Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I came from California to the East Coast because I was
elected to sit on the board of an anti-war organization called The War
Resisters League. What drew me to Occupy Wall Street was initially the
Adbusters magazine. I was
really excited to see what the community around social justice, economic
justice and creating a better world was like here in New York City, so I came
out to some of the early planning meetings just to find community and see what
people were thinking about when trying to create a better world, and I stuck around
this whole time and haven’t gone back to California because of the community I
found.
I believe this is so important because this concept of
justice and this concept of liberty. When I think about justice, I think about
a balance on a scale. The injustice that exists is a lot about the power and
the wealth and the resources all concentrated in the hands of very few
people, which really creates an inequality and a lack of availability where
some people have an exorbitant amount, and other people are homeless and hungry
and can’t stay warm at night. I think that that’s a really big injustice. There’s
also an injustice of water. Some people get to drink super clean water
and super healthy water, and other people can’t get anything that’s not sludge,
or their water lights on fire because of the fracking that’s been going on. There’s
also injustice of air, injustice of land and how much land people own.
Some people own acres and acres and acres, while other people sleep in a box
and get criminalized for doing so. I think there’s this great concept of
injustice.
There's also this concept of liberty. It's about our rights. The theme of what I feel this has all been about has been surrounding the Bill of
Rights. It’s so ironic that we’re now sitting on the steps where the Bill of
Rights were first introduced, and we are forced into a cage and often really restricted about
how big our signs can be or how loud we can be or how many people can be in the
cage at one time. Our freedoms are being restricted, so the concept of liberty
and the concept of justice are really some of the biggest reasons why we’re here.
I want to see a just world where we’re working toward
collective liberation. I want to see a world where power is more equally
distributed, wealth and resources are more equally distributed rather than in
fewer and fewer hands. I want to see a world where we are very conscious about
the waste that we create. In everything we do, we are aware of its impact, so
that we try and cultivate more than we try to take. Most importantly, I’d like to
see a world where war and violence are never seen as the solution to conflict.
War is conflict resolution. It’s not the conflict, so I want to see the means
of conflict resolution to be peaceful. Conflict is natural. Conflict is
human. Conflict is what creates the world, but I think how we deal with it in
our conflict resolution is what’s really important.
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/