Talking With Everybody in the Neighborhood

I'm absolutely thrilled to report working with my local Occupy group, Occupy Sunset Park, to produce three new posters for our ongoing May Day campaign in Arabic! Sunset Park is a remarkably diverse community, a microcosm of Brooklyn itself. It started out as a community built for immigrants from Northern Europe, developed largely in the early years of the twentieth century. But it has remained a entryway for newer immigrants. Today the neighborhood's largest groups are people from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and from Mexico and Central and South America, and people from various regions of China. While next-door Bay Ridge has larger Arab and South Asian Muslim communities, our neighborhood is home to many Arabic-speaking people as well. Hopefully Chinese=language posters are on the horizon.

The poster above is a translation of one of our English-language posters, reading roughly "We Are Many (99%) They Are Few (1%)." In the next month these posters will be put up around the neighborhood. They're already being shared all over facebook. Closer to May Day itself we'll produce new posters with a specific call for action on that day.

Another of our new Arabic-language posters is tailored to speak directly to another part of the community being targeted for repression by the NYPD.


This one reads, "Are You Only Innocent Until Proven Muslim?"

I'm proud that my fellow Sunset Park occupiers understand how important it is to build bridges to everybody in our community. It truly is a movement about fighting together for our common interests, common interests that can be achieved only if we do, in fact, stick together.