Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I started watching the news about Occupy in September 2011.
My wife and I were watching the news, and we agreed with a lot of the
overarching principles. We started to see how people behaved, and we thought it
was really great the way people were taking care of each other. We went down
there on October 17th, which was the one month anniversary and
participated in the general assembly and witnessed the mic check. It was
incredible to see the way people were treating each other. They were giving
each other a chance to speak, taking care of each other and feeding each other. There was just this sense that people were excited by a group of people that
wanted to treat each other the way we think is the right way rather than going by the established way of doing things. It was like, “No, we’re going to
start by talking about what the right thing is to do and then work out
processes to make that happen.”
People would drive up in cars on the south side of the park and
say, “We’ve got food. We’ve got clothes.” Then, there were people coming into
the park that needed to eat something, and they were given food. It was just
really an amazing way to look at how people should take care of each other and
interact. There were the immediate things of people taking care of each other. Then,
on top of that, people were looking at the larger issues, the fact that all of this was
about how the systems of the world were not taking care of people or outright oppressing
people - Wall Street, all the corporate structures and the
establishment, the whole system being rigged to benefit a small amount of
people at the expense of everyone else.
I’m a Christian. I grew up a very conservative Christian. I
shifted very much progressive but very much still believing things. I believe
that if you look at what Christianity is all about, not the cultural
Christianity of the American empire but what Christianity’s roots are, it was
about caring for each other, caring for the poor, the good news that God loves
everybody and that we’re supposed to treat each other that way. That means not
just taking care of people who have been hurt by the system but saying, “The
system is wrong, and we should do things to stop people from being hurt.” I
read a great line once that said something like, “The church needs to stop
being the chaplain for institutionalized oppression by just taking care of the
victims because then it’s enabling the system that keeps creating victims.”
Obviously, we should care for people who have been hurt by the system, but we
should start saying, “Something’s wrong with the system. Let’s try to prevent
people from getting hurt.”
I saw people at Zuccotti Park and around the world that
were inspired by this and people who were doing it before who were inspired as well
and just encouraged in the work that they were already doing because of the attention
it was getting and the fact that people were saying, “No, this is the right way
of doing things. Another world is possible.” Another good quote I read somewhere was, “What we need is a lot of people who believe in another world so much that
they’re willing to act it out right now.”
I’m also an attorney. I’m not practicing, but I was eligible
to join the National Lawyers Guild and get the legal observer training, so I
did that. My first legal observer day was December 17th at Duarte
Square with people going over the fence and the whole conflict there, followed
by the long march up to Times Square. I was kettled with a group of people, and
after some interactions with the police, we were allowed to leave. It was an
interesting first day as a legal observer. The National Lawyers Guild is a bar
association of attorneys who are very much about freedom and taking action
against civil rights violations. There are a lot of people fighting for civil
rights who are guild members, people working on Stop and Frisk and police abuse
across the country. The legal observer program is to provide a credible witness
who saw what happened in the actions between protesters, demonstrators, people
who are exercising their rights and the police. It’s to watch them, so
potentially a defense attorney will have someone they can call on the stand who
saw it, who is an objective witness.
As a legal
observer, at least in the New York chapter, you have to either be an attorney or
a law student. Part of the reason for that is that you can be held accountable
if you misbehave. If you are an attorney and you do something unethical, you
can potentially face a disciplinary action with the state bar, and if you’re a
law student, you are waiting to pass the committee on character and fitness to
become an attorney. It at least gives a little bit of an extra idea that you
would behave properly, and as a legal observer, you’re supposed to be there to
watch. You are not supposed to be participating. It’s one of the things that
over time as I’ve gotten involved in different protests, I have to ask, “Am I going as a legal
observer? Am I going to going to wear the green hat the whole time and be part of
observing, or I’m going to be a part of the protest." I keep the two separate.
I’ve seen a lot of things over time. I
was there on New Years Eve when there was a big protest in the park and a march
where a legal observer was arrested. They let him go quickly. They had no
reason to arrest him. From what I’ve seen, they usually don’t have reason to
arrest people, but in this situation, they said, “Whoops. We arrested someone
who is an attorney, who was clearly marked as a legal observer. This will look
bad." They let him go after about three hours. I was there on March 17th
as a legal observer. It was a really terrible evening. I once testified at a trial
for a protester who was accused of assaulting a police officer. The police officer claimed that he ran at him and tackled him. I didn’t see the arrest, so I set
the scene for how people had been kettled and how the police were pushing
people with the netting, but the video I think is what helped him be found not guilty
because the video showed him with the net being pushed over him and him crawling
away trying not to be trampled as the police jumped on top of him. At no
point was he running at them and tackling them, so the jury unanimously found
him not guilty. The thing with legal observers, we see a lot, but I don’t think
we often get called because often there’s video or some kind of ACD or plea deal, so they don’t end up going to trial. Sometimes we give a little
bit of information of what we see to the attorney when they are preparing for
trial.
In the last year, I started paying attention to issues around debt, and I got together with a friend, and we got the idea to build a Debt Boulder. We wanted to have something bigger than a person. We brought it out on September 16th of this year, and we suggested that people write their story about debt on it, and people wrote stuff like, “I lost my house to foreclosure. That’s why I occupy.” Someone else wrote, “I have 30,000 dollars in credit card debt. My husband has 22,000. Our debt broke up our marriage.” Somebody else wrote, “300,000. I have Cancer.” People wrote their stories, and it was really exciting and encouraging to see people sharing something that is often treated as such a shameful thing. Things are rigged to push people farther and farther into debt. It was really exciting seeing people being able to share this. There was one point where three of us were carrying it, and I saw a policeman going by, and I just kind of waved, and the guy in the passenger seat gave me a thumbs up. I was like, “Okay, apparently even the NYPD doesn’t like debt.” After that, we started hanging out with the puppet guild folks more because of that. It’s been a lot of fun.
I look at where things are going in the world and in this
country, and the more you look at history, the more you realize that a lot of
things that we are told about this country are not quite true. They’re kind of a
white wash over our history. We’ve had injustices. We’ve made
progress in things. We said that certain things were wrong, and we’ve
tried to turn that around, but I feel like with a lot of things, we’re giving
up more and more of our freedoms. One big trend in politics
right now is that big government is bad but big corporations are okay, and that
seems really strange to me. I’m often surprised, as somebody that grew up with
a conservative background, people who are considered conservative or libertarian
seem to be okay with the idea that there is no one to keep in check big,
powerful corporations. It’s an interesting question. Is the only way to do that
to have a big government with lots of regulations? I don’t know. I guess I can
sit here and question theories about political structures, but I don’t know the
answer to that. I just know that I feel like we are headed in the wrong
direction, and I feel that it’s important for people to start speaking out
and to try to point out what’s going on, try to get people to realize that they
need to start participating, or it’s not a democracy.
We don’t actually have a
representative government if people aren’t actually paying attention to what
their supposed representatives are doing. A big part of that is things like campaign
finance, the fact that politicians are largely beholden to people who give them
all of their money because that’s how they get votes. They don’t actually need
to reach out to individuals so much as spend a lot of money on ads where their
name will be recognized, or they’ll get a party endorsement from one of the big
parties, and their odds are 50/50 that they will be elected. We need to do something. Hopefully, people can start paying
attention, and as things continue to get worse, we can make some progress
against that. From a personal side of it, I feel like I want to do
something that has meaning. I feel like this is one of the most meaningful
things that you could do — try to work with people who are trying to make
things better for others.
We can always hope that it will bring about a world where
people think about how what they do affects other people, where they want what
they do to benefit other people, or at the very least not actively harm them. I
like to say, “Another world is possible,” but it’s very hard to know how to get
there because reaching out to people and changing people takes time. I guess
that’s it, that over time that we set up a culture where people think about how
what they’re doing will affect other people, and they want to benefit each
other. It’s a really hard question to answer because I want to say what I would
like to see is something we can keep working towards. I’d like to see something
where people take joy in caring about each other, where we realize that the
most important things are our relationships with other people, not the
possessions we have or the power we wield but just being able to talk to other
people and share with them and learn something about this other being.
I like
to connect to other people, and I find it fascinating to talk to somebody and
try to figure out who they are. It’s a crazy idea to think about
this whole world that we have inside of our head, and so does everybody. All of
these people around us are all of these little universes. I think it’s
exciting to do that. That would be the ideal thing, if people looked at people
and said, “This is an entire universe. This is something extremely important
and valuable. How could I become closer to or friends with this person? Every
person?” As someone who has faith in God, I feel that that’s what we’re
supposed to be doing. That’s why we’re here.
If we can get to that point, that sounds like what people
say heaven will be like. I guess that’s the question. Can we? That’s a big
theological question that I’m not going to try and answer because I believe
that regardless of whether we can make things like that on earth, that’s what
we are supposed to be doing.
The term in Judaism is Tikkun olam. It’s the
rebuilding of the world, the idea that the world is damaged. That’s an idea in
Christianity as well, that the world is broken, that people are broken, and
that we are supposed to do things to help each other. In Christianity, it would
be called The kingdom of God. That’s one of the things that Jesus spoke about when he was
teaching here. He spoke against the kingdom of this world, and he spoke about the kingdom of God, and that was a kingdom where
people loved each other. They said that that’s how you’ll know that the people
are part of the kingdom of God is that they love each other, and that means
that anything else that pushes against that is not right, so all of the people
out there that are using religion to abuse other people and to try and get them to behave a
certain way or follow certain rules, if they are doing that in a way that harms
other people, then they are clearly wrong.
What is possible in a world like that? I feel like everybody would be
able to actually learn the things they want to learn, to discover new things,
things that no one else has learned before. It would be interesting to imagine
how ambition to discover things works where we’re not doing it to get an
advantage over somebody else. Things could be collaborative and cooperative
without all of this backstabbing. I can’t imagine the things that would be
possible. In a world like that, I feel like it wouldn’t take very long for us
to turn around the damage we have done to our planet. I can’t imagine it would
take very long to figure out how to reach other places, other than this planet if we weren’t
always tearing each other down.
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/