Friday, March 30, 2012

Stacey Hacker Hessler

Spring Training, March 16, 2012, Liberty Square
Photo: Stacy Lanyon


I kept on seeing stuff on Facebook about Occupy Wall Street, and I didn’t really do anything with it for a  while. Once more and more people started talking about it, I looked into it. The idea of taking a space and staying in that space as part of the protest was a really cool idea for me because people can come there, and they can talk to you, and you can talk to them about what’s wrong with this world. Before I came here, I was a peace activist, and then I was an activist for the labeling of genetically modified foods, and I read about what Occupy Wall Street was about, and those things were also in the Occupy message. It was just a group of people who cared about what I cared about all uniting together in one place to have their voices heard. That’s the thing that made me want to come here, so I could be one of those people, uniting together. I felt like the only way to change things would be to all unite together. In a large group, I felt like then our voices could be heard. They couldn’t ignore us if we got bigger and bigger and bigger. They couldn’t ignore us.

I think it’s important because the way the world is today we’re just destroying the planet. We’re just destroying each other, and I think we need to change that. We have to care about the generations to come more than we care about the money right now. We have to fix the water and the air and the land, and we have to stop these wars. That’s why it’s so important. We won’t be here. The earth will be here, but we won’t because we’ll kill each other by either the wars or by ruining our food and our water, and then we can’t live anymore. It’s not really going to affect me, but it’s going to affect the next generations.

Ideally, I would like a world where there are smaller communities where you can connect with each other and know each other. I would like a world where everybody is doing what is important individually to them and contributing to the community that they live in, so that everybody is fulfilled in the purpose of their life, a world where we take care of each other, where we think about the consequences of all of our choices, and we don’t make choices that have negative consequences toward either people or the planet. 

 Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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