George E. Packard

May Day, May 1st 2012, Vietnam Veteren's Plaza

Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I’m the retired bishop for federal ministries in the Episcopal Church. I had supported other efforts of social justice in the City, was involved in the September 11^th recovery, and so I contacted the kitchen working group offering to help when Occupy settled into Zuccotti Park. They needed water so I brought jugs of water from Costco to Liberty Square. I was the water man.

We have a great sadness now as we mourn the passing of the Zuccotti days. Encampments received a person in physical space. After all, the only power you have left is your body which can be put in physical space. What real power DO you have in this culture? One can fill space with personal intentions, time, and activity. One of the things I’m doing now is the People’s Investigation as developed on the model of the South African Reconciliation Commission. There, people were held to task on what happened as a result of the serious wound of apartheid. Archbishop Desmund Tutu led this process and it simply began by sitting down and listening to stories. That’s what we are attempting to do with the People’s Investigation. For instance we might ask a neighbor, “How did you lose your house to foreclosure? What happened?” If you tell me your story, let me slow down my life and listen to what happened. I make space for you. That’s what occurred in the encampments. People would connect and slow down for each other’s story.

A number of the financiers who made millions of dollars really want to tell a story and say they’re sorry. Not all of them do. Some will remain corrupt and unconscious. But those with a level of awareness really need to cough up this bile. Can you imagine what it would be like to have someone who wrote one of these exotic, collateralized instruments--looking out the window thinking about the big bonus he/she is going to get at the end of the year—reaching a moment of remorse? Then, they would—in effect--meet the single mother who was thrown out of her house because the mortgage wasn't transparent enough for her to understand what she was signing. I would like to see a connection between those two people. That’s what the People’s Investigation is trying to do. 

The Occupy Movement is housed within the horizontal democracy of our campsites where people can share and talk. It’s a sloppy process. As a theologian from Fordham said to me, “It’s far better than the alternative.” Most of us elect representatives to talk about our needs. In other words, you give your power to them, and they talk about your life and make decisions on your behalf. Occupy confronts that idea. These days, we don’t have to do that. We can take that power back whether it be on Ebay, or Craigslist, or Angie’s List, or a neighborhood general assembly. Consumers gather in conversation and vote with their power to say, “We reject that kind of provider, that kind of company, and we take our interests, energy and power and we place it over here.” Ideas like this are popping up in many places. Carne Ross writes about this as “participatory democracy”--people realize that they don’t have to give their power away. They can enter into conversation in local neighborhoods, towns, and governments, even on the internet, consumer groups and other ways. We’ll see more and more of that. 

It’s desperately important to re-insert the dignity of individual personhood in our culture.  It’s one of the last great hopes we have for the future, reclaiming that agency. Occupy Wall Street has its finger on this idea and they’re not letting it wiggle away. (As an example, unfairness has been woven into the system and debt keeps it all in place. Individual life control is taken away, whether consumer, student, homeowner or medical debt. The system remains oiled. Further, exotic instruments package this debt allowing for more and more leverage, which in turn gets sold off to pension funds and foreign governments. The scandal is enriched when such collateralized instruments are sold to ignorant investors.)

I’m not naive about this. Full transformation is not going to happen in my lifetime, but if we can start to move in the direction where we talk about what our destiny is going to be…it will come. Such conversations that matter and have outcomes will start to gradually change the way we understand our lives. Right now, we think we have to elect representatives that go off to other places and do great deeds on our behalf; it is frozen and not working.

I hope what we're doing together will bring about a world with the focus of shared power, transparency and honesty…and all the grace that flows from that. There are always characters who want to wrap themselves in more riches than they’re entitled to, but at least we will start to make a difference. When we crossed the fence at Duarte Park on December 17th onto Trinity Church’s hallowed vacant lot, about 300 people assembled before the cops came in and started to crack heads. It reminded me of when I was at St. George’s Church, Baghdad, Iraq. It was the Sunni, the Shia, the Jews, the Copts, other Christians who all joined in a court yard jubilation after a post bombing rebuilding. ALL faiths worshiped there; it was a sanctuary-refuge and the way it was supposed to be. This shared belief that harmony and diversity as a bipolar truth occurring in the same moment could have been enacted again at Duarte Park, but a corporate church said “no.” It’s the blessing of connection which has brought Occupy into being and won’t be denied. 

Interview by Stacy Lanyon

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