Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I came to Occupy Wall Street because I felt as a person who
was twenty when Occupy Wall Street started that it was my responsibility to
engage in a social movement, especially since I had felt so let down by the
Obama Administration. I was really concerned about my ability to have access to
health care and my ability to have access to a college education, and I was
really disturbed at what was developing in this country with the financial
crisis. My grandmother had lost quite a bit of her retirement fund in the 2008
crash. My mother had lost whatever she had in that stock market crash, which
affected me because that was less that they were able to help me out. I also
felt that post the Civil Rights movement there was a lot to be done and a lot
of conversation that was not being had about race and class in this country.
I came to Occupy Wall Street on October 8th or 9th. It
was huge, and it was happening in my city. The first day I
came out I was just really overwhelmed. It was just very much, “Wow, this is a
lot. I don’t even know where I would begin to do anything. People are sleeping
on mattresses outside. There’s no visible order. There’s this thing called
Think Tank. I don’t know what they do. I’m going to take a deep breath and come
back in a few days.” I think now that we’re past the year anniversary, I feel very
conflicted about Occupy Wall Street. I feel like we wasted a lot of time and a
lot of access that we had. I feel saddened by the fact that for that short span
of time between October and November, even after the eviction, we had the
conversation. The conversation was about us, and I feel that we could have
pushed a little harder to get some real tangible changes made in that time
frame. On the other hand, I feel really
positively about the work that is being done from Occupy Sandy to
Occupy Our Homes to Bio Buses to just the network of people who have been
activists before Occupy and the connections that we all have. It's created the ability to start making these
issues united and have the people that are working on these issues be working
together to complement each other. I think that is a beautiful thing about
Occupy.
Occupy Wall Street is important I think for many reasons,
but I think the most important reason is that it put a face to a lot of people
who are really suffering in this country. It was a beginning of giving a voice to people who haven’t had a voice for a very long time in the current
political structure. Occupy is important for so many reasons. Occupy is
important because it showed that you can have a social movement that can be effective, that can help people, that can provide for people without having a
leader. You can create social change without any partisan stance. It’s
beautiful because it shows that mutual aid and helping each other can really,
truly change the way that people communicate. I can at least say in the beginning there was such an open breath.
Everyone was open to what each other had to say, what each other’s different
tactics and strategies were, and I think that regardless of everyone’s experience
or how everyone came to feel, that experience of being about to have a
conversation with someone who you fundamentally disagree with on issues and
move forward and respect each other and figure out a way to work together, I
think it invaluable.
Occupy has people from all different sorts of political ideologies working together, and that is something that historically has almost never been done in this country, to have socialists and communists and anarchists and people who just want to move for reform all working together is so rare and is such an amazing thing and makes everybody’s ability to affect change so much more powerful. I think if we are being honest, that was the real thing that scared the institutions about Occupy Wall Street. It wasn’t that people were camping out or that people were providing mutual aid. It was the fact that people were beginning to talk to each other. People were beginning to work together and not let the things that have traditionally held them apart hold us apart any longer.
Occupy has people from all different sorts of political ideologies working together, and that is something that historically has almost never been done in this country, to have socialists and communists and anarchists and people who just want to move for reform all working together is so rare and is such an amazing thing and makes everybody’s ability to affect change so much more powerful. I think if we are being honest, that was the real thing that scared the institutions about Occupy Wall Street. It wasn’t that people were camping out or that people were providing mutual aid. It was the fact that people were beginning to talk to each other. People were beginning to work together and not let the things that have traditionally held them apart hold us apart any longer.
Ideologically, I’m
an anarchist. My personal best world is a world where there’s not a power
structure controlling or manipulating people. If we’re talking more in the
short term, I think that the world that I’d like to see is a world where the conversation is being had, not any
specific conversation, but all of the conversations that need to be had. I also
think what would be ideal and beautiful is if we could build on a larger scale
the idea of mutual aid, the idea of helping each other out. Money should not be
the way in which we relate to each other. Ideally, I would love to see a world
where people can relate to each other based on who we are, individually, and
not based on money or appearance or any of those things. I think Occupy has the
ability and the potential to help create that, to really model that for the
world and really begin to spread that idea out amongst different people that haven’t been
involved. It has the ability to create a world where people are not so much worried about
the finances, where people are doing the work that they want to do because they
love it and because it affects the change.
Once we affect that change we have the potential to do whatever
we want, to keep changing, to keep growing, to keep building all of these
things. I think that that world would
just make it easier for people to express themselves and be themselves and
build the things that they want to see. If there
is one thing I feel that is most important in the world, it’s the ability for people to
self-determine. I think in that world, people would have an amazing ability to
determine for themselves what they want and how they want to live.
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/