The idea for OWS MV (Occupy Wall Street- Martha’s Vineyard) first appeared as an image of a can rolling down a hill. The hill was the enthusiasm I felt all around me as people took to the streets to restore our democracy. The can represented a simple idea — a photograph of people congregating in some visually iconic place to support the Occupy movement in each of the Island‘s six towns. Let’s publish these photographs, I thought, wherever appropriate — on Web sites, on social media like Facebook, in newspapers.

This idea had a lot of advantages.

Ideally, the idea might go viral. I imagined people in towns all over America organizing their own photo ops. I saw a sign on the outskirts of the tiny Minnesota town of Tenny which proclaims “population six” and I saw six people standing under it with flags and banners. I saw Gannts Quarry, Ala., population two, or Buford, Wyo., population one. I saw thousands of these photographs flittering across the ether and into the homes of millions of Americans, silent testimony to the great American disaffection — the need for change.

I saw also that the signs these people carried would be different. Some might focus on our country’s spiraling income inequality, a threat to our democracy by the power of wealth to buy votes or to influence them through vast propaganda machinery. Some of the signs might emphasize the need to protect our environment; others a return to actually making things rather than just making money; still others might question our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. All these are symptoms of larger systemic issues in our country.

I imagined 10,000 such photographs from Martha’s Vineyard to Molokai to Fairbanks.

Sam Low lives in Oak Bluffs and is a frequent contributor to the Gazette.