Bette Snyder is nourishing the Wall Street protesters from her kitchen in northwestern Ohio.
For the past three weeks, the 69-year-old woman has sent the occupiers of Zuccotti Park tins of home-baked cookies and messages of support.
“Here are some cookies for the demonstrators,’’ she wrote in a note accompanying one of the tins. “I will keep sending them as long as you keep protesting.’’
The protests at a park in lower Manhattan that have been raging for about a month are inspiring people across the country and around the world to send letters of support — even if they are only a few words on a scrap of paper with a tin of cookies.
The letters show how effectively protesters have delivered their scathing critiques that the vast majority of people struggle to make ends meet while a small percentage of people control most of the wealth.
“Please accept these humble donations,’’ wrote one sender who did not disclose a name. “I am poor and am fighting foreclosure, but if you are willing to occupy and keep this message alive, I will support you.’’
Since the protests began on Sept. 17, protesters at the Zuccotti Park encampment say they’ve received about 100 letters a day. By last week, according to volunteers sorting them, the letter count was about 2,000; some have since been posted online. They come from the unemployed, college students in debt and grandmothers worried about the financial struggles of younger generations. The letters have arrived from all over the United States and from abroad, addressed from South Korea, Australia, Scotland and Germany. They bear messages of hope, advice on tactics and criticism. Some have now been posted online.
With some of the letters are parcels of ponchos, gloves and camping gear for demonstrators. A good number of the senders apologize for being unable to send more donations because of their own financial problems.
The letters and packages arrive at a UPS branch near Zuccotti Park and are taken over to a storage depot in an office building where donations from around the world are sorted. There are shelves of canned food, bags of dry pasta, piles of hand warmers and half-opened boxes waiting to be sorted. On a recent weekday, there were well over 100 letters waiting to be processed in a mail bin. Some were handwritten, others typed on a computer.
“I can honestly say for the first time in my cynical, contrarian years that I am damn proud to be an American!’’ said one writer, in pink ink, who described herself as a college student.
