Photo: Stacy Lanyon
When Occupy first started, I was out of town for the first
week and a half of it. I had seen it on the news, and I was sort of intrigued,
but I didn’t really know what to make of it. I got back in town, and I saw on
Facebook that a good friend of mine had gotten arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge
along with two other good friends of mine. I had gone to sort of intrigued
but not really sure what to make of it to realizing that three friends of mine,
all of whom I generally respected their opinion, were willing to get
arrested for this, and it got me even more intrigued, so I reached out to them and said, “What
is this thing? What’s going on?” I sat down with two of my friends who explained what was going on and convinced
me. I was like, “Okay, I’m in. It seems like a cool thing.”
I would show up at
Zuccotti Park, and I never really knew where to plug in. I’m actually a
musician, not a puppeteer originally, and I never really felt like I connected
to any of the music people who were involved in Occupy, and my friend Joe was
making a puppet. He had gotten money from the general assembly to make a puppet, and he
needed some help. I was at home one night, and he was like, “Hey, what are you
doing tonight?” I was like, “Nothing.” He was like, “Why don’t you come over and
help me build a puppet,” and we built Lady Liberty together. Since then, the
puppet guild has been pretty much the only thing I’ve done. I’ve popped in and
out of a couple other working groups and affinity groups but pretty much the
puppet guild has been my one and only focus.
I know the park was a lot of things to a lot of people. To
some people, it was everything. To me, it was a conversation. I never spent the
night there, but I would go down first thing in the morning pretty much every day
that I had free, and I would just stay there until people started going to bed.
You would just have the most incredible conversations with people about where
we are, what’s going on in the world and what we could do to fix it. As much as
there were other things about the park that were important, the thing that I
took away from it and the only thing I really miss is the availability of tons
of people to have very intelligent conversations about what is going on in the
world and what we could do to fix it. Those conversations are still happening,
but it’s just a lot less convenient. I continue to have them, but not with
strangers. There’s not someone holding a sign that you walk up and you go, “Oh that
sign is intriguing. Tell me about this position I’ve never heard of. You stand
for migrant farmers in California. Tell me about that. I don’t know anything
about that.” That I don’t get as much of anymore. That I miss.
I think we’re at an interesting place in history right now
where the twin dogma of capitalism and modern
liberal state representative democracy have spent two hundred years generally
workingish, sometimes not working well and sometimes actually working fine. We’ve
gotten to a place where we’ve gotten very dogmatic about those ideologies. You
have people who essentially worship the constitution as a sacred document. You
have people who essentially worship a book by Adam Smith as a sacred document,
and the more that that continues, the less sustainable anything is going to be.
I think the thing that I have always found really inspiring and continue to be
inspired by about Occupy is the willingness to question everything and the
willingness to be actively non-dogmatic and the willingness to listen to people. It
feels to me that we are at a place right now in history where we have a choice
to either continue going down that road of looking at the American founding
documents and also the general ideology of capitalism as sacred principles that are immutable, and I think that that is going
to push us down a very dangerous and ugly path, or we can look at them as
suggestions, templates and roadmaps and be willing to experiment and willing
to try new things and willing to throw out things that maybe worked two-hundred
years ago and don’t work anymore.
I think there is a lot about the dogma of capitalism that is about industrialism and was written specifically about a proto-industrial
nation that hadn’t even been industrialized yet, and we are supposedly a post-industrial nation. Those ideas, a lot of them don’t hold up anymore because they’re
not our reality. They’re tools for living that were defined by a two hundred year old reality that isn’t true
anymore. I think what is important about Occupy is that it’s a group of people
who are saying, “Hold on. Let’s re-examine this, and let’s actually come up
with new tools that fit how we are now, that fit the reality that we live in
now. Let’s look at our current reality and the way that our social structures
are currently structured and come up with new systems that are maybe more
sustainable, that are maybe more flexible, that don’t just serve 1%, that
actually serve everyone, 100% of us." We are the 99%, as much as that was fun to
chant, the fact is that the systems that we’ve had for the last hundred
years have broken down and they’re not working for anyone, really, not just the
99% of us. The people at the top are also getting screwed. They just don’t
really realize it.
The kind of world that I would like to help bring about is one
where we acknowledge that all humans have a right to food, health care, shelter
and education, and anything above and beyond those four things, you’re entitled
to earn or figure out whatever system that works to acquire them, but a baseline
existence is guaranteed to all humans, not just Americans, where there is a guaranteed quality of life for all people. I’m not necessarily opposed to some elements of capitalism, but I
think that a baseline standard of life should be guaranteed to all humans, and
until that happens, I’m going to keep coming down and try and make it happen.
I think most problems that we have in society can be traced
down to the mistaken belief by a lot of people that scarcity is a thing. We
have more than enough food to take care of everyone who lives. We have more
houses that are currently empty than we have homeless people in America. A lot
of the conflict between humans comes down to people believing that there are
not enough things to go around and subdividing into groups and saying, “There’s
not enough to go around, so if it’s either you or me, my group
or your group.” If we can eliminate that element of competition, that belief
that my survival and your survival are mutually exclusive, if we can get people
to realize that that is not true, then I think that a lot of the conflicts along
racial, ethnic, religious, sexual lines will start to disappear because people
won’t need to divide into groups to protect and ration resources. They’ll
realize that we have more than enough, and everyone can live, so I think
eliminating the illusion of scarcity will do a lot to let people live more
harmoniously and more peacefully and more openly with each other.
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/