Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Shawn Carrié

Stop the NDAA, January 3, 2012, Grand Central Station
Photo: Stacy Lanyon

One beautiful day, walking down the street on my lunch break from work with my headphones on, I heard the chanting.
I lowered the volume, turned around, and saw the most glorious sight my eyes had yet seen. Thousands of people flooding the street behind me. That day was September 22nd - the day of the Troy Davis march - and I'll never forget it. It all started when I asked someone, "Where are we going?" and they said, "to Liberty Square." 

It was the thing I’ve been waiting for. I think we all kinda feel that. People were doing exactly what I'm frustrated that we don't do: being together and talking to each other and acknowledging each other. The New York attitude is to ignore people, don't talk to strangers on the subway and on the street. That’s what society tells us, that we don't need or care about others. But in Liberty Square, we cut out all the noise and created a space for us to be people again.

Occupying Wall Street is so important because everything is getting worse, and the system will collapse on us if we don't push back against it being reinforced and normalized on every level. We have to do it here, at the mouth of the stream that turns into the ocean. We have to do it now, to start undoing years and years of a fundamentally oppressive economic system, of oppressive cultural systems, of apathy, of every single object and relationship being monetized and capitalized. It all persists this way because the system tells us that everything's fine, while we continue to toil our lives away for someone else's profit. Once you wake up to it, you realize it’s so not fine. We're drowning in ads, messages, mind-numbing culture and consumerism everywhere, the media and popular culture upholding a system built on a foundation of violence and subjugation and existing to drive a wedge between people. And that's why we don't talk to each other - the barricades covering this city are a physical manifestation of a culture that must survive by separating us - because if we realized how we're not alone, and our grievances are connected and that people are more real than production and profit, we'd realize how this decrepit system isn't working for us, and we'd cast it over our shoulders. And the first step to fighting it is to become aware this is happening. Shit is so fucked up, and you have to acknowledge it and then start to cut out space to fight the current and grow.

The world I want to bring about is a world where people have awareness of these things, realize their own power and resist. It's even in the littlest things. I think a better word for freedom is 'autonomy '- asserting your humanity in making choices freely and with dignity. I'll give you an example that happened to me the other day. I went into a store to buy cigarettes, and the clerk asked me for ID. I showed him my food stamps card, and he had never seen one before. He said he couldn't accept this because he needed a New York State ID. I pointed out that it has my photo and date of birth on it and says "New York State ID Card" at the top. Unsure, he said "hold on, I'll have to ask my manager." The encounter made me think of how people are so worn down and mentally caged in by wage slavery that they don’t even feel like they have the dignity and power to make simple decisions for themselves and have to rely on the routine, on the machine. They don’t feel free to question, think and decided for themselves, so they resign themselves to be cogs in the machine. It’s the same thing with the cops. “Can I walk down the street?”-“No, you can’t.”-“Why?”- He doesn't say why, and he doesn't even think about why because he’s a robot that's been programmed with his orders, a mind behind barricades, instructed to throw the bodies behind bars of those whose minds refuse to be imprisoned.

Today, we are enlightened, creative, and resourceful enough to imagine alternatives to this life. Think about something: Why do we put our money in a bank? How is it that they've convinced us all that it’s completely normal that you take all the money we earn, and you give it to the bank, so they can profit off of it by selling financial products? Fictitious products having no real value are bought, sold and traded right over there at the stock exchange. They're peddling an idea that doesn't exist, and we're the ones paying the cost. The whole capitalist system is based on consumption, consumption, consumption - underwritten by something that isn't real. Money isn't real. The ideal that ads fill our minds with isn't real. What’s real is human bonds and aiding people and helping someone.

I want a world where people acknowledge their freedom, realize that our interactions with each other don't have to be built on the fallacy of free market capitalism, and reevaluate what is really 'free speech'. The freedom to speak in a "free speech cage" is not free speech - it's a lie. Being able to choose a college, get a job, live where you want and be whatever fashion of consumer you prefer, when those opportunities are still not available to everyone is NOT freedom. I hope people will realize their autonomy and bring about a society & economy based on real things - based on shared value in a completely new sense, beyond the capitalist notion of "value".



Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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