Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I’m part of different communities in New York. I’m part of Times Up,
which is a bicycle and environmental community. I’m part of the Reverend Billy
Stop Shopping Choir, which is activism about consumerism. I came to the first
day on September 17th. I've lived 16 years in the United
States, and what drew me was, for the first time, I saw young people taking charge. That inspired me so
much. It made me so proud to see people stray away from advertising,
consumerism and television and start looking seriously at the problems of
social injustice.
I started by joining the Call to Action Working Group, and I was honored to collaborate on the creation of the Declaration of the Occupation on New York City (http://www.nycga.net/resources/declaration/). After that, I joined the Occupy Wall Street photo group. I've been photographing
the occupation since day one. I've witnessed a lot of proud moments in the
occupation, and it’s delicious to me how peaceful and non-violent this is, as opposed to the counter part of the police being so violent and unreasonable when they
charge peaceful occupiers.
In the last three years at the corporation that I used to work for, I saw the salaries frozen for three years. Every
quarter, the company was reporting profits, but every year our medical benefits
were slashed, our hours of work increased with no pay, and all the profit
that we saw in the company never reflected on benefits for the employees. In that climate of social injustice, definitely, we need to stand up and say
something.
It's so important because now is the time. We have
waited too long to get it right. The system is broken. What I see here is
that we are not trying to fix the system. We are trying to create a new
society, a new economy, based on fairness, based on acceptance, based on
equality, based on love and freedom.
I dream for a world of equality where every person in this
society will feel accepted and not diminished, will feel that every person has
the power. I hear too many people saying, “I’m just one person. There’s nothing
I can do. The system is what it is,” and I always tell them, “The waterfall
starts with a single drop of water, and you can hear the roar and the power
that that waterfall has, and if you are that single drop of water that doesn’t
want to fall, then there will be no waterfall.”
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/