Occupy Denver: Barbara Gawlowski & Charles Howe use occupation as lesson for daughter

At noon today, Civic Center Park held a meager 12 protesters.

It is the second home of Occupy Denver, and chances are it might not be the last, but it is this park where Charles Howe and Barbara Gawlowski are watching their 6-year-old daughter Jezebel pick up a "staple" she found in the ground. "It's a tent stake, baby," her mom gently corrects her. "From when we had tents."

The evidence of a large-scale occupation is still here even if the people currently aren't. On October 14, this block of Broadway served as the setting for Jezebel's first hands-on introduction to the police, and she later watched her parents taken into custody on TV on the night of the group's eviction from Lincoln Park. Homeschooled by her mother, Jezebel's knowledge of the police has never been typical. When Gawlowski recently asked her daughter what she'd do if she got lost, Jezebel's answer betrayed both her advanced fifth-grade testing levels and an open mind: "I'd go find someone with dreads," she said.

"We think about the occupation every morning when we wake up and every night when we go to bed," Gawlowski says. "It has changed every aspect of our lives, especially how we raise and what we teach out daughter. It has inspired a sense of fear in my fearless little girl, and we're afraid to take her down on Saturdays now."

Kelsey Whipple

Barbara Grawloski and Charles Howe are afraid to bring their daughter Jezebel to Saturday rallies.

Jezebel, who challenges occupiers to races in the park (she always wins) while her parents talk, watched their arrest, which ended in her mother's now stark broken nose. The six-year-old was there again the first time the police used pepper spray on the gathering. Jezebel currently takes lessons in a list longer than the names of people in the park -- piano, violin, drums, guitar, gymnastics, judo (soon), Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, various crafts -- but her most recent lesson, that of political activism, has been based on Broadway.

Gawlowski and Howe have spent the past three years together, and their wedding is scheduled for June 21. However, they have closer anniversaries to celebrate: Yesterday marked one month since their arrests for unlawful conduct on state property (Howe was also charged with resisting arrest), charges they encountered four days after stopping by to start a coffee bar.

Although the heater and other materials they used to do so were lost in the raid, their conviction was cemented nonetheless. "We try hard not to get too fired up anymore because we've been forbidden from getting arrested again. But it's hard to ignore the situation down here," Howe says. "From the day we were arrested in front of Jezebel, we've cared even more about the politics of the movement than we even did before."

This is not the couple's first experience with political activism: Both were at the DNC riots, and the thirty-year-old Howe was previously involved in the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle. Likewise, his 32-year-old fiancée protested the war in Iraq in New York City in the early 2000s. "We knew it was going to get heavy then because the officers wore electrical tape over their badge numbers," she says.