Photo: Stacy Lanyon
The way that I got brought into Occupy was that I was
hanging out at my friend’s house. My other friends gave me a call and
said, “Hey buddy, there’s this protest going on in the city at some point. You
wanna go?” I was like, “Yeah sure, sounds good.” This was a month before
September 17, 2011. I totally forgot about it, and I got a call at like eight o’clock
in the morning, “So yeah, I’m outside of your house. Are you ready to go?” I
was couch surfing at this point, so I was like, “Yeah, sure.” Then, we came to Occupy for the day. My friend was like, “Hey, so I’m going to get going now. What
are your plans? It looks like they’re going to be staying here overnight.” I
was like, “I think I’ll stay.” I decided to stay, and I never left. It was beautiful because every morning I’d wake up and hear, “Oh, good morning brother. Good morning sister. How are you doing?" There was such love. It was this indescribable, beautiful
feeling of love. It was an incredibly close family, and there are still people
that when I see them, they’re family now. It’s so wonderful whenever I see
these people. There’s really nothing like it that I’ve ever experienced. I
never really got along too well with my own family. It was just beautiful.
I got involved with medical probably about three or four days in, so I’ve always been a medic for Occupy. That’s what I do. I don’t really like holding signs. I don’t really like yelling. In the park, I remember what I would do. I worked about every day because it wasn’t work. There’s this whole theory out there that if you make work play, then people will be more productive because it won’t be like, “Oh, I have to go to work now.” I was a medic. That’s just what I did. That’s what I love to do. It was my duty. That’s how I felt. I’ll go over the routine of what I would do. What I would do is I would wake up in the morning or afternoon. Usually, I would do the night shift. I would wake up. I would go grab a coffee, bagel, whatever from the kitchen, and later on when they had the cigarette table, I would go grab a cigarette from the cigarette table. Then, I would go to the sacred space, eat my breakfast, smoke my cigarette. Then, I would just go on duty. I wouldn’t really go off duty at any point during the day. I would walk over, get myself some food or something or drop into the library for ten minutes, but I pretty much just worked for the entire thing. I would wake up, do my morning routine, work, go to sleep, maybe take a break or two, walk around the park for a minute.
I’ve realized that what being a medic is is just love, loving everybody, and having such care for everybody. You do stupid things for love, like stay up for an entire weekend action to make sure that everybody is okay. That’s really the best way that I can describe it. It is a love for humanity that transcends everything else you do. When you’re a medic, that’s pretty much what it is. In this immense caring for humanity, you kind of lose track of taking care of yourself. That’s one of the funny things in medical care. A lot of times you won’t say, “Okay, I really got to take a break with this.” Usually, it will be your buddy that says, “Hey dude, you gotta chill. You’re fucking running yourself ragged here. You really need to take some time for self-care.” That’s one of the things that’s really enforced in medical training, is self-care. You are number one. If you lose your mind, there is no way you can help anybody. You can’t take care of anybody else if you can’t take care of yourself.
As a homeless youth, I certainly feel class war. Classism is something
that a lot of people don’t really perceive that much, but it’s a very real
thing. I certainly feel it when I haven’t been able to shower or when my
clothes look ragged or whatever. I generally take good enough care of myself
where it’s not often a thing, but you get looks from people, or you’ll
get asked to leave a place where if you weren’t homeless, you’d be able to
stay. They just don’t like you existing. It makes them uncomfortable to think, “I
have all of this, and there’s a person that really doesn’t.” One of the things
that I’ve had to realize is that my mere existence is an act of guerrilla war
against our classist society, the fact that I exist.
I don’t receive things
differently. I’m a mentally stable individual who is somewhat intelligent. I
know what I’m talking about. Everybody throughout my entire life has always
told me, “Oh, you’ve got so much potential.” It’s actually funny because that’s
one of the things that ended me up in homelessness. I think that if I was just
an average child, I wouldn’t have been pushed as far as I was. At one point in
my life, I was working forty hours a week at Starbucks. I was in the fire department doing firefighter
training. I was in culinary school and going to high school, and my
grandparents, what did they tell me? “Get more hours at Starbucks.” My
grandparents never really wanted to support me, at all, ever. They sent me to
live with my mother in South Carolina where I didn’t really have any kind of
opportunities because we were barely able to feed ourselves. I had to figure
out ways of supplying myself with food or else I might not necessarily get to
eat two or three meals a day. There was no way that I’d be able to go and find
a job because I lived out in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have enough gas
for me to go out trying to find a job, so what I was stuck doing was hanging
out in the house and reading books. That happened for about a year before one
of my friends got a couple people together, and they used their Christmas money
to bring me back up to New York. When I got back up to New York, my
grandparents said, “What you expect to stay here?”
The current system, the class warfare
that I’ve described is getting worse and worse. The disparity of wealth between
the rich and the poor, not even just the rich and the poor but between the rich
and the middle class, the people who used to make some kind of living, is getting worse and worse. Everybody is saying, “It’s hard times right now.”
Not for the rich folks. They’ve been making record amounts of money, ridiculous
bonuses, and I feel that’s wrong. It's wrong that they hoard and take from everybody else.
Wage slavery is totally a real thing. If I held a gun to you and said, “You
have to do this.” that’s slavery. If I held a gun to you and said, “You either
have to do this or this,” slavery. If I said, I won’t feed you unless you do
either this or this,” that’s slavery. If I say, “I won’t feed you unless you do
something to earn money,” that’s still slavery. I think that’s totally wrong. I
think that’s something that needs to change.
I believe that food, housing, education and health care are human rights. I believe that this society would be so much better off if these things were provided for you. God knows there are enough resources to do it. There are enough people who want to contribute to society. You look at the park, sanitation was the best example of this. There were people scrubbing that park 24/7. You couldn’t walk around at any time without seeing someone picking up garbage or changing the garbage cans, scrubbing something. People step up and take care of things when they need to get done. People always say, ‘Human nature is to sit around and do nothing.” Well, in a society where you’re overworked and underpaid, yeah, taking a break and not really wanting to be a wage slave, you kind of don’t really want to do that. Most of the time, I ask somebody who says this, “Have you ever not done anything for six months?” “Yeah, it’s aweful. It drives me insane,” they say. “Exactly!” It’s the same thing with anybody. Everybody wants to do something. Everybody has hobbies, and a lot of these hobbies are useful to society. I don’t get paid to be a medic. I just am one because that is my existence. I care for people. Even if I got a part-time job somewhere, I would probably carry my medical kit with me everywhere because you never know when something can happen.
What I would like to see in the world is free health care
for everybody. That’s a big thing as a medic. Everybody gets
sick. It’s not your fault if you get sick. You can live a healthier lifestyle, but some
people can only buy cheap food, and they can’t get the proper nutrients. I'd like to see housing for everyone.
That’s part of living. I want free food for everyone. That’s absolutely necessary for life. The whole
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness thing, these things all fall under
that. I'd like to see a gift economy, so if you need
something, it’s given, or there is somewhere where you can just go and take it
if you need it. It would take a lot of reprogramming of society because our
society programs us to be hoarders, “Get all the money you can. Get all of
the resources you can.” You’d need something where if you took all of the
resources, people would look at you and say, “What are you doing? We need
that.”
If you’ve got roommates in your apartment, and you eat all of their
food, they’re going to be like, “Dude, chill with that. We need food too.” With
groups of friends, if you have a bunch of people who are trying to decide, “Oh,
what bar are we going to go to?” Usually, it’s not like, “Oh, here’s the
general commander of our group, so we’ve got to listen to what bar he wants to
go to.” Usually, it’s like, “Okay guys, let’s get together.” “Oh, this bar is
good.” “Yeah, but the bartender there is kind of a dick.” “Well, this bar has karaoke.”
“Oh yeah, Karaoke. Let’s do that.” It’s
a much more organic way of doing things. Anarchy is such a hyped word, but my personal definition, what it means to me is it’s where everybody is an equal, everybody should have an equal say in everything. In the workplace, the workers would all decide, “Okay, well how are we going to conduct this?” I think that that’s the best way to do it because when you have a stake in something, you’re much more likely to do a better job at it. You’ll have some pride in it, and if you don’t, then you’re probably in the wrong business, and you should bounce around a little bit and figure out what you want to do.
I think if there were a gift economy
like that where no one would really do without, I think there would be this
beautiful art renaissance like humanity has never seen. You’ve got so
many people who are like, “I want to play music.” “I want to make art.” “I want to be a
writer.” They don’t get to in this society. Their talents are wasted, and they’re put in a
coffee shop or a Walmart or in a supermarket, maybe to stock shelves. Of
course, these things would need to be done, but people would step up. There are
times when I honestly just feel like cleaning stuff. I think that people are
way too cynical as far as human nature goes, which is not correct from what I’ve
experienced. People aren’t just going to sit around and
let their world go to filth. People are going to do something about it.
The art renaissance would be so beautiful. It would really
be something to behold. Science would also excel because you’ve got so many
people who love science but can’t really do all that much schooling unless they
can pay back the student debt. Personally, I would probably be a doctor and a
research scientist or well on my way to being there if we lived in this world
that I want to live in. I would probably be doing something with microbiology.
Medicine would be amazing. Right now, it’s all profit driven. I’m an herbalist.
That’s one of the things that I picked up during Occupy. I see
medicine from a western medicine background, most of my training
being while I was in the fire department sitting in on EMT trainings and then
also taking an EMT course myself. My background is mostly in western medicine,
but I’m getting more and more into the herbalism because for preventative care
and everyday stuff, most of it you can do with plants. I think that we can
create this world that I’ve described, and the only thing that is getting in
our way is the people that say, “No. This will never happen. We can’t do
this. We can’t do that.” Try! That’s the best that you can do, and make sure
that you drink a lot of water.
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/