Sunday, April 1, 2012

Tim Barker

Occupy Christmas, December 25, 2011, Liberty Square
Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I didn’t come here on purpose. I was really interested in what was going on, but I was really skeptical. I figured it was probably going to be a bunch of rich kids who could afford to occupy. I was on tour, and we got to New York. I needed a place to stay, so I decided to check out Occupy Wall Street, and I’ve been here ever since. What made me stay was the realness of it. It wasn’t just a bunch of rich liberals. It was actually people who were really into it and really did believe in what they were saying. Some of them were homeless people. Some of them were poor people. It was everybody, and it was amazing to see.

Why this is so important is because this is a fight to change the world for the better. This is a fight that involves each and every single one of us, whether we get actively involved, whether we are against it, whether we do nothing. We are all involved in this fight. Poverty, for example, is something that hits us all. The economy, student loans, lack of jobs, police brutality are all things that affect everybody, so we have to fight back against capitalism. Capitalism is a dead end. Capitalism is a system that says you don’t have a right to live. It says that you must earn a privilege to live, and that’s wrong. On every level, that’s wrong, and we need to fight it.

There are a lot of people who know shit is real bad, and it’s only getting worse. We’re sick and tired of it, and we want to do something, but we don’t really know what to do. We’re bumping around saying, “I know things are bad, but what can I do about it. That’s the way it is. I just gotta live my life.” Well, there is something we can do about it. Occupy is getting people to talk about things that they never talked about before. It’s bringing into light all these issues that are capitalism. 

Occupy is fighting for student loans, for financial reform, for jobs, against police brutality. All these things fall under capitalism, but it’s decentralized. It should be because every single one of these issues is equally important. You can’t say fracking is less important than police brutality. To one person in might be, but for other people it’s not. The earth means everything to some people. You can’t put priorities on these issues, so what this can do is help people find a group that will help them to fight for what they feel is important.

If you look at some of the positive elements of Mao China, the positive elements of Soviet Russia, the positive elements of Cuba, you can get an idea of what I would like the world to look like. I would like us to have our five basic needs fulfilled. Everybody has a right to a house. Everybody has a right to food. Everybody has the right to education, health care and a living wage. Whether you play music for a living or work in a factory, you have the right to a living wage. You have a right to adequate housing. There’s not a shortage of housing around. There’s just a shortage of the money to get into it. 

I want people, regardless of their skin color, regardless of how poor they grew up, to be able to live an equal life. I want people to be able to live a life where they can be happy instead of having to be a slave all day long to some job where they’re making money for somebody at the top. I want people to be able to live their lives to the fullest. We've only got eighty to one hundred years on this earth, and if we put all of our time into slaving away for jobs and never actually live that life, what was the point of living at all. I want to play guitar. I want to go out and play my music. That’s what I want to do, and there’s no reason that I shouldn't get paid a living wage to be able to do my art, and that’s the type of world that I’d like to build.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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