Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I wasn’t necessarily drawn to Occupy Wall Street - I stumbled upon it. Zuccotti Park (for the record) had been my park for a year and a half before the movement started. I would go there after work every day to do my crossword puzzles, have a cigarette and decompress. Back then, it was a boring slab of concrete mostly used by tourists and a whole bunch of skateboard kids (though ironically, the one rule in Zuccotti Park at the time was no skateboarding, but skateboards abounded nonetheless - which, in retrospect, says a lot about selective rule enforcement). The first Monday after September 17th, I stopped by Zuccotti on my way to the subway, per usual, and found it occupied!
I didn't necessarily feel a pressing urge to engage with it at first - I kind of liked that it was just happening around me. Sitting on the west steps that first afternoon, though, I overheard a conversation between two cops and someone who was griping about the presence of Occupiers. Their utter confusion and the extent to which their discourse was just totally misinformed made me realize that there are a lot of people out there that really don’t get it. People need to talk to one another, and they need to get information outside of their own circles because I think so much of the isolation and the head butting that occurs just comes from everyone propagating and echoing their own ideas and not seriously entertaining other people’s.
I approached Occupy originally as a listening space and was really just relieved to see and hear and participate in Americans sharing and talking things out in spite of their disagreements. That’s how it started. I’d visit three times a week until mid-October, which was when the crackdown started intensifying. I was pretty blind to how intense the state’s grip on our freedoms was. I assumed that a peaceful protest could just be a peaceful protest, and that nobody would bother anybody and that police brutality only happened in rare, provoked cases. I started to see it with my own eyes, and it was at that point that I was like, “I can’t be passive in this. I have to be here.” So I started live streaming, which was a good way to start to understand the process early on - you could just observe from behind the camera and didn't feel obligated to participate.
The system is super, super broke. There are a huge number of us who voted for change almost four years ago and were super hopeful that it would happen. I think the reality of our political system is that you are even more shackled in that office. One person can’t do it. What democracy requires is the will of the people and for the will of the people to be expressed loudly and daily. Apathy is just not an option if you want a functional democracy. On top of that, we have a government that is bought and sold by people who have little interest outside their own self-preservation.
My time with Occupy has underlined for me something I've always known to be true, but feels truer with every day I spend in the movement - and that's how necessary each of us is for the functioning, success, and well-being of the next person. I want to see a world where everybody walks around with their primary values being the appreciation of one another's humanity and the understanding that we can’t do it alone. We need everybody else. Therefore, you have to treat everybody else with dignity and respect and love, the same that you want to be treated with. I want to see a world where if we can’t have justice, that we at least have people fighting for it. We’re fooled into thinking that we don’t have power, and we have to acknowledge and lift up the power that we all in fact do have. That’s where real power comes from. It comes from recognizing one another’s strength and acknowledging that and respecting that.
I want to see a world where people don’t walk by when they see someone fall down, and I mean that on a grand metaphorical level and on a very literal level. I don’t understand it when I see it, and I see it all of the time. I just want a wholescale restructuring of our value system wherein we understand that as soon as you take care of yourself, you take care of the next person. You don’t eat any more than you have to, and you make sure that everybody hungry has eaten and everybody tired has slept, and you know and appreciate all that you get from the world, and you know where it comes from and why you have it and why everybody else deserves it too.
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 didn't necessarily feel a pressing urge to engage with it at first - I kind of liked that it was just happening around me. Sitting on the west steps that first afternoon, though, I overheard a conversation between two cops and someone who was griping about the presence of Occupiers. Their utter confusion and the extent to which their discourse was just totally misinformed made me realize that there are a lot of people out there that really don’t get it. People need to talk to one another, and they need to get information outside of their own circles because I think so much of the isolation and the head butting that occurs just comes from everyone propagating and echoing their own ideas and not seriously entertaining other people’s.
I approached Occupy originally as a listening space and was really just relieved to see and hear and participate in Americans sharing and talking things out in spite of their disagreements. That’s how it started. I’d visit three times a week until mid-October, which was when the crackdown started intensifying. I was pretty blind to how intense the state’s grip on our freedoms was. I assumed that a peaceful protest could just be a peaceful protest, and that nobody would bother anybody and that police brutality only happened in rare, provoked cases. I started to see it with my own eyes, and it was at that point that I was like, “I can’t be passive in this. I have to be here.” So I started live streaming, which was a good way to start to understand the process early on - you could just observe from behind the camera and didn't feel obligated to participate.
The system is super, super broke. There are a huge number of us who voted for change almost four years ago and were super hopeful that it would happen. I think the reality of our political system is that you are even more shackled in that office. One person can’t do it. What democracy requires is the will of the people and for the will of the people to be expressed loudly and daily. Apathy is just not an option if you want a functional democracy. On top of that, we have a government that is bought and sold by people who have little interest outside their own self-preservation.
My time with Occupy has underlined for me something I've always known to be true, but feels truer with every day I spend in the movement - and that's how necessary each of us is for the functioning, success, and well-being of the next person. I want to see a world where everybody walks around with their primary values being the appreciation of one another's humanity and the understanding that we can’t do it alone. We need everybody else. Therefore, you have to treat everybody else with dignity and respect and love, the same that you want to be treated with. I want to see a world where if we can’t have justice, that we at least have people fighting for it. We’re fooled into thinking that we don’t have power, and we have to acknowledge and lift up the power that we all in fact do have. That’s where real power comes from. It comes from recognizing one another’s strength and acknowledging that and respecting that.
I want to see a world where people don’t walk by when they see someone fall down, and I mean that on a grand metaphorical level and on a very literal level. I don’t understand it when I see it, and I see it all of the time. I just want a wholescale restructuring of our value system wherein we understand that as soon as you take care of yourself, you take care of the next person. You don’t eat any more than you have to, and you make sure that everybody hungry has eaten and everybody tired has slept, and you know and appreciate all that you get from the world, and you know where it comes from and why you have it and why everybody else deserves it too.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/