A family occupation: Occupy Bloomington protester and family offer a look at the movement

Waving a cardboard sign above her head with her right arm and holding her 4-year-old daughter’s hand with her left, IU employee Nicole Cadow Johnson, 34, stepped off the curb at Peoples Park. Her two older children walked in front of her, blending in with the large group of protesters marching west on Kirkwood Avenue toward Chase Bank.

One side of Nicole’s cardboard sign read “Robin Hood was right.” The other side read, “It’s easier to buy a gun than my education.”  

Each of her children — Zoe, 11, Uriah, 8, and Willow, 4 — wielded their own signs. “Wall Street needs adult supervision,” read a sign dangling by a rope from Willow’s neck.

But it took a few moments for Nicole to convince Willow to carry the sign.

“Willow, Willow, baby. Please carry this for me,” Nicole said to her daughter before the march. “It would be really cool because you’re a kid.”

But Willow, who sat on a park bench with lunch smeared across her face, contested, shaking her head.

“Please, will you do this for me?” Nicole asked, but quickly gave in. She was beginning to drape the sign from her own neck when Willow changed her mind. She agreed and Nicole placed the rope around Willow’s neck and gave her a hug.

“It looks extremely cute on a kid,” Nicole told her daughter.

As the group of protesters progressed west on Kirkwood Avenue during the “People’s March” on Oct. 15, unified chants were illuminated by the hollow sound of bongo drums

“Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like,” Nicole chanted in unison with the group. “You pay tax and so do we, everyone except GE.”

For two weeks, protesters have gathered at Peoples Park for their movement, “Occupy Bloomington.” This movement is a spin-off from “Occupy Wall Street,” a protest in New York City gathering mostly in opposition to perceived corporate greed. The protest in New York began in September.

*  *  *

Currently, tents occupy a majority of Peoples Park.

For more than a week, Nicole and her husband Joshua’s six-person tent has been one of dozens on the grass. The zipper for the front entrance to the tent has since been duct-taped shut. A thin layer of familiar items line the tent’s nylon floor — sleeping bags, clothes, a set of drumsticks and a white football. Inside a mesh pouch on the tent’s wall are two Lego figurines.

On Oct. 16, Nicole sat cross-legged on the tent’s floor when Zoe and Uriah rushed in through the tent’s back entrance.

“Can I show you what I got?” Uriah said.

“Of course you can show me what you got,” Nicole said. “Where did you guys go? Oh, you guys went to the comic store.”

Uriah held a Green Lantern figurine and a Green Lantern comic book, the prequel to the movie.

Nicole was impressed with their find but quickly moved on to Uriah’s messy appearance.

“You’re dirty. You really need to wash your face,” Nicole said to Uriah.

“I washed my face this morning,” Uriah replied.

“Yeah, but you’ve got something going on on your chin there, man,” she said laughing.

Shortly after Uriah and Zoe entered the tent, Joshua appeared with Willow in his arms, crying.

“She just sat down and scraped her back over there,” Joshua said to Nicole.

“Hey, are you OK?” Nicole asked.

“No,” Willow said.

“I’m sorry,” Nicole said.

“It’s my fault, not yours,” Willow said with a soft voice.

While the family has not stayed in their tent in Peoples Park every night, Nicole said she has been out there as much as possible. So far, factors preventing their participation have included rain and illness.

“But I mean, we have kids,” Nicole said. “I’m not going to put my kids in substandard conditions. Camping is one thing. Camping in substandard conditions when you have a house a mile away is totally different.”

When they do stay, she wakes up at 5 a.m. and drives a mile home. After bathing and eating a hot breakfast, the family parts for work and school. Nicole is the project director for the IU Smoking Survey .

Then, at the end of the day, it’s back to Peoples Park.  

Nicole and her family did not attend the first night of the protest.

“We didn’t come down the first night because I needed to see the vibe,” Nicole said. “My husband came down. He attended the march. He didn’t even sleep but stayed really late to see if there was going to be any police action, someone getting harassed or whatever,” Nicole said.

But the next day, Nicole and her family were a part of the movement.

On Oct. 13, rain pummeled Peoples Park. Water filled the inside of Nicole’s tent, and since her children were already sick, they stayed home for the next two nights.

“I think they’re probably sick from a lack of sleep, not so much just from being here,” Nicole said. “It’s not hard to get to sleep, but it’s just been a change in environment.”

Nicole added that she also struggles to pull her children away from the festivities in Peoples Park each night.

*  *  *

As Joshua watched over the children at home, Nicole endured the rain on Oct. 13. Wearing multi-colored rain boots, she placed a dry protest sign on a bench and took a seat.

Regardless of their illness that day, Zoe, Uriah and Willow marched beside their mother Oct. 13.

“I feel it is important because I need to be active in what I believe in and my children need to see people be active in what they believe in,” Nicole said. “I cannot raise responsible citizens if they see apathy. ... I need my children to be exposed to not only the inequalities that exist but the fact that you can do something about them.”

So far, Nicole said she has not been approached by anybody opposed to her children’s inclusion in the protest.

Instead, she believes her children have benefited the movement. Because there are children present, she said protesters are better behaved.

It’s also been a learning experience for her children, she said.

“They love it because it’s community,” Nicole said. “If we were home, I would be fielding requests constantly for television and computer use. ‘Go out and play.’ ‘But I want to play on the computer. I want to be attached to an electronic machine.’”

Zoe said her mother told her they were protesting to end everything that’s bad in the world.

“It’s really fun, actually,” Zoe said. “There are lots of kids here and I like the food. I guess it’s good to be protesting and being in the environment, the community, and being part of it. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it’s freezing at night, even though I’ve got an awesome sleeping bag and I’m fine once I’m inside of that, but still.”

Zoe said her main cause is to end animal abuse. In fact, she inspired her family to become vegetarian.

“I told my mom I didn’t want to eat anything with a face on it,” Zoe said.

After a gathering in front of Chase Bank, chanting, “We got sold out, Chase got bailed out,” the group walked the wrong direction on College Avenue. Cars were brought to a halt as the protest consumed the street and sidewalk. Some motorists honked their horns while others shook their heads with disapproval.

After a stop in front of the Monroe County Jail, the group approached the Farmer’s Market.

“We support the Farmer’s Market,” Nicole chanted at the top of her lungs, waving her sign above her head. Zoe and Uriah stuck together several yards in front of Nicole. By this time, protester Lily Rushlow was carrying Willow on her shoulders.

Rushlow currently works as a nanny.

“I have two hands,” Rushlow said. “I might as well use them when someone else needs them.”

Beginning in 2003, Nicole attended a community college in her hometown, New Orleans.

While she, Joshua and her two young children visited family for the weekend in 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

Although she did not protest the way the government handled the hurricane, she was angry. She has participated in numerous protests throughout the years, ranging from the current immigration laws in Arizona to supporting a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion .

Because people were not let back into the New Orleans, Nicole and her family were unable to reach their home.

With nothing more than a car and a change of clothes, they moved to Phoenix.

During this time, Nicole gave birth to her third child.

Nicole graduated from Arizona State University in 2010 with two degrees in psychology and sociology. Around the same time, the recession hit and Joshua lost his job.

Nicole said she has heard people criticize the “Occupy Bloomington” movement by telling protesters they need to get jobs.

“Our biggest hackle is ‘Get a job, you fucking hippies,’” Nicole said. “But it’s like, ‘Dude, we’ve got jobs, and if we don’t have jobs it’s because there’s no jobs and we have educations.’”

On a whim, Nicole and Joshua agreed to move to Bloomington, his hometown, for numerous reasons.

“The valley is a really big place. Arizona is super right wing, and we don’t agree with a lot of what’s going on there, and I can’t let my kids ride their bikes around the corner,” Nicole said. “Meth is a serious problem out there, a very serious problem. This is like night and day. I live in a storybook currently. That’s how I feel here.”

*  *  *

Shortly after moving to Bloomington in July 2010, Nicole was hired by IU. However, she struggled to pay the student loans she accumulated during the last seven years.

Currently, Nicole owes $60,000 in student loan debt.

In the future, Nicole plans to attend graduate school, thus incurring additional loans.

However, those are not the only causes drawing Nicole to the movement each day.

“I’m here occupying public space until corporations cease occupying the government,” Nicole said. “I don’t believe the government should be able to tell me anything about how I should live my life.”

She does not believe corporations should be treated legally as people, as the United States Supreme Court has ruled they can. She said the government’s continual bailouts for corporations need to cease, and lobbying should be illegal.

“Why are they bailing out corporations,” Nicole said, “when they could be bailing out young professionals and people who are losing their homes?”

And while Nicole believes these changes need to occur on the federal level, she is content with working small.

Within Bloomington city limits Nicole said she hopes to inspire multiple reformations, such as creating designated “Free Speech Zones” and eliminating corporate personhood.

“Corporations currently hold the same rights as an individual, and it would be to remove that in the city of Bloomington,” Nicole said.

She also marches each day with environmental motives.

“But the thing is, it’s the corporations who are destroying (the environment), so it all goes back to the corporations,” Nicole said. “They’re the ones who have the poor environmental protocols.”

Many protesters, she emphasized, do not share her exact political beliefs or motivations.

This is positive, she believes, as long as they use nonviolent tactics, operate with autonomous action and don’t try to impose a hierarchical system.

Nicole doesn’t know how long she will continue to stay in the movement at Peoples Park, but she said she does not want to put her children in a harmful situation — harmful due to weather or extreme police action.

But for now, she can be found among the protesters, carrying a cardboard sign, cleaning up or supervising her children as they run and play among the rows of tents.

*  *  *

The flock of protesters crept toward Peoples Park, energy deflated, and the Peoples March came to a halt.

Nicole dropped her cardboard signs to the ground and climbed atop a cement sculpture in the park.

Chatter ceased.

“Thank you all very much for showing my children what democracy looks like,” Nicole yelled to a silent crowd.