Reminiscent of ad hoc Occupy actions last fall, the march in Manhattan blocked streets and confused police attempting erratic, aggressive arrests. It was, however, just a small nod to the action taking place in Montreal. There, up to 500,000 people took to the streets on Tuesday in what's being called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, marking the 100th day of a powerful student strike.

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That’s a guy named Michael Pless singing “Something’s Got to Give.” Even without hearing the song, you can surely imagine the essential elements: Plaintive acoustic strumming, an earnest vocal, and an air of polite outrage to match the stilted syntax and hoary platitudes. Welcome to "Occupy This Album," the collection of protest-minded songs released by Occupy Wall Street. Sprawling across four CDs and a slew of bonus digital tracks, this behemoth set includes 100 (why not 99?) new and previously released tracks from artists representing a range of generations, genres, backgrounds, settings, and styles. Folkies join hands with rappers; ominous post-rock marches alongside peppy radio pop. There’s spoken-word poetry, tribal percussion, earnest singer-songwriter fare. Even a bit of jazz.

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Eight people were arrested Monday during a protest at Obama's 2012 campaign headquarters. The rally, organized by social justice and anti-war group Catholic Workers, was the first organized demonstration -- and the first instance of arrests -- relating to the NATO counter-protests. It was small (just over two dozen participants assailed security and stormed the campaign headquarters and read a statement inside) but set a tone for actions later this week in asserting that the president and Democratic Party are protest targets alongside NATO generals and corporations like Boeing, who receive large government defense contracts.

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“You have to get rid of corporate America,” Lewis told occupiers in Zuccotti Park. “You have to get rid of the powers that they have ... As long as they have the power they are going to continue to exploit and manipulate the working class."

The blowback from the police establishment was swift: A Nov. 23 letter from Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey demanded that Lewis “immediately cease and desist wearing, using or otherwise displaying any official Philadelphia Police Department uniform, badges or facsimiles thereof or any official departmental insignia.”

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It's beyond the purview of these paragraphs to explain the many reasons someone might take to the streets and shout "fuck the police!" However, as a new report from the New York Civil Liberties Union confirms, the consistently racist practices of the NYPD should make fierce anti-police sentiments understandable, even for those who find such an attitude unpalatable.

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When a New York judge ruled in April that Harris did not have the standing to fight the subpoena (arguing that his tweets actually belonged to Twitter) and that there were no privacy grounds on which the individual user could refute the demand for his Twitter records, this seemed to suggest something worrying: that we have little jurisdiction over our online identities and can't even fight for our online speech in court.

Harris' lawyer, Martin Stolar, told me at the time that he planned to file another motion against the judge's decision -- to re-argue that his client indeed has a standing in fighting the order, and there are strong privacy grounds to resisting the authorities obtaining records of someone's accumulated Twitter activities (including deleted messages) without a warrant. But now it seems Stolar doesn't need to file this motion; Twitter has stepped in.

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Half a year later, a collection of young people backed by major foundations and companies like Dell are promoting two new organizations, Campaign for Young America and Fix Young America. In a recent profile, the New York Times touts the groups as “advocacy groups for jobless youth” on the order of the AARP or NRA. They are, the Times claims, “younger siblings of Occupy Wall Street, but with a nonpartisan agenda, more centralized leadership and one specific mission: to help young people find jobs.”

But don't be fooled. This is Occupy as reconfigured in the subconscious of Thomas Friedman: The country's problems can be solved by promoting technological wizardry and unleashing the potential of everyone's inner risk-taker in a sink or swim economy. Think Americans Elect, for kids.

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The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s -- although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today -- nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

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As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.

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Instead of bemoaning the lack of coverage of OWS, however, activists have begun to cultivate a media strategy that aims to supplement, and, in some cases, circumvent, the need for mainstream media. The revolution will be televised; the revolutionaries will be broadcasting it themselves.

“I don’t think we’re able to spread our message without the mainstream media. But the mainstream media follows us,” said Michael Levitin, who edits the Occupied Wall Street Journal. “We can help shape the narrative of the movement, we can help clarify, and as journalists, that’s what we need to do.”

During the months leading up to yesterday’s May Day protests, the Occupy movement developed an independent media infrastructure that both mirrors and acts as an alternative to mainstream media outlets. From newspapers, pamphlets and magazines, to radio and television coverage, Occupy-related media was able to cover yesterday’s protests in a more sophisticated and comprehensive way than it ever had before.

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Yet there was still familiar frustration at the end. “I’m actually really disappointed,” said Marisa Holmes, a documentarian and longtime key figure in the officially leaderless movement. She was sitting with about 30 others in an impromptu debriefing on the steps leading to the long-barricaded Chase Plaza a block from Wall Street. Her voice had a tone of exasperation after she listened to another occupier vow that they would soon take over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza — the endpoint of yesterday’s march. Police had just roused the remaining few hundred demonstrators – and arrested a handful – after the plaza closed at 10 p.m. (Minutes later, police cleared the small gathering from the steps of Chase Plaza, as well.)

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Many factors underlie the ongoing global upheavals. Protests in North Africa at the start of 2011 were fueled by decades of corrupt and authoritarian rule, increasingly literate and digitally connected societies, and skyrocketing world food prices. To top it off, throughout the Middle East (as well as Sub-Saharan Africa and most of South Asia), rapid population growth is fueling enormous demographic pressures. The protests spread from North Africa worldwide. Everywhere the fundamental concerns have been the same—political representation and the growing gaps between rich and poor—but local circumstances have of course differed.

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Not completely so, of course. As in 1848, 1968, and 1989, the insurgencies were many and they absorbed multitudes. As in all three, the protagonists were chiefly young. As in all three, the holders of power felt various degrees of panic. As in 1848 and 1968, they took place on more than one continent. As in 1968 and 1989, the insurgents were largely nonviolent, until the uprising in Libya. As in 1968, the targets were multiple, the identities of the movements alternately seductive and repellent in the eyes of outsiders, and often confusing.

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Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello will lead the troops. But Baldwin also takes inspiration from folk legend Pete Seeger, whom he joined on a spontaneous march in support of Occupy Wall Street last October. Of all the ways to participate in the cause, Baldwin has decided to take a musical route. “It builds solidarity,” he said. “It’s less angry.”

That’s the prevailing philosophy among today’s New York City performers and visual artists — comprising nearly 50 groups and more than 1,000 participants, according to organizers.

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You might expect a journalist-cum-supporter of Occupy like myself to cover the day's action blow-by-blow, tweet-for-tweet, having written with enthusiasm about the calls for a May Day general strike for months now. But May Day is not just a planned day of action; the idea -- although amorphous -- is general strike. It is not a union-led general strike. The meaning of "strike"  is complicated in this economy of financialization, information, service, effective and precarious labor. But on May 1, Occupy organizers and allies have invited us to think about what striking out, generally, might mean to us -- and for me, this means no reporting or live tweeting. I will approach the day as a striker, and not as a story chaser trying to frame a narrative of every lived experience.

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I have written here at some length against judging this May Day by standards of traditional general strikes -- not seen in the U.S. since the 1940s -- or contemporary mass strikes in Europe, where unions have not been politically pummeled into weakness, as they have in this country. And although pundits are looking at May Day as a referendum on Occupy's relevance, it's unclear what success in this case means or would look like. Marches (both permitted and un-permitted), free meals, teach-ins, college student and high-school walkouts and roving dance parties have been scheduled in 115 cities around the country. Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello and other well-known musicians will be joining a "guitarmy" -- 1,000 guitarists marching (and strumming) from New York City's midtown to Union Square. Clearly, the general strike organizers in New York are less interested in affirming the strength or relevance of a movement than they are in experimenting with new tactics. Still, there's a feeling that somehow, and in some bold way, it's got to be big.

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The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, Calif. in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with a past we've mostly forgotten.

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