Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I think like a lot of people, I’ve been waiting for something. Its just so obvious that our country is not going in the right direction. I come from a pretty radical family, and I’ve had that sense for a really long time. I’ve thought a lot about what I feel could be done better. But I think that general feeling is pretty pervasive right now. There are places in this country that now have double-digit unemployment. That’s insane, the idea of mass foreclosures, people losing their homes. Owning your own home is the central piece of the American dream, and you can’t do that anymore. A lot of the compromises people have made are just not working out. You thought that if you went to college, you were investing in yourself. You’re smart. You’re going to work hard. You’re going to take out these loans and invest in yourself, and everything is going to be great. Then, you can’t find a job. Honestly, if you take out these loans that people are now expected to take out, you’re never going to be able to own a home. There’s something really fucked up about that, which I think has stirred a lot of imagination and a lot of indignation. There is something really out of balance with how we look at the world.
I live here in New York. I’m a born and raised New Yorker. I was aware that Occupy was happening, but I was like, “Uh, yet another attempt. It will teeter out.” The fact that it gained so much momentum was really impressive. I’m not in my own background an anarchist. That’s not my ideology. I wasn’t really sure how this was going to work out. Like a lot of people, I was just waiting to see. Then, as many people say, it’s really hard to get involved. I spent a lot of time on the fringes at the park before the eviction for like a month or so, trying to figure out how to plug in. I was lucky enough that I met someone at a programming class, not Occupy related, and she was in Tech Ops. That was an entrée into a working group. That made the whole Occupy thing more accessible.
America is a really funny country. I’ve lived in a lot of other countries. After college, I lived in India for a couple of years. Then, I lived in England and in Austria for several years. America is a really strange place. Every other country I’ve ever lived in, they all have a lot more in common with each other than anybody has with us, in terms of political culture and public culture. The lack of engagement in this country is mindboggling, how disengaged and disconnected we are. No Indian can pretend that we are not a consumerist society; we definitely are. Indians are incredibly materialistic. Look at our weddings. If we get any money, we spend massive amounts on our weddings and jewelry and our cars. It’s disgusting. We’re disgusting consumerists. At the same time, we also have close to 70% electoral participation. We may not have the greatest literacy stats in the world, but everybody that can read, reads like three or four newspapers a day.
A city like New York has one serious newspaper and two tabloids. Delhi has four serious newspapers in English, god knows how many in Hindi and a whole slew of tabloids. Similarly, Austria and the German-speaking world is like that, and England is like that. That sense of engagement and passion about politics is much more similar, so this country is really weird as opposed to the rest of the world. We are really strange. Part of why Occupy is so important for this country is that the rest of the world has figured out how we are relating to each other and the idea of government as something that we are part of. Like you call the superintendant to fix the faucet in your tub, your government is supposed to be there to do the things you don’t have the time to deal with. That’s part of what it is. It’s about providing roads and infrastructure and education and health care and all of these things. That’s what the government is for. That’s a very common idea about what government is for in every other part of the world.
I think that because we all own that, because that’s something that’s our collective will, it’s one of the ways that we engage with one another. Americans don’t do that. We’ve outsourced it. We’ve allowed corporations to pour large amounts of money into elections for decades now. We’ve allowed other kinds of collective forces to capture our government, but not the people, not us. Our focus at Occupy Wall Street for the last six or seven months that I’ve been involved has been really clear that our purpose is not to win specific gains, to have specific demands. Our purpose is to create a space where people can figure out what their demands are and how to organize in their communities and around the things that they care about.
If you look at a working group like Immigrant Worker Justice, which is part of the labor cluster, they do a lot of stuff. Some of it seems really obviously against the banks, against corporate take over of the government, but some of it is not. They do a lot of consciousness raising and very sort of traditional union organizing, really fantastic stuff. Then, they have these teach-ins, and out of that will come a community deciding to create a building association to challenge their landlords on the NYPD using Clean Halls to invade their home. It’s about figuring out what people care about and expanding that. It’s about reminding people that this is our right. There is something really lovely about the US constitution. There is something really fantastic about being one of the oldest democracies on the planet. There is something really fantastic about our history and about our culture as Americans, and we need to reclaim that. I feel like giving that space is really what Occupy is about.
In terms of what I hope for with Occupy, it’s hard to even say the words because I think, for a lot of us, our dreams are so big. You either feel stupid, or you’re definitely going to get your heart broken if you say it out loud. I would like to live in a world where we can actually find work that is meaningful. I don’t want to be embarrassed about the job I have. I don’t want to feel bad about what I do all day. I don’t want to be waiting to have something that’s more moral. I want the work that people do to contribute to the world they want to see. Ultimately, that’s what I care about. That’s what I want for myself. That’s what I want for other people. We should be able to build that world. All of those time wasting jobs, no one should feel like a meaningless cog in a machine. People should have meaning in the work that they do. I think a lot of us feel like that. That, ultimately, I think is what will transform the world. The more that the things that we do with our hands and our minds have meaning and actually contribute to our dreams, that is going to be the result and cause of this new world.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
I live here in New York. I’m a born and raised New Yorker. I was aware that Occupy was happening, but I was like, “Uh, yet another attempt. It will teeter out.” The fact that it gained so much momentum was really impressive. I’m not in my own background an anarchist. That’s not my ideology. I wasn’t really sure how this was going to work out. Like a lot of people, I was just waiting to see. Then, as many people say, it’s really hard to get involved. I spent a lot of time on the fringes at the park before the eviction for like a month or so, trying to figure out how to plug in. I was lucky enough that I met someone at a programming class, not Occupy related, and she was in Tech Ops. That was an entrée into a working group. That made the whole Occupy thing more accessible.
America is a really funny country. I’ve lived in a lot of other countries. After college, I lived in India for a couple of years. Then, I lived in England and in Austria for several years. America is a really strange place. Every other country I’ve ever lived in, they all have a lot more in common with each other than anybody has with us, in terms of political culture and public culture. The lack of engagement in this country is mindboggling, how disengaged and disconnected we are. No Indian can pretend that we are not a consumerist society; we definitely are. Indians are incredibly materialistic. Look at our weddings. If we get any money, we spend massive amounts on our weddings and jewelry and our cars. It’s disgusting. We’re disgusting consumerists. At the same time, we also have close to 70% electoral participation. We may not have the greatest literacy stats in the world, but everybody that can read, reads like three or four newspapers a day.
A city like New York has one serious newspaper and two tabloids. Delhi has four serious newspapers in English, god knows how many in Hindi and a whole slew of tabloids. Similarly, Austria and the German-speaking world is like that, and England is like that. That sense of engagement and passion about politics is much more similar, so this country is really weird as opposed to the rest of the world. We are really strange. Part of why Occupy is so important for this country is that the rest of the world has figured out how we are relating to each other and the idea of government as something that we are part of. Like you call the superintendant to fix the faucet in your tub, your government is supposed to be there to do the things you don’t have the time to deal with. That’s part of what it is. It’s about providing roads and infrastructure and education and health care and all of these things. That’s what the government is for. That’s a very common idea about what government is for in every other part of the world.
I think that because we all own that, because that’s something that’s our collective will, it’s one of the ways that we engage with one another. Americans don’t do that. We’ve outsourced it. We’ve allowed corporations to pour large amounts of money into elections for decades now. We’ve allowed other kinds of collective forces to capture our government, but not the people, not us. Our focus at Occupy Wall Street for the last six or seven months that I’ve been involved has been really clear that our purpose is not to win specific gains, to have specific demands. Our purpose is to create a space where people can figure out what their demands are and how to organize in their communities and around the things that they care about.
If you look at a working group like Immigrant Worker Justice, which is part of the labor cluster, they do a lot of stuff. Some of it seems really obviously against the banks, against corporate take over of the government, but some of it is not. They do a lot of consciousness raising and very sort of traditional union organizing, really fantastic stuff. Then, they have these teach-ins, and out of that will come a community deciding to create a building association to challenge their landlords on the NYPD using Clean Halls to invade their home. It’s about figuring out what people care about and expanding that. It’s about reminding people that this is our right. There is something really lovely about the US constitution. There is something really fantastic about being one of the oldest democracies on the planet. There is something really fantastic about our history and about our culture as Americans, and we need to reclaim that. I feel like giving that space is really what Occupy is about.
In terms of what I hope for with Occupy, it’s hard to even say the words because I think, for a lot of us, our dreams are so big. You either feel stupid, or you’re definitely going to get your heart broken if you say it out loud. I would like to live in a world where we can actually find work that is meaningful. I don’t want to be embarrassed about the job I have. I don’t want to feel bad about what I do all day. I don’t want to be waiting to have something that’s more moral. I want the work that people do to contribute to the world they want to see. Ultimately, that’s what I care about. That’s what I want for myself. That’s what I want for other people. We should be able to build that world. All of those time wasting jobs, no one should feel like a meaningless cog in a machine. People should have meaning in the work that they do. I think a lot of us feel like that. That, ultimately, I think is what will transform the world. The more that the things that we do with our hands and our minds have meaning and actually contribute to our dreams, that is going to be the result and cause of this new world.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/