“How can there be a march and I’m not there?” This was the question that came from my mother, a feisty but proper Southern lady when I told her I was headed downtown to see Occupy Wall Street for myself. Her question was rhetorical since being in such a crowd would have exceeded the limits of her strength, and yet it is what she, a civil rights activist in her day, has been asking for some time now: “How long will it be before people are marching in the street?” Marching for her was a default in times of national crisis, an appropriate collective cry of anguish, “when the earth groans in travail and we ourselves,” (Romans 8:22-23) and, in the same moment the opportunity to draw energy and courage from the shared experience of being together—“You make the way by walking,” the saying goes. My mother, a Depression baby remembers meeting her father on the streets of Wilmington, NC, right after the 1929 stock market crash when he reported that $100 was all the money they had. She knows something of the fear and want that many Americans are experiencing today.

I guess it’s in my DNA because at Occupy Wall Street I found the crowd energizing and welcoming. “Tell me what democracy looks like?” “This is what democracy looks like,” was the through line of the chants and songs. And it was an apt description: a panoply of marchers of all colors and sizes, union members, nurses, students and organizers, talking about living wages, tax codes, corporate greed, and the observation on a poster held by children who seemed to know from firsthand experience that “shelters are not family friendly.”

Click to read the rest of Katharine's article on the Huffington Post.