Tammy

Guitarmy 99 Mile March, July 7, 2012, Staten Island Ferry

Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I had run a non-profit for four years and had been working in DC politics for about a year and a half, and I quit that job in May of 2012. I had said I didn’t want to organize anymore. I was tired of non-profits, and you certainly couldn’t make change through DC politics. I had traveled around the world, and I got back to New York on September 5th of 2011 and was trying to put my life back together. I didn’t want to organize anymore. In organizing positions, I had felt like I was running up a down escalator, working so, so hard and not actually getting anywhere. Part of that has to do with the non-profit structure. It just didn’t feel fulfilling. Also, just seeing up close and personal the way that money influences politics in DC and just how much grassroots organizing depends on having big donors supporting them was really disheartening.

I was trying to get into radio and had found an internship online for an oral history project. I was really interested in oral history after traveling in South Africa. I was interning at a project called Housing is a Human Right. I heard about Occupy before it happened. Some people had pasted it on my Facebook wall, but I really had just gotten back into the country. I was pretty disoriented about a lot of the political things that had happened, so when Occupy started, I didn’t think much of it. I went down the first week with some friends, and it just looked like the usual suspects. There were some cardboard signs, and I remember this woman dancing by where the drum circle was, just swinging some ropes and dancing. It just looked like a hippie festival. I ran into a friend and asked what was going on. He said, “We don’t really know.” The GA was about to start, and we left before it happened, and I do wonder if I had been there for the actual GA if that would have changed my mind.

I wasn’t really participating, but it was just in the air. A bunch of my friends and I didn’t know what to think of it. We didn’t know who organized it. We didn’t understand what the goal was. We all had traditional organizing backgrounds, so these are things that we were really trained to ask and wonder about. I was kind of skeptical and not really sure how I felt about it, and Adbusters in particular had been a magazine that I didn’t really like. There were some things I liked about it, but some things I had found problematic. I had had problems with it in the past, so since that was the only name I knew, it increased my skepticism. Then, through the oral history project I was working on, I decided to come down and take audio on the day of the big community and labor rally. Some of the skepticism was relieved when I saw community and labor organizations getting on board with it. I went down on that day, and it was so big, and there was so much energy in the air. We went back to Zuccotti Park, and I was like, “Okay, something is going on here. I still don’t fully understand it. I don’t really understand what the goals are. I don’t understand what it’s going after, but it’s really real.” Then, I started getting more and more involved.

The oral history group I was involved with was organizing an action that they had told me about. It was a secret action. It was the first foreclosure auction blockade, so I went to this secret meeting to go to the auction, and I remember being really, really afraid of being arrested. My fear of arrest was so heightened and real in a way that was just gone a month later. We went in, and when they started the foreclosure auction, we started singing. It still to this day is I think the most beautiful action I’ve seen. I went back to foreclosure auction blockades later in the year, but that first one just had something super special and magical about it. It wasn’t really an Occupy action, but it was sort of in that vein. Sometime that same week, I went to the millionaire march on the upper east side, and I remember marching around, and all of the doormen were giving us a thumbs up. We went to all these houses of these millionaires and left these really, really big checks for a million dollars, and that march had a lot of energy.

As I started going to all of these actions, I was like, “Okay, the overall thing doesn’t have a goal, but these specific actions are really concrete and real and bringing energy that hasn’t been here for a while," so I started getting more engaged. I’m not someone who likes to just participate, so I was really trying to get involved, and it was really, really hard. I even knew a few individuals involved, and I still couldn’t figure out how to plug in, which was incredibly frustrating. Finally, I saw a friend and said, “I’ve been trying to plug in. Tell me what to do.” He’s like, “Come to this meeting on Wednesday. It’s going to be for the planning of October 15th.” So I went to the meeting, and I figured that I would find a way to plug in there. The group that had come together to plan October 15th was really an interesting cross section from all the different working groups. There were people there from press and people there from livestreaming and people there who had been doing housing issues because the idea of the day was that it was going to highlight different issues, so it was a really great first meeting to go to because there were so many people from so many different aspects of the movement that were in the room. I got in and helped with logistics for the day – martial training for the marches, making maps, getting people on the celly loop to be able to communicate about the day. That day was really incredible. Taking Times Square was amazing. I remember being up front with the cops on the horses right in front of me. It was super hectic. It was definitely the most hectic thing I had been a part of up until that day.

Then, another one of my friends had been trying to put together this movement building working group. At one point, I told him that was s and the idea was that there were these camps emerging all over the country, Occupy camps. There was a desire and a thought that we should be connecting them but noomething that I could really help with. I had run a national network of student activists for four years. The idea of connecting nationally and how to do that was something that I had a lot of experience with. The first movement building meeting happened,t really a clear idea how to do it. There were a lot of debates about if we as New York were to try to bring something together, would we then be, becoming the leader or taking the leadership in a way that we didn’t want to do. Eventually we decided to just call for a conference call and see what happened. We put out the word over social media, and the topic of the call would just be, “Do we want to communicate with each other?” Asking the question rather than thinking that we already knew the answer.

We were going to have three different calls throughout the weekend, so that people who weren’t able to make one call would be able to make the other call, but we didn’t’ get our act together and get the word out for the first two calls, and there were only a few people signed up for those calls, so we decided to cancel the first two calls and just do the last one, which was on Monday at 10PM. I remember going to a meeting the Sunday before the Monday, and I showed up, and there were tons of people in the room. Our meetings until that point had been tiny. Not many people were involved. I didn’t think anyone thought it was relevant. Then, all of the sudden, all of these people were in the room interested in connecting across the country. We came the next day to do the conference call, and there were over two hundred people on the call from all over the country. There was so much energy in the room, and people were so excited to hear from each other. It was definitely clear that people were excited about it and that people wanted to keep calling.

The idea was that we didn’t want New York to facilitate each call, so we’d ask at the end of the call if there was a city that wanted to take on the next call. Because of the confusion of the moment when we asked who wanted to help, a bunch of people raised their hands electronically. We took their contact info. We arranged a call for the following Thursday, and that call the following Thursday became the Interoccupy team, and it was pretty consistent for the first year. I really like that story because I think it’s interesting. All the accidents and things that happened ended up being the right things to happen, but we didn’t know it at the time.

At Interoccupy, we were very clear from the beginning that we were neutral. We were just a place for people to communicate through. We were like the tracks and the movement was the trains. At first, we were just hosting these Monday night calls where people would get on, and we would get to hear what was going on around the country. Then, we started letting people request calls through our system. People would request a call, and we’d send out a blast on our list. Then, over the course of a year, our systems became much more sophisticated. We created a web platform. One of the things I felt was interesting about the Interoccupy story was that there was this other group called Occupy Cordination that was also trying to run national webinars, but they wanted to take control pf the moment. It fell apart because it didn’t fit the movement. Whereas, Interocc took a different route and did really succeed. Over the course of the year, it got stronger and stronger because it was going with the spirit of the movement. I saw that happen over and over again throughout the year. People would try things, and the ones that really cared about the process and fit the principles of the movement, those are the things that succeeded.

I think it was important because it really did change the national conversation. I don’t think the 99% versus the 1% is a very in depth class analysis. I do think, however, it created a class consciousness in a way that there hasn’t been in this country for a long time. I also think the moment of Occupy Wall Street was a moment where networks collided. It was a moment where people just met a million different people who were interested in a million different things, but because of the moment we were in, because of some of the infrastructure that was created, we were actually able to maintain those networks. I know a lot of people will say that Occupy failed or that it’s over, and I really don’t think so. I think the park was a time when massive amounts of networks came into contact with each other. Then, throughout the course of the next year was when the new and interesting organizing happened. Now, we’re in a place where the most in depth organizing is happening, and it’s all happening because of those networks colliding in that moment and energy being in the air and people asking themselves what is possible in a way that they hadn’t really asked before.

I had been out of the country for the six months beforehand and literally got back right before it started. I’m not really sure what changed. I was here when Egypt happened. I was here when Madison, Wisconsin happened. I went to school in Madison, so I felt really connected to the capitol takeover there, and I remember trying to come out and find solidarity rallies. They were kind of pathetic, so I was like, “Oh man, New York is just this pathetic place with no political energy.” Then, I came back six month later, and this is what happened. I feel like there are really clear things. Obviously, the economic crisis. People put a lot of hope into Obama, and when he failed to really bring change that people were hoping for is when the energy was there to create a grassroots political movement. We needed Obama to raise people’s hopes in the political system and then when they realized he wasn’t actually what they thought he was, people began to look and think outside of the political system, which people hadn’t been doing for so long. I think those are some key reasons why it happened. I think, obviously, the fact that so many people had graduated college and couldn’t find jobs and couldn’t get their life together meant that there was a lot of highly skilled folks that in a lot of ways really felt entitled and in some ways they really needed that entitlement to say, "We demand more, and we believe that we deserve more." In some ways, I feel like we needed that middle class crash for the spirit of “We demand more” to really be there.

What I would like to see is people understanding their own power and having faith in their own power and not just being apathetic because they feel like there isn’t really anything they can do. I think the massive numbers of people who have been connected to each other, like a world where we connect across difference, is something that I really have seen come out of this moment. In some of the outgrowth, like Occupy Sandy where I’m really involved now, I’ve just seen this ability for connections and cross-difference to exist because we are all engaged in our own power and spreading the gospel that we are actually powerful as people, and when we are connected to each other, we’re even more powerful. This question of what I want the world to look like is such a hard question because I’ve been fighting for that new world for so long that I think I’ve forgotten to ask. I mean, there are obvious things. I hope for a world where we respect each individual, where work is respected and humans are seen as equal and there isn’t just massive inequity, where we respect earth and the environment and ecosystems as important to our survival as well, and not just think that we can do whatever we want, a world where culture and music and beauty still exists and are being created and experienced by all and not just by some.

Even if we achieve massive improvements, there are still things that are going to be imperfect, so there are always going to be things to fight for, and I also think that in any sort of revolution in history, it teeters. Even when something massively better has been created, it is always at the risk of falling apart, so I think if we did create a world that was more just and more equal and more friendly towards all beings, we would always have to fight to maintain that world. If we get complacent, then, we’d so easily lose what we fought for.

Interview by Stacy Lanyon

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