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Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I voted for Obama and just hoped he wasn’t full of
shit on a lot of things that I cared about, and he’s proven that his words
don’t mean anything anymore. What he’s done is extend all the Bush policies
like civil liberties and foreign policy and the bailouts. I became completely politically cynical, and I was resigned to, "Well I guess the status quo is going to run its fuckin’ course, and it’s going
to be horrifying, and I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll just hunker
down and weather the storm." Then, Occupy Wall Street came, and I was like, "That’s what needs to happen." It’s just people talking. That’s the coolest thing.
I proposed to my girlfriend at Liberty Square. Then,
I got contacted for interviews by the daily news. I suddenly had this little bit of a microphone
to use to talk about all these issues I
really care about. That's what made me see how cool Occupy Wall Street was. None of these reporters from these different places were caring
about my views before that. I didn’t have a voice in any sort of national media
platform, and now tons of people I see are having their voices heard. I have friends who just because of going and tweeting things,
they get to write up major pieces about their experience getting arrested, and these are stories that people need to hear. A lot of people don’t know what
goes on when you get arrested these days with retinal scanning and
stuff like that.
I guess what drew me to the Occupy Movement was that I was just
waiting for something like this to happen, and it’s not about electing someone,
which I’ve grown so cynical about because then you have to just hope that this one guys is not full of shit, and you don’t ever get to talk to him. You
have four years when you’re just stuck. This is cool because everyone is trying
to talk about what the core problems are that exist outside of the bipartisan
consensus. If I show up at an Obama rally with an end
corporate personhood banner like I do at these things, I’m a lunatic. I’m this
lefty lunatic who’s not being pragmatic. Now, with Occupy, people are like, "Yeah good, I want to talk about that too."
I was there the night of the eviction. The first time I was ever
scared was when the cops showed up to get rid of everybody. It was terrifying,
and what Occupy has done and why it’s so important is because it’s showing the
police state for what it is right now. You read newspaper
articles come out about the NYPD having been spying on Muslim students and things
like that and have been working with the CIA. Just replace the word Muslim with Occupy because it’s very
easy for them to do that right now, and that makes it touch home in a way that
it hasn’t with what they've been doing to Muslims in this country. What happens if the war machine and the media spins Occupy as being treasonous? That terrifies the hell
out of me, and that’s why I say that Occupy has to succeed to some degree
because if these things are allowed to perpetuate, corporate personhood,
indefinite detention, having the media completely owned by corporate interests
and being controlled by very few people, that will lead to totalitarianism.
The main thing is that all of
our institutions are not serving us, and this is people stepping up to
articulate that and hearing others do the same. People are finding out that they're not alone in
the things that they feel strongly about. We were sold an advertising slogan
for change in the last election. It doesn't matter what the real motives were. What does matter is that they have to sell the people on
the idea that they should be free, that change is necessary. That’s what makes me optimistic. People
bought into these slogans that Obama put out there that didn't mean anything,
but they do want them.
More than anything what
I’ve seen is that Occupy has activated people
and it’s made them civically engaged again, and I’ve been to the general assembly. I’ve
witnessed it a couple times when I was in Zuccotti Park, and I tried to participate in a spokes council. It was really frustrating
because there were so many different people with so many different interests, and
that gave me the scary look at democracy. A lot of people might have been
horrified and ran away from the whole thing watching some of these happen, but
the way I see it is that we’re learning to crawl. We have been told that voting
and these state sanctioned elections is the only form of democracy there is.
We’re learning that there's a new form, which is consensus seeking democracy,
which is harder and can have its own form of tyranny if the wrong people can
influence it, and there’s no way to gauge who’s being disruptive just to be
disruptive when it’s open and inclusive like this, but
then on the local level, I’m seeing where we’ve moved from crawling to starting to walk. What
I feel like this movement needs to do now is to go really local, so I’ve
organized my local general assembly, and
we’re all about listening to our community and figuring out how we can use the
tools that Occupy has started to cultivate.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/