Photo: Stacy Lanyon
What
drew me was this burgeoning feeling within myself that life has to be more than
about self-interest and self-preservation, and recognizing that there were
probably many more people who felt the same. When Occupy Wall Street hit, it
was a recognition of everything I had been feeling and coming toward. The
chance to come and be with like-minded people was so exhilarating and
fulfilling that it changed my life. I went down a couple of weeks in and would
come back almost everyday. On my first day there I actually met a guy who
recognized me because we've lived on the same block for about six years but had
never met before. We met at Zuccotti Park and became really great friends. In fact, we decided to get Occupy Astoria started together. The
kind of serendipitous meetings and encounters that you’d have with everybody
was such a testament to the better parts of humanity, and that was being
brought out in this incredible forum for discussion, which was really like a
public square of democracy. It was astounding, really.
The park was almost like an amusement park for intellectuals, in the way that you could go around and have these incredible, deep, comprehensive conversations with perfect strangers all the time, and just be pivoting from one topic or subject to another with people who were greatly versed in subjects. It just made you wish more people could have gotten a chance to see that, and had that been the case, if people were able to see just what this Occupy Wall Street thing was, it could have been this huge change in society because I think this is what so many people are clamoring for, an opportunity to be heard and to discuss things in a way which is so missing from contemporary consumer-driven society.
People were empowered to tell their life stories to strangers and also to gain all of this knowledge from people who were experts on various subjects, the kind of conversation that this nation so desperately needs, instead of all the garbage and propaganda you see on tv, newspapers and radio. Like Chris Hedges always says, the authorities were so afraid of it because it became a mainstream movement. You saw women coming in from the suburbs pushing baby carriages, teachers, students, construction workers, and you talked with them and heard their plights firsthand. It’s the kind of thing that could have hugely transformed this idea of unfettered capitalism and its detrimental effects, getting people to wake-up to that idea, because everyone was feeling the same way, under this great thumb of the oppressive constraints of unchecked capitalism.
Occupy Astoria is just like the Occupy movement. It ebbs and flows. We’re at a point where people have their own lives, and they’re coming back. What we find is that when there’s something that really speaks to people, such as this lock-out of workers at a local supermarket, then we all organically coalesce around these issues that mean something to us, which require our participation and where we can interact with the community, which is separate from having meetings inside. We’re actually out on the street and talking with workers who are being asked to have their wages cut and faced with grueling cut backs in hours and their pension plans. You see this kind of thing, and you realize that (as Occupy always says) all of our grievances are connected. Those events are great for bringing out people, so we have this kind of renewed energy happening just of recent.
There's also the proposed café that we want to put up, which is an idea that people seem to be clamoring for in a place like Astoria, which to some is like a cultural desert. We have not one book store in Astoria and very few cafes. Last summer we came into 5000 books from Tuli Kupferberg, who is a countercultural activist from the sixties and member of the Fugs, and it was this serendipitous gift. His son donated the books to us, saying that he would have loved the Occupy movement. So that has become the impetuous for possibly forming our own café, and one of our members actually has some space in a store that his father owned a business in. We’re looking to have something open soon, which will not be a commercial business. It will serve as a community gathering place in which we'll host lectures, a movie series and things like that, which we hope will galvanize the community to further action and awareness. It will be about community, not commerce.
The Occupy movement is important because every one of us knows someone who is either laid off, unemployed, underemployed, who has been asked to work more hours for the same money or less money, who doesn’t have health insurance or who is under the verge of being foreclosed on because of medical debt or a bad mortgage. Basically, a lot of this stuff is almost like good religious tenants, like do unto others as you would have done to you and recognize your neighbor in everyone you see. I think that’s what Occupy is trying to do, is show that we have corporate interests who have hijacked the world as we know it, and they’re not acting in anyone’s interest but for their own selfish and destructive greedy motives. A lot of people understand that, but they don’t have the willpower. They are struck by inertia and this feeling of apathy combined with consumerism that makes people feel like there’s no hope. Every little conversation matters, every protest march, every picket line, every Facebook posting. The awareness is so important. I think people want to see a different world, and they’ve been pushed to the brink with this economic collapse. It’s only a matter of time before this whole movement conflagrates again in a way that this time gathers the whole world in a big way. It’s gonna happen.
I’d like to see a world in which people take civic engagement seriously, in which we are not afraid to confront our own history, one that recognizes that there’s an incredible amount of propaganda that gets us to act against our better nature. I'd like to see a world in which people are interested in creating a better world for themselves. Everybody wants these things, but we’re so poisoned by advertising, marketing, propaganda that we scapegoat other people for our own problems. There’s a better way. It starts with talking to your neighbor, and it starts with getting involved in things, and it starts with adopting a philosophy of less consumerism and leaving this world a better place for the next generation. We are all here on the shoulders of so many people who came before us, and I think we need to think about that more in our everyday lives, and if we did, we’d get somewhere that we all want to be.
We all have friends that are working at jobs that they don’t like. If we could just take care of the basic framework of life in a way that would combine the economic systems of socialism and capitalism and communism, taking the best ideas from them, maybe we'd have a world in which people weren't just slaves to making money and paying bills and instead could have a little more time to spend doing things they'd rather being doing . We have all of these great natural resources. We have all of this great technology. If we could have people less concerned with keeping a roof over their head and could fully realize their real potential, we’d have a world of truly fulfilled and happy people. Isn’t that what we all want? I think that’s what we all want.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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