Remember this? Three years on, doesn't it already feel like a leftover from a bygone era? Isn't that too bad?

This version of the Occupy mask appeared in The Occupied Wall Street Journal, in November 2011, thanks to the designer Adam Bezer. It's now on view as one of the least light-hearted objects in a show called "Play Things", at the main branch of the New York Public Library. The mask reminds me that many of the most important improvements in American life – women's rights, union rights, Black rights – only came about after demonstrators took to the street, and risked life and limb for their goals. Occupy, with its public theatrics, was central to our slow-dawning awareness of this country's chasm between have-nots and have-way-too-much-es. If the majority's going to take back its share of the nation's riches, those Guy Fawkes masks may need to go on again.

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