The Occupy Wall Street movement exploded into the national consciousness like a frag grenade when seven hundred peaceful protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, a national landmark and worldwide symbol of the City of New York, simply because they stepped on the taxpayer-funded pavement reserved for cars.

Leaving aside for a moment all the philosophical arguments about the First Amendment and that 'right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances' thing, it's clear that these mass arrests were nothing short of a PR disaster for the Bloomberg administration. Those arrests were the spark that made the Occupy movement viral and took its growth from linear to logarithmic.

Presumably, this was not the outcome City Hall and the NYPD had in mind. So what to do?

Here's an idea: why don't we just clean out Liberty Square in the dead of night with hundreds of cops, dozens of arrests and illegal seizure of property?

Stupid, right? But that's exactly what happened while most of the City was asleep.

I don't personally like making predictions, but this one I'm quite comfortable with: Mike Bloomberg and his various lackeys will come to regret this as much as the initial arrests. Occupy Wall Street, #OWS, is an idea, not a person or place, and ideas can't be arrested or evicted.

We can change the world. And nothing our billionaire mayor did tonight, or may do in the future, can stop us. We are legion. Expect us.