Photo: Stacy Lanyon
One of my interests is organizing in big groups and bringing
lots of people together, having people fully connected and fully engaged in the
decision making process, so when I saw Occupy, I thought of it as a really,
really interesting experiment. I’ve organized in the anarchist tradition for a
long time using consensus decision making and stuff like that, so I was very interested
in bringing in a lot of different people who hadn’t come in and seeing how we
could figure it out, see if we could make it work and what would come out of it. That was
really my first interest in Occupy. I did Occupy New Orleans first before I
came to New York, so that was fun and interesting to organize. Someone came out
from New York and told us about all of the stuff that was happening with the
people’s mic and the general assemblies. We did that in New Orleans.
In New Orleans, you have a lot of resource extraction, and you have the idea where poverty
is this thing that is kind of maintained as a way of dealing with things that
are happening in New Orleans. We talked a lot about racism. We talked a lot
about poverty, the prison industrial complex and how that was connected. That’s
what people in New Orleans wanted to talk about. You have this super unhealthy
situation with the police. That was an overarching issue that was happening at
all occupies. There was a camp in New Orleans. It was right outside of City
Hall. We started on October 1st, and it was there until around
January. The city council decided that the camp was something they could
handle. A lot of people in New Orleans understood what we are saying by being there. Occupy New Orleans was starting right in the aftermath of the BP
oil spill. People were more likely to listen to what people from Occupy New
Orleans had to say because of that. We did eventually get evicted.
I arrived in New York City on November 1st. I’m a
medic, and I’ve been doing that for a long time. My hope was that they would need medics through the winter, that it was
going to be something that stretched for a longer time. My friends were also
medics, and they were asking for people who knew how to do cold weather stuff.
The park was interesting because the New York situation was an
epicenter of this bigger national thing. When I came up, I stopped in Atlanta, Baltimore
and Philadelphia occupations on my way up. Then, I got to New York, and I was like,
“Oh, this is the place where all of this is happening.” It was interesting because
I feel like New York City had the smallest Occupy space of all the occupations
that I went to. It was just packed. When I got there, the tents had gone up. It
was really starting to build on top of itself. I lived next to a group of
people, and they had built a two tiered tent with plywood. In New York City, I
felt like a lot of different people were attracted to it. People were coming
around just because they were curious. There was a very diverse group of people
participating. It was the best compilation of ideas that I
had seen, which is something else that excited me about Occupy, bringing all
the ideas that we had, bringing them to the situation and saying, “Okay, what
are we going to do?”
That moment really was important. I felt that the most
important thing was that clash of ideas, people coming together face to face. After
the eviction, it was harder to do that. I think in that time and space, Americans felt more separated from
each other than ever before. We had just come out of that crazy war. Then we
had these bankers who had done this crazy thing to the economy, and no one was
holding them accountable. Nobody went to jail. Occupy Wall Street created a
space for us to come together and talk face to face, which I think was the most
important part of the whole thing. I think that as Americans we felt very separate
from each other, and we felt powerless, and Occupy created a space where you could get
together and talk to someone you usually wouldn’t talk to.
I found myself in those conversations and exchanging information respectfully, and that’s something that isn’t really done. So much of our time is spent watching television in America. I guess I’m so against TV watching because it’s so one way. You’re only getting it. Nothing is going back. When we were in Zuccotti Park, we were just exchanging ideas, and one of the conversations that was really interesting to me was the one about police brutality, discussing and watching how different people were dealing with the police. The police mean a million different things to a million different people. Then, you have conversations about it, and you see together this crazy brutality. Then, you could talk about it.
I found myself in those conversations and exchanging information respectfully, and that’s something that isn’t really done. So much of our time is spent watching television in America. I guess I’m so against TV watching because it’s so one way. You’re only getting it. Nothing is going back. When we were in Zuccotti Park, we were just exchanging ideas, and one of the conversations that was really interesting to me was the one about police brutality, discussing and watching how different people were dealing with the police. The police mean a million different things to a million different people. Then, you have conversations about it, and you see together this crazy brutality. Then, you could talk about it.
It comes back to the idea that people don’t really have
agency over the choices that are being placed in front of them. After the crash
of 2008, no one provided any answers. There was no solution of how to get out
of it. All of these people were out of work. All of these people were suddenly
in poverty. All of these people who were waiting to retire suddenly didn’t have
any money, and there was nothing you could do about it. We didn’t really get to
a place where we got to a definitive answer, but the exercise of thinking of
what we were going to do was the biggest part.
I think that hopefully this sets seeds of change. Thinking about
it in the French tradition, they think of the struggle against the hierarchy
and the people in charge as just a continuing tradition. This is something the
French deal with all of the time. My parents did it, and my grandparents did
it. Hopefully, we can get a little current of what that begins to mean, taking
the power back, even if it’s only a story we tell ourselves and begin to think
that some of these things are possible, and realize that we are the ones with the power to do it.
I feel like one of the great American myths is that you can
be anything you want, and I think maybe when they started telling that story it was closer to a reality. Now, that reality has become more and more of a myth. I want all of these
things to be made true. I found myself in a place that I couldn’t get a job
unless I knew someone. I want to see a place where as people have ability, they
bring that, and as they have needs, they are taken care of. It’s about all of
us being equal. That’s the kind of place I’m trying to go toward. I think that
it feels like a place where anything is possible, this place where if somebody
wants to put their mind to something, they will have the tools in front of
them. That’s a place that we can create, but it’s going to take everybody. We can’t
have people standing on people’s shoulders holding people back. We need
everybody working together.
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/