Photo: Stacy Lanyon
Occupy didn’t know it could not work. Occupy wasn’t afraid
of not working. I grew up during the Bush Administration. I was a
teenager when 9/11 happened, and I saw anti-war rallies not work, and I saw
outrage not work, and I saw people in the streets not work, and it made me feel
really disillusioned and kind of jaded about protests in general. I was
honestly pretty skeptical when I first heard about Occupy, but it stayed. They just kept being in the same place
and kept coming back. It wasn’t that we just had a rally, made lots of noise
and went home. We had a rally, made lots of noise, and then we came back and we
did it again, and we did it again, and we did it again. We built relationships
and maintained an actual community that cared about all of this stuff.
I first went down to the park right after the Brooklyn
Bridge arrests, before the really, really big march in October. It was really
overwhelming. I didn’t stay in the park. Before the eviction, I did one volunteer watch night. I was around but was not a super
active participant. I feel like I became more active after the eviction. The group that I tended to gravitate towards in the park was
Think Tank, and Think Tank after the eviction because this weird space for
people to deal with what had happened. I found that the more I stayed and
listened to people, the more I felt a responsibility to be more involved. I
like the fact that you could talk to just about anybody, and something
interesting would happen. You felt like you could just talk to a stranger about
just about anything.
This is important because no one is going to do it for you.
Power is a really weird thing, and people who want it will do whatever they
need to do to keep it, and even the people who have the best intentions and
want to use power as a means to an end, eventually power becomes the admin
itself. Popular movements and protests are about changing the way that people
think about power. It’s something where power is creative and not concentrated.
It’s not like power is a pie and one person gets the biggest piece of it. It’s something
that’s distributed, and we need to keep challenging that understood power dynamic. Power paradigms make it really hard for people to actually
participate in the decisions about how they are going to live their own lives.
They don’t feel like they actually have the power to make those decisions. When that happens, when people start to feel powerless, it becomes a
self-fulfilling prophesy. You feel powerless, and you become less and less
capable of harnessing your own power. You don’t talk to other people, and
you don’t engage.
I think the power of popular movements and protests comes out in the moments when people connect with each other and recognize ways that they can work together to generate something that’s good for the collective whole, rather than what's good for themselves or whatever small group they relate to. To some extent Occupy is helping people do that. I was talking to someone a while ago about the difference between campaigns and movements. A movement is what happens when you have a campaign and you can’t control it anymore, and you’re not responsible for it anymore, and if you tried to be responsible for it, you’d actually probably break it and destroy it by trying to hold onto it too much. I feel like that’s the point where we’re at now where the paradigms have shifted. To some extent, I think people are concerned that we’re doing the same things that the left has always done, but I think it’s changed. I think that by creating these improved networks of people who work together and by having these shared beliefs that it is helping to harness power in a different way.
I think the power of popular movements and protests comes out in the moments when people connect with each other and recognize ways that they can work together to generate something that’s good for the collective whole, rather than what's good for themselves or whatever small group they relate to. To some extent Occupy is helping people do that. I was talking to someone a while ago about the difference between campaigns and movements. A movement is what happens when you have a campaign and you can’t control it anymore, and you’re not responsible for it anymore, and if you tried to be responsible for it, you’d actually probably break it and destroy it by trying to hold onto it too much. I feel like that’s the point where we’re at now where the paradigms have shifted. To some extent, I think people are concerned that we’re doing the same things that the left has always done, but I think it’s changed. I think that by creating these improved networks of people who work together and by having these shared beliefs that it is helping to harness power in a different way.
I want a world with better problems. A lot of times, we see
protests that focus on a single point of an issue and not necessarily recognize
it as interconnected to a larger systemic way of thinking and way of living. I
have this joke about Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan. He's like the number two in
Al Qaeda. You could get rid of him, but somebody else would just take his place.
There was this period where is seemed like the government was killing the
number two in Al Qaeda once every two months or something. It’s like one of
those punching bags where you punch it, and it just comes back up. The point I’m
trying to make is that I want a world where we aren’t just making someone like
Jamie Diamond quite their job, but a world where people stop wanting to be as
rich as Jamie Diamond, and a world where people stop wanting to unseat power
and replace it. I want a world where people redistribute power. To me, that’s
not easy, and I don’t even think that it's utopic. I didn’t feel like the park
itself was a utopic space. People talked a lot about utopia. There were still
conflicts. There were still disagreements. There were still problems, but they
were better problems to have than the ones we were used to having.
Some of the problems are going to be similar because there
are going to be more and more problems with allocation of resources. There’s
currently big problems with allocation of resources, but I don’t see that
getting better with climate change. I think the problems of being honest about
fear and trust and control, which sounds very existentialist, but in a lot of
ways, I think that’s where a huge part of the conflicts that we currently live
in are based in. A lot of it is about people being unable to overcome fear, being unable to
trust others, or wanting to have control. Sometimes they want to have
control out of fear. The problems will be better in a world where people confront
those directly rather in the round about ways that we currently do.
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/