Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I met this girl named Heather, and she was really, really poor. She lived in a trailer in Flint,
Michigan, which is one of the poorest cities in America, and it really didn't seem to her like there was a way out of that situation. I encouraged her to go to college, and she went. Now that she's out of college, she can't find a job. There just simply are none. When she got out, she said, “Now what?
Now what do I do? I did all this work for nothing. I’m even worse off than I was
before because now I have student debt.” About that same week, Occupy Wall Street
started. I told her that you can make a difference, so who am I to not show her that it's possible, so I told her, “I’m going to go to Occupy Wall Street, and I’m going to stay there. I’m going to stay there until they beat me up,” so three days after it started, I went down there.
In the past year, my mother got cancer, and her house was foreclosed on. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s literally nothing you can do about it. Even the judge shook his head and said, “There’s nothing I can do.” I wheeled my mother out of her home that she built. She bought a screwed up house to begin with, and she worked her ass off every day to fix it and make it into a home, and they just came right in and took it. It’s just not right. Obama and all these elected officials keep saying, “Oh well, what they did was morally and ethically wrong but not against the law.” Okay well, what are you going to do to change that because murder used to be morally and ethically wrong but not against the law either. They know what the problem is. What steps are they taking to prevent it from happening in the future? What steps have they taken so that another Wall Street crash doesn't happen? Nothing! They’ve done nothing, not a damn thing. They don’t want to take a stand. They're either lining their pockets, or they’re too scared that if they actually stand up and say something, they’ll lose their position in life.
In the past year, my mother got cancer, and her house was foreclosed on. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s literally nothing you can do about it. Even the judge shook his head and said, “There’s nothing I can do.” I wheeled my mother out of her home that she built. She bought a screwed up house to begin with, and she worked her ass off every day to fix it and make it into a home, and they just came right in and took it. It’s just not right. Obama and all these elected officials keep saying, “Oh well, what they did was morally and ethically wrong but not against the law.” Okay well, what are you going to do to change that because murder used to be morally and ethically wrong but not against the law either. They know what the problem is. What steps are they taking to prevent it from happening in the future? What steps have they taken so that another Wall Street crash doesn't happen? Nothing! They’ve done nothing, not a damn thing. They don’t want to take a stand. They're either lining their pockets, or they’re too scared that if they actually stand up and say something, they’ll lose their position in life.
We have lost our sense of community. We are losing that part of us. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth all the money in the world to just walk around like an automaton and just act like you don’t have to care. There was a time when communities were so tight that if someone came to foreclose on someone’s house, the entire community would gather around that house and not let them take it, through donations, through doing whatever they needed to do to keep the community together. We need to start thinking like that in every community all over the world, on a global scale. We have to start thinking as one race, no more black, no more white, no more Hispanic, no more separate. We’re all together. Everyone is special in their own way, but together we can accomplish way more. The biggest answer we need is the answer for greed, and the only way to get rid of greed is to look in yourself and change it in yourself.
I want total world peace, and I want love and all that, and all those things are great, but my world has already changed. When you say your world, the world is really right now, as far as you can see that way and as far as you can see that way. That’s the world. What have you changed in this area today? I guess I would like to see a lot more empathy, not sympathy. It would be nice just to have more empathy, people just stopping and caring. You can see the lack of empathy in the world when you ride a subway. Nobody talks. They’re scared. They’re literally scared to death to reach out to another human being. It doesn't matter what color they are or how tall they are. They’re just scared to death to reach out to anybody, and that has to change because nobody gets through this life alone. I don’t care who you are. Nobody does it alone. The president has an entire team of people helping him. Don’t you think you deserve a team of people helping you? Everybody deserves their own team helping them, so let’s all work together, and hopefully shit will change, and if it doesn't, it was fun. Time will tell. I think we've already raised a lot of awareness. I think a lot of people have started to rethink things. They are focusing on being happy. Happiness has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with where you live or where you work. Happiness is an inside job, and you gotta go in there to find it, and you just simply decide to be happy regardless of whether you have a dollar in your pocket or a million.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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