Kittin

Occupy Town Square, January 30, 2012, Washington Square Park

Photo: Stacy Lanyon

My initial involvement in Occupy was a coincidence. I was in Baltimore at the time when it came out, and I got an email from Adbusters, and the headline of the email was about boycotting Starbucks. At the very bottom it said, “Oh, and there’s this Occupy thing.” I had been planning a road trip to Salem, Massachusetts for Halloween, so I went to the Occupy Baltimore thing. It was great. Then, I went to the Occupy Philly thing, and it was great. When I passed through New York, I intended on staying in New York for a day, but I stayed there for months. The first time I was at the park was around October 16^th. I didn’t actually go all the way in the park the first time. I stood by the big red statue. That was the first place that I slept, and it wasn’t until the second or third day that I actually ventured around and started meeting people. As far as the energy, I got my first tattoo there. I met someone who dressed exactly like me, which was really cool, not dressed like me in the general sort of way, but in weirdly specific kind of ways. I guess that does something to describe the energy in there. I started helping with the library. I did the community watch thing, which wasn’t all that great, but at least it was experimenting. I also did not talk very much in the big general assembly, but I did speak up once or twice there. 

What made me stay was a lot of things. Part of it was a place to stay. I was living out of a car at the time. It seemed like if I was going to be somewhere that I should be there. During the famous Times Square "Why I Occupy" thing, what I said was, “I occupy because I have nothing better to do.” People have said some not nice things about what I said, but it really speaks to conditions, my own conditions and what caused that. Why would I have nothing better to do than hang around a park for weeks talking to people about things? I guess the main point that I’m trying to make when I say that I have nothing better to do is that a lot of people don’t realize that they have nothing better to do. Nowadays, I watch a lot of Let’s Play, which is a Youtube thing where people play video games. That’s about the least productive thing a person can do. You’re not even playing a video game. You’re just watching someone playing a video game, so as far as being productive goes, I think a lot of people fool themselves into thinking that they’re being productive when it’s relative. You have to put a value judgment on it. As far as things that people can do that are good, well, you could plant things. You can do yoga and Kung Fu. You can dance. Other than a handful of things, everything else is capitalism, capitalism, capitalism. 

I was at the eviction. I got my ass handed to me. One of the more often watched videos of the eviction has a short scene of somebody with some sort of bright colored thing in their mouth get knocked down, and there’s like some horrid scuffle dragged out, and people start shouting. That was me. I stayed in jail for like 25 hours, and I went right back to the park when I got out of jail. I remember the night of the eviction. I was minding my own business, sewing a patch on my buddies jacket when people start yelling, “Raid! Raid! Raid! Raid! Raid!” People started throwing shit around trying to make barricades, which is a pretty reasonable action when you’re occupying a very valuable piece of land and you have a foreign army surrounding you. You should probably make barricades. It’s pretty reasonable, so I sort of made a couple of barricades, and I mainly went to the kitchen, which was in the middle. It was apoco-fucking-lyptic. It was really, really scary. There were these gas mask, robot looking terminator people everywhere, and they were closing in on us. It was crazy. Then they started grabbing us. They were saying that it was a fire hazard. It was something I had to protect because it was a food source, and it was where I lived, and it’s pretty reasonable for someone to try and protect that against a bunch of apocalyptic riot squad scary people. That’s what I tried to do, but they got me. I’m not much of a warrior. 

I think the question is to find what makes importance a thing, what makes something important, so it’s gotta be relevant, and it’s gotta be based on relative values, and the only person whose values that I’m intimately familiar with are my own. Why is it important to me? I think that certain things are important because they’re life-giving. They are an actual function of what I am. I could say "what we are," but I’m really talking about myself, so what I am. What's important is what let’s me live and what enriches that. What doesn’t enrich that, what doesn’t let me live is the cops, the police, law, so dismantling those things are important because I like being happy and stuff.

I think there is more than one valid answer for every question. From a bigger perspective, you could say that there’s nothing new under the sun and that things have always been this way, and from an internal perspective they have always been this way. There has always been everything, every element that we’re seeing now is an element of what has always been seen. On the other hand, they say the microcosm is the macrocosm. When you’re talking about the macrocosm, you’re saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” When you’re talking about the microcosm, the daily events of our lives, you’re talking about subjects like, “How come I can’t live in a park?” or “How come I can’t smoke a frickin ton of weed?” You're talking about issues of law, issues of oppression. As far as what the world has gotten into in preventing happiness, I think it’s trying, but I think it’s a giant blind eating machine that doesn’t have an off switch. I really like this metaphor. A really good example is the Gulf oil “spill”? It wasn’t really a spill. I guess you can say it’s a spill, but when you have a broken pipe, it’s not a spill. It’s a leak. How come there wasn’t just an off switch? There’s not an off switch for this whole big structure, and that’s a huge problem. There’s no kill button.

I have absolutely no idea at all what kind of world we can bring about. I would like to experiment with other things, though. I think that’s the important thing. I would like to have a nice, lovely, everybody is fine time. That would be cool. Beyond that, there’s no way to know. I think that’s the important thing to really realize, that I don’t have the answers. I do think the Federal Reserve bank should go away and a couple of other specific things. That’s the thing about anarchists. It’s sort of a blank slate, an open book. It’s not a prewritten sort of world. I think it’s important to realize and know that. You could say one version of what I hope for in the future is all of the nukes going off. That’s unbelievably frightening, but it’s one version of something that can be hoped for. It’s not a very nice version. All the nukes, everything, Boom! Kablooey! Clean slate. It would be really cool if everything were nice and that didn’t happen. It would be really nice, but I don’t know. That’s just one version of the future, a dark version. I think the idea of preventing it is great. How practical it is is up for debate. 

Armageddon is a lovely idea when viewed through the right lens. I recently read a nice book on Armageddon and apocalypse and the end of times, and generally, almost universally, it’s seen as a renewing of things, as a rethinking of systems. I hope that I and everyone I care about are fine and don’t suffer a lot, but that’s as far as I can speak. As far as the end of the world goes, that’s what I think about that. You could say end of the world, beginning of the world. What’s the difference? It seems a convenient way to just hit the button. We might as well. Taking the nuclear Armageddon route is sort of a cop out. It’s sort of the easy way out. Practically, it’s not very easy at all. It’s intellectually easy.

I think it would be different from now because the rules would be different. The rules for authority would be different. You wouldn’t have our current form of democracy, which is a terrible, terrible thing. You wouldn’t have nationalism, which is a terrible thing.  I think democracy is a terrible thing because it takes minorities and makes them irrelevant. It makes it so minorities don’t have a voice. The unpopular opinions are less likely to be valued. Democracy is populist. Actual democracy has never existed. You look at the different forms of democracy that exist right now, and you never really find a pure version of it. 

I have absolutely no idea at all what I want the new world to look like. I just hope that it’s really cool. I don’t want to say that it’s pointless to plan for things, like emergencies. I think it’s really important to plan for emergencies, but as far as what I want the world to look like in the future, I haven’t got the vaguest idea, and I think that’s the best way to look at it. If I have a conception and things don’t turn out that way, that could be a problem, but if I’m prepared for all sorts of different things and I don’t really have a solidified idea of what I envision and I plan, I might be more prepared to deal with it. It’s a vague picture of the future I have, a very vague one.

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Interview by Stacy Lanyon

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