrat who resents that bailouts are reserved for investors only.  The one thing that the vast majority agrees on is actually very simple.  Our country is for all of us.  The only way to save the American Experiment is to take it off the auction block.  But what does that mean?  What can we agree on, really?

• The tax code, the massive body of law that affects each and every American, must be made simple enough for the average citizen to understand, and simple enough for the government to enforce.
• If we are to keep the roof over our heads, we must rigorously enforce the laws that apply to the financial industry.  It was only three years ago that a major rallying cry was “Main Street versus Wall Street.”  Now that cry is more like “Everyone versus Wall Street.”
• Campaign finance must be reformed to forbid the purchase of our politicians by labor unions, corporations, and the absurdly wealthy.  This is the big one.  A law is not a law if someone or something can buy it.

Now, I believe in this consensus, in its power and its political currency, even while I admit that the consensus does not reach much further than what I have spelled out above.  But that is how consensus works, you have to find it, not choose it.  Looking back to the Civil Rights Act, we see another moment in our history that seemed improbable at best.  This moment too must be defined by our consensus if our nation is to survive.  We got past Jim Crow because we agreed as a nation that the status quo could not stand.  It is time for us to stand together again.

As I walked away from Sixth Avenue, other songs popped into my head, because songs are really the way I understand the world.  I thought of the cynical Rolling Stones line, “I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse.”  Maybe that’s how some people see Occupy Wall Street, but I also remembered that same song’s brilliant chorus, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”  But mostly my thoughts turned to the question “Who owns New York?”  For the sake of all of us, it had better be all of us.