Photo: Stacy Lanyon
First, I saw there was something in Bushwick about Occupy,
written on the side of a building, and then there was a facebook invite for
September 17th to show up on Wall Street, and I checked it out. The things
that drew me were student loans, jobs, food, housing, basically, all the things
that matter for regular everyday people. I found myself in a spot where I can’t
even afford the most basic things, even with three different part-time jobs.
I’m
a different kind of story because I’ve been a vagabond for like three
years, ever since I finished graduate school, and before that I finished the
Coast Guard, and before that I was a music major and married. These experiences
led me to want to explore the world more, so when I finished graduate school, I
wanted to find out where I was from in order to plan where I would go in the
future. I started visiting the lands of my family, and after I did that,
when I came back to the states, I only wanted to live in New York City because
of chance encounters and the diversity and also the anonymity we have in the
city.
Living in New York is very tough to survive without a decent job. It’s
tricky because I could say jobs, and people can say, “Well, you chose to live
in one of the most expensive cities to live in, so I don’t feel sorry for you.
You’re privileged. You have been educated, and you had a lot of student loans
to do that.” I lived a very good life in school, but since then the job opportunities
have been kind of slim, and then whenever they’ve come, I feel like I would
have to compromise my integrity just to do them, so now I’m choosing to just work
in the service industry, as cliché as that is, just to keep supporting an
activist, artivist lifestyle and just so I can kind of explore what I actually
enjoy doing because unless I enjoy what I’m doing, no one is going to want to
be around me anyway. This movement is important because a lot of people have
that same kind of energy wavelength. It’s community. I like just being around
these people. I feel like there are so many reasons why I’m a part of it.
You know that guy that has the sign, “Shit is fucked up and
bullshit”? I think a lot of people feel that right now, but they don’t know
where to direct it. You can direct it at everyone on the street, or you can
direct it at a corporation, or you can work with other people and see where
they think to direct it. Occupy is helping me direct my energies in positive ways.
In my private life, I’ve been searching for a creative team
that I can work with in order to afford my personal peace. The reason that I
want to afford my peace is because unless I’m supporting myself, I can’t help
anyone else, and I think that’s something that’s still true with this movement
and something that we deal with all of the time.
I’m not looking for violence,
definitely not violence, and I’m definitely not looking for swift, fast,
overnight changes to the entire system. I think probably most changes that are
done in that fashion are going to be violent, even from people like this. I don’t think we’re going to have
major, radical transformation tomorrow. I’m not looking for that. I’m trying to
celebrate the small changes that are happening every day and helping to bring
about this revolution of consciousness and encouraging people to think
differently about their everyday actions and how they relate to people and also
how to work with other people to make the world better. I want us each to be able to
afford our own peace and get the sense of community that we all are looking
for.
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/