Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I was working with the war resistors league when Occupy began, and we were preparing a demonstration for the anniversary of the Afghanistan war with a number of other New York organizations. That anniversary is October 7th. Occupy started up, and of course people in the New York anti-war community got really excited and said, “How can we access all of this amazing energy that’s going on? Either get involved with OWS or have OWS participate in our demo." I said, “I’ll go down and find out.” I went around the encampment, talked to a number of people, and the consensus advice was to just get on stack at the general assembly, so I did, and I spoke at the assembly that night about the demonstration and what was going on. Then, after I spoke, I said to one of the facilitators, “I guess I should come back tomorrow and speak again,” and they said, you know what you should do, you should go to the direct action meeting,” so I hunted that down and went to the direct action meeting and spoke about the demo, and what really amazed me was the kindness that I saw expressed by the people at the direct action meeting, so I thought, “I think I’ll stick around here.”
I’m a theatre artist, and I’ve staged a lot of political street theater, but I’ve never staged a full day of action, and there were just a lot of people who were really educated and experienced and articulate and had a lot of skills, so I thought, “I will come here, and I will get an education,” and I did. Coming to Occupy was like meeting a new lover whose really warm and soft and exciting and really smart and has good politics. I began working with direct action. We were meeting five days a week, and I really dove into that. I kept my mouth shut for a long time and listened to people and started to learn how things worked and ended up staging a full day of action on November 30th. There were defense contractors and Wall Street banks having a conference, and the entertainment was Department of Defense officials. We had two pickets, a civil disobedience, a disinformation campaign, infiltration into the conference and a banner drop. It was really quite amazing.
One of the most enjoyable things was just going to the park with my sign for an hour and sitting there and having conversations with people. My sign was one of Peter Maurin’s easy essays. It’s called Better or Better Off, and it says, “The world would be better off if everyone tried to become better, and people would become better if they stopped trying to be better off, for when everyone tries to be better off, nobody is better off, but when everyone tries to become better, everyone is better off. Everyone would be rich if nobody tried to be richer, and nobody would be poor if everybody tried to be the poorest, and everyone would be what he ought to be if everybody tried to be what he wants the other fellow to be.” So that would stimulate some discussion. The park was stunning because it was a place for activists to form relationships and share skills with each other, and it was a place for people to come and be radicalized, who never really had stuck their toe in that before. It was a commons, which was something that a lot of us had been working for for a long time.
During the Civil Rights movement here in the US, they said
that there are four fronts in the battle for social justice. There’s the legislature,
the courts, the media and the streets, and they showed how important it was to
have a presence in the streets, that that was how you then affected an
intelligent discussion in the media, which then affected the courts and the
legislature. I think that Occupy does an amazing job in the street. That’s one
of the aspects of it. Again, this was a draw to so many activists, people who
had been working on various community organizing projects, anything you can
think of from child care to food to healthcare. Occupy was a place for all of those people to come together, meet each
other, form relationships and unify. I work with a theatre company called The Living
Theatre, and one of the things that we always talk about is unity in the movement.
We experienced in the sixties a really strong peace movement that then fractured, and people went off and started doing their own things, and we were constantly saying, “How can we unify all of these people.” One of the things we did was we thought that an issue that people could all get behind was the death penalty because it’s such a horrendous thing, and we created a play called, “Not in my name,” which was a protest against the death penalty that we performed for ten years in Times Square on days that there was an actual execution in the United States. We thought if people knew that there was a demo in Times Square every time there was an execution that they would just come down and join the demo, but we could never really get good traction. In the years before Occupy, people in New York had gotten out of the habit of going to demos. Occupy started up, all of these people doing various good work came together and met each other.
Then, there was this whole amazing educational experience that was going on. I can’t tell you how many workshops in direct action and anti-oppression and de-escalation and non-violent communication I took and how much reading I was turned onto by people, going to a book club, sitting in the think tank, just being part of various discussions, and just seeing the high level of discourse and the educational experience that was going on every day and continues to go on is to me one of the most important aspects of Occupy. Very early on, people kept asking. “Why are you doing this?” or “What is it about?” or “Why is it so important?” I worked out my rap. This was my rap when someone said, “Why is this so important?” I would say, “Let’s you and I count together from one to four." Then, we would count together, "One, two, three, four." And I would say, "So in our world, every four seconds, a child dies from causes related to poverty. It could be malnutrition. It could be no access to medical care, many things, but we live in a post scarcity world. We have the ability to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care for everyone, so this poverty doesn’t arise naturally. It’s manufactured, so when I said “and,” a child died, and when you and I said "four," a child died, and in the minute it has taken for me to explain to you why we counted from one to four, fifteen more children have died, and that’s why Occupy is so important.”
We experienced in the sixties a really strong peace movement that then fractured, and people went off and started doing their own things, and we were constantly saying, “How can we unify all of these people.” One of the things we did was we thought that an issue that people could all get behind was the death penalty because it’s such a horrendous thing, and we created a play called, “Not in my name,” which was a protest against the death penalty that we performed for ten years in Times Square on days that there was an actual execution in the United States. We thought if people knew that there was a demo in Times Square every time there was an execution that they would just come down and join the demo, but we could never really get good traction. In the years before Occupy, people in New York had gotten out of the habit of going to demos. Occupy started up, all of these people doing various good work came together and met each other.
Then, there was this whole amazing educational experience that was going on. I can’t tell you how many workshops in direct action and anti-oppression and de-escalation and non-violent communication I took and how much reading I was turned onto by people, going to a book club, sitting in the think tank, just being part of various discussions, and just seeing the high level of discourse and the educational experience that was going on every day and continues to go on is to me one of the most important aspects of Occupy. Very early on, people kept asking. “Why are you doing this?” or “What is it about?” or “Why is it so important?” I worked out my rap. This was my rap when someone said, “Why is this so important?” I would say, “Let’s you and I count together from one to four." Then, we would count together, "One, two, three, four." And I would say, "So in our world, every four seconds, a child dies from causes related to poverty. It could be malnutrition. It could be no access to medical care, many things, but we live in a post scarcity world. We have the ability to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care for everyone, so this poverty doesn’t arise naturally. It’s manufactured, so when I said “and,” a child died, and when you and I said "four," a child died, and in the minute it has taken for me to explain to you why we counted from one to four, fifteen more children have died, and that’s why Occupy is so important.”
I would like to see a world filled with mass non-cooperation
with the capitalist system. I’d like to see large organized mutual aid networks
so that people don't have to participate in the capitalist system, in the governmental
structure. I would like to see a lot of education in non-violent conflict
resolution. We’re always going to have conflict, but it’s how we deal with it
that is really going to create a new world that we all want to live in, so I
would like to see an end to using a punitive form of justice, and I’d like to
see a move from hierarchical structures to non-hierarchical structures of
organizing. The classical anarchist, when they were asked what the world would
be like after the revolution, they would always respond, “We don’t know because
that world will be made by people who are free, and since we are slaves, we
cannot create that world. Our job is to create the revolution, and then we’ll
see what that world could be.” Let me just say simply that I would like that to
be a world where if you found yourself in trouble, you can count on more than
50% of the population to step right up and say, “How can I help?”
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/