October 15th, 2011, was a day of global protest.
Millions of people in cities all over the world rose up together to decry ~" the abuses of the superwealthy, the cuts to social programs, and the compassionless approaches to ending the world financial crisis"~.
Madrid is thought to have had the largest protest in the world -attendance estimates range from 10,000 to 500,000, but it was, in all likelihood, somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands, likely on par with Barcelona and Rome which were in the 2-300,000 range.
American news sources like to portray the worldwide protests as "inspired by Occupy Wall Street," still throwing the idea around that the rest of the world still continues to - or ever did - take its cues from the US. But no, that's not where the protests began. They began in Madrid, 5 months ago, in a movement called 15M (quince-m - "keensay immay" - the 15th of May), which in May occupied Puerta del Sol - arguably the heart of Madrid - for about a month. And back in may it wasn't like the OWS protesters occupying Zuccotti park; imagine ten times that number of people occupying a site relatively as important as Times Square.
Anyway, the main occupation trickled off over the summer but there have been ongoing protests all year over cuts in education etc. Well on October 15th, all the disparate groups got together and this was the result:
(skip around, watch to about 2:30 then skip to 4:00)
By nightfall it had turned into this unbridled mass of democratic energy:
It was powerful. A movement capable of assembling this many people is one to be reckoned with - imagine how many people sympathize without attending.
Who knows what's in store for the people of this country and this world? Time will tell.
Some pictures from the event:
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