The frontline calling, brought us downtown last Tuesday. At 11pm a daunting flank of stormtroopers in black, armed with helmets, billy clubs & mace face the clamor of the boisterous crowd. The LAPD kept us out of the park where those defiant of the mayor's call to evacuate our City Hall park held ground. Our motley crowd stopped in the street at 1st & Broadway chanted and cried for change and a vision of a new future free from banking corruption, corporate greed, joblessness and a choking democracy, maimed by a political system flushed moneyed influence.

I cringed at the hateful talk being spewed at the police force as I looked into the innocent wonder and fear of the young officers doing their job. I observe cops, male and female standing as strong as they can, imagining their thoughts 'this is the last place I want to be'. Engaging them and the crowd with 'God is love' and 'LAPD, Love All Police Department' I hope and pray these chants may transform just a little our collective minds, as an alternative to the fear, anger and the isolation of the 'us & them' mentality.

Two hours later… the gig is up, the force is tripled in front of us and they start pushing us back 6 inches at a time to test our resolve. Next comes the announcement to leave or get arrested. Weighing the very real inconvenience and ramifications of arrest and possible jail time most of the crowd starts backing off and clumsily following orders. A few of us park ourselves in the street locking arms and holding our thumbs within our armpits, heads down in a ball on the concrete.

The cops rush in stepping on us and go right by us, at first. Within 10 seconds a handful return to our human ball and force us apart in a struggle of arm twisting and clumsy attempts at pressure points. Eventually they pry us apart and aggressively cuff us to the point of bruising my wrists and cutting off blood circulation in a fit of revenge. They drag us half way across 1st street, eventually get us on our feet to walk over the park benches on the other side and deposit us forcefully the park benches. I politely request them to loosen the extremely painful and unnecessarily tight grip of the plastic cuffs behind my back as I continue to engage them in a dialogue of the purpose of our cause. Meanwhile the enraged woman next to me is spewing a diatribe of accusations of the cops 'facist' treatment of us and demanding her rights among verses of revolutionary chants and kicking. She is basically ignored and mocked for being a drunken hippie.

Despite the over abundance of a well-armed police force, the promised assistance to redo my cuffs proves impossible, no one can find cutters to handle the job! I try to explain that I need my hands to work, I'm happy to be detained with cuffs but there is no reason to have them so brutally tight. Meanwhile I'm packed into a paddy wagon with the self-expressed girl flailing in the front cage and seven more of us in the back. We wait 30 minutes for the signal to drive 3 blocks to the metropolitan jail.

When we finally emerge from the dark recess of the metal holding tank on wheels, we're plopped out into a massive garage and ordered to line up against the back wall along with about 60 of the other LA occupiers. What unfolded here all night over the next 8 hours was the most ridiculous demonstration of utter apathy, incompetence and inefficiency I have ever seen. It that left us with no other alternative in our minds than intentionality on the part of the city. The 3rd hour into this whole affair we finally convinced an officer to redo my cuffs and those of a few other 'criminals of conscience'. Ahhhhh… thank God that pain had become unbearable and was requiring slow breathing and relaxation techniques not to lose it completely.

The overall tone of the cops to us was we really don't care how long this takes. You can sit on this cold concrete while your friend is vomiting next to you, here a trash can, oops he missed of well… you'll get booked sometime this morning and be in jail but we going to drag this process out as long as humanly possible. That was assured by the fact that at any given point there we're 3 or 4 cops actually doing some work and 20+ we're sitting around talking and hanging out... and as cliché as it sounds, yes eating doughnuts! I felt like a school kid asking permission to pee and then got escorted to the bathroom to figure out how to drop my pants with both hands cuffed behind my back was challenge. The cop who had to help me put my belt back together and insisted it was 'not something he enjoyed doing'. Finally several of us through out the night managed to jump through our own hands to get our hands cuffed in front of us, an infinitely more comfortable way to wait out the painfully long process of getting booked. Randomly through the process the inevitable occupy 'mic check' human call and response techniques of the occupiers would emerge with comedic commentary on our situation and system that held us there.

After going through four separate processes of getting our possessions into bags and information on paperwork we enter our first waiting cells in groups, an 8 hour process with no water, which should have taken no more than 90 minutes. Next another waiting game, no we weren't actually booked yet! At this point mid-morning we're finally given our first taste of jail food, 2 microwave burritos (suspiciously reminiscent of the food like substances we were fed in public grade school) and 2 mini boxes of what we ended up calling pink drink, a wanna-be juice consisting mostly of water and corn syrup, along with assorted chemicals and traces of a few fruit juices.

After going through four separate processes of getting our possessions into bags and information on paperwork we enter our first waiting cells in groups, an 8 hour process with no water, which should have taken no more than 90 minutes. Next another waiting game, no we weren't actually booked yet! At this point mid-morning we're finally given our first taste of jail food, 2 microwave burritos (suspiciously reminiscent of the food like substances we were fed in public grade school) and 2 mini boxes of what we ended up calling pink drink, a wanna-be juice consisting mostly of water and corn syrup, along with assorted chemicals and traces of a few fruit juices.

So after this long sleepless night 19 of us crammed for a full day into a cell labeled with huge letters 8 persons with one open shitter I came to realize that jail is a kind of psychological test of your mettle. We had three guys who we're more than mildly ill with us and the stench of BO, dirty campers socks and I wont mention what else was growing steadily funkier by the hour. My mind would fluctuate from thoughts of 'why did I do this, I'm an idiot! I could be doing some really productive work right now.' to 'ok what can I really learn from this experience?'. After hours of complaining about police brutality, our lack of beds, and the failed response to our pleas for our sick brothers our small cell clan of occupiers decide that we're going to actually make some good use of the time. We decided to have a round table discussion of why we're here, in the occupy movement and it proved to be a most inspiring highlight of these precious hours in captivity.

Stories of skills resurrected and honed (from cooking to sign language), all offered and shared in the LA Occupy community along with an acceptance in good humor of the wild assortment of characters from gang bangers and homeless to accountants, religious teachers and master gardeners involved. This all seem to focus around this notion that a shared world is possible, where talents are freely given for a purpose greater than just our own profit. I had to conclude that this kind of community was strikingly familiar to the iconoclast Jewish followers of 'the way' in the book of Acts. Sharing all things in common, sacrificing for one another, seeing a vision that is greater than our own selfish needs, living with love for one another. Yes, this really is possible in the winter of 2011, even as we sit and share this crammed and ass stinking cell in the Los Angeles metropolitan jail, our bodies we're trapped but our hearts and minds were free.