Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I found out about Occupy when I was in Portland, Maine. That’s
where I’m from. I had just gotten back from traveling and living in the Middle
East for about four years. I learned a lot about politics being in a place that
was so political and turbulent. In Portland, I was involved in the Free Change
Collective, which was a small political group, and my friend’s partner showed
me a link to the Adbusters page with the ballerina on the bull. I decided to
come down for the day with a friend. I thought it would be fun, and I never
left. On September 17th, we got off near City Hall. I didn’t know
New York, so I didn’t even know where Wall Street was. I saw some girl with a
cardboard sign, and I asked her where it was, and she led us there. We got to
Bowling Green. We were really early. Nothing was really happening yet. We did
yoga in the grass. I was really judgmental about it at first. There were a lot
of speeches. I found it boring. There didn’t seem to be any clarity to it, but
that changed when we got to Zuccotti and the general assembly started.
I ended up sleeping in the park that night. We went and scavenged carpets and cardboards out of dumpsters right around the area. That night was beautiful at Zuccotti Park. It was gorgeous, the lights. The park was packed that night. There were definitely one thousand people in the park the first night. I was really naïve, so I didn’t really get it. I didn’t think it was all that impressive that we slept in the park. Apparently, a lot of people didn’t think that the police would let us do that. I just wasn’t aware. I didn’t have a lot of responsibility, so I didn’t have a set day that I needed to go home, not for at least a couple months at that point. I figured I would just ride it out. The mornings at Zuccotti were really gorgeous. You would wake-up really early because traffic would start really early. It was a really small group the first morning. It had thinned out a lot.
What was great about it was that even in the first week there was a very tight crew that really got to know each other and started learning a lot together. I was helping with a lot of the logistical stuff in the first week, like setting up tents. It was constant learning. It’s been constant learning for two years. There were a lot of new ideas that I had never heard before, like the idea of consensus, the idea of what anarchism was. I didn’t really have any sort of vision outside of two-party democracy before I came to Occupy. I just hadn’t learned about that kind of thing. I didn’t know there were other models, so I was learning about that. I’m excited about that. I was involved with Facilitation in the park. I used as much of my acting, loud voice, white privilege that I could, sometimes in a bad way. I was new. I didn’t really understand about the politics of oppression at all. I had some understanding. I certainly didn’t have the New York vernacular. I had some learning to do, a lot of learning to do.
I ended up sleeping in the park that night. We went and scavenged carpets and cardboards out of dumpsters right around the area. That night was beautiful at Zuccotti Park. It was gorgeous, the lights. The park was packed that night. There were definitely one thousand people in the park the first night. I was really naïve, so I didn’t really get it. I didn’t think it was all that impressive that we slept in the park. Apparently, a lot of people didn’t think that the police would let us do that. I just wasn’t aware. I didn’t have a lot of responsibility, so I didn’t have a set day that I needed to go home, not for at least a couple months at that point. I figured I would just ride it out. The mornings at Zuccotti were really gorgeous. You would wake-up really early because traffic would start really early. It was a really small group the first morning. It had thinned out a lot.
What was great about it was that even in the first week there was a very tight crew that really got to know each other and started learning a lot together. I was helping with a lot of the logistical stuff in the first week, like setting up tents. It was constant learning. It’s been constant learning for two years. There were a lot of new ideas that I had never heard before, like the idea of consensus, the idea of what anarchism was. I didn’t really have any sort of vision outside of two-party democracy before I came to Occupy. I just hadn’t learned about that kind of thing. I didn’t know there were other models, so I was learning about that. I’m excited about that. I was involved with Facilitation in the park. I used as much of my acting, loud voice, white privilege that I could, sometimes in a bad way. I was new. I didn’t really understand about the politics of oppression at all. I had some understanding. I certainly didn’t have the New York vernacular. I had some learning to do, a lot of learning to do.
David Graeber taught me how to facilitate on day two at the
bottom of the park, hiding between concrete seats because that was the only
kind of semblance of privacy and space you could get. Facilitation is a very
contested and hard place to be because sometimes it is leadership, and it’s
often confused with leadership. There was definitely a lot of pressure. One of
the powers you can’t avoid is picking the agenda. That's where the power of the position really is.
Someone has to pick the agenda, and that’s usually Facilitation. That’s a real
thing you have to be careful of, but it’s also a super awesome, important basic skill for humans to learn—how to navigate a group of people and help them
communicate with one another. At the base level, I still love that so much.
There’s humor, and there’s compassion, and sometimes there’s strength and firmness
that all kind of intermingle in that space. It’s an art. I still really enjoy
watching people facilitate. I don’t facilitate as much anymore, but I really
enjoy it when I get to.
I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had incredible educational
opportunities, from trainings to intensives on political education. I did a lot
of organizing for the first-year anniversary. It was great. It was really fun.
Me and about twelve other people helped to get Occupy Sandy off the ground in
the first days. That really blew up bigger than I could ever have imagined. It’s
scary how big it got. There was a lot of energy. There’s a lot of energy when
things are going your way, when you’re getting a lot of work done. It reminded
me of times in the park when you could really do shit. I helped to start an
organization called Respond and Rebuild. Then, I had a falling out with that
organization, but it’s still going, and it helps a lot of people, so power to
that. It’s an interesting experiment doing a lot of disaster work and trying
to make it political, which is super hard, like trying to solve more systemic long-term issues at the same time as you need to put food in people’s mouths and
save people’s lives. Trying to do those things simultaneously is really
difficult. That is definitely a marker in a lot of my organizing—the Occupy Sandy
experience. Since then, I’ve been making a lot of connections in New York and doing a lot
of organizing with a number of people. I was hired to do the Robinhood Tax
organizing by the National Nurses Union, and I was just totally over the moon to
do that for them. It’s a cause that I
believe in.
The people who I respect the most, who I organize with, don’t
want to call themselves Occupy ever again. They think that it brings a culture
to the organizing space that they don’t like. They think it lacks a race
analysis. It brings a lot of people who have this privilege of understanding
this very complicated process that some of us take for granted because we were
well steeped in it and well learned in it. We ended up having endless meetings
that don’t respect the time of other people who may also be experienced in
working in organizations that are more efficient, and I would say they are more
hierarchical, and that’s what makes them more efficient. Some of them feel the need to
focus on more concrete wins, which they see as being hard to deal with in the sort of chaotic, distributed nature of Occupy.
I have no problem using the name Occupy, but for some people, it might bring people they don’t want to organize with and that they think are oppressive. It brings an expectation of a certain organizational structure that they might not agree with—horizontalism. I don’t know where I stand on this issue. Part of me in my gut thinks that when you succeed, like Occupy did, the pressure on the organization becomes very high. No matter what you call it, if you start winning, you’re going to get attacked. I think in Occupy people have a tendency to see authority as a negative quality. We need people who are authoritative, not authoritarian, who can lead and be good examples. It doesn’t necessarily need to be hierarchical, but I think you need faces to speak out to the world, and we need to have a more unified voice.
Occupy broke a lot of people’s hearts. A lot of my friends are pretty broken hearted over it, and it makes them not want to engage back into it. I think people will organize in different ways, using similar tactics that will hopefully be awesome and interesting and bring the same people who’ve been working on this together again. I have a lot of hope. Occupy, I think will get big again when there is a crisis. It's a frame to organize a mass amount of people around, but I don’t know if it will be able to be jump started by any one group or cause.
I have no problem using the name Occupy, but for some people, it might bring people they don’t want to organize with and that they think are oppressive. It brings an expectation of a certain organizational structure that they might not agree with—horizontalism. I don’t know where I stand on this issue. Part of me in my gut thinks that when you succeed, like Occupy did, the pressure on the organization becomes very high. No matter what you call it, if you start winning, you’re going to get attacked. I think in Occupy people have a tendency to see authority as a negative quality. We need people who are authoritative, not authoritarian, who can lead and be good examples. It doesn’t necessarily need to be hierarchical, but I think you need faces to speak out to the world, and we need to have a more unified voice.
Occupy broke a lot of people’s hearts. A lot of my friends are pretty broken hearted over it, and it makes them not want to engage back into it. I think people will organize in different ways, using similar tactics that will hopefully be awesome and interesting and bring the same people who’ve been working on this together again. I have a lot of hope. Occupy, I think will get big again when there is a crisis. It's a frame to organize a mass amount of people around, but I don’t know if it will be able to be jump started by any one group or cause.
There is why it’s important for myself and why it’s
important for the world. I say that because I think there is both self-interested
and very selfless ways of talking about things, and I think both are really
important. As far as the self-interested, I want to live in a world with less alienation, and I
want to be able to have more fun and talk to more people and my kids to not
grow-up in a totally racist society. I don’t want them to be racists just
by living, by taking oppression in from the culture and then become oppressive
themselves. It’s hard to even help doing it in the world that we live in. I want
to not live in a climate that’s totally insane. I want to feel secure,
especially secure in having a child. Inequality is what’s wrong with the world. I’d like to see a less racist and less sexist world and finally a less classist world.
I think that one of the things that Occupy did get right is bringing attention to the problem of the 1% holding most of the wealth and resources in the world. If we can take that on, if people can realize that this is what's going on in reality, then evolution will take off. We’ll be in a rapidly evolving world if people can realize the real power structure of the world and how that affects us all. You just have to figure out how to name those things, those institutions and those people and go after them because they own the keys to the castle. They destroy the world, and they have enough wealth to educate the world, which I think is a good start. We could figure out how to get a solid college education for every human being. As long as you get the right stuff, the true stuff.
I think that one of the things that Occupy did get right is bringing attention to the problem of the 1% holding most of the wealth and resources in the world. If we can take that on, if people can realize that this is what's going on in reality, then evolution will take off. We’ll be in a rapidly evolving world if people can realize the real power structure of the world and how that affects us all. You just have to figure out how to name those things, those institutions and those people and go after them because they own the keys to the castle. They destroy the world, and they have enough wealth to educate the world, which I think is a good start. We could figure out how to get a solid college education for every human being. As long as you get the right stuff, the true stuff.
The world I'd like to see looks like people starting to understand work in a
different way. We work a lot less. Hopefully, we will understand the
difference between job and work. Work is awesome. Work’s great—finding something
you’re passionate about and struggling over it, getting through it, loving it,
hating it, moving through it. It’s awesome. The world we live in where people
have to do what they hate to support families, that's not really
enriching them. I’m a socialist—free education, free health care, free housing, basic free food. Basic needs for all human beings should be met. It’s a tough one. We might burn the world out like that because needs are a relative thing. We have a lot more needs that other people, well wants. Even wants are a relative thing. We want more things than people in different parts of the world. Cultural relativity is a reality. People live in different ways. People believe very different things.
I think it does look like more participation in politics. It’s not that I think hierarchy is the answer. I just think that our level of horizontalism was impossible. I definitely think we need a lot more participation in day to day political life, and that needs to be put forward as something that’s a beautiful thing, not a chore or a vote. It’s not that I’m against voting. Voting is fine. We should continue voting. Voting is an important way to deal with huge groups of people in mass amounts of area around big hard decisions that need to be made. The trick is to figure out what decisions really do need to be made. I unabashedly work within the political system because I think that we don’t want to overthrow our government. It’s not a good idea. I believe in representative democracy. I just think it needs to be a little more representative. I think even two-thirds. The current system is fifty/fifty. I’m only looking for another 30%. There would be more city councilmen and more meetings that people would go to.
We’re seeing that freedom isn’t free. When you start getting successful, things start getting scary. If you’re lucky enough to overthrow your president, get ready. There is a lot you have to work through when speeding up justice because everything changes. People tend to evolve slowly. I think people become more tolerant over time, like gay rights is a really interesting example of a slow build of tolerance globally. How did it happen? A lot of work. Media, like Will and Grace. Never underestimate the power of seeing gay people on your TV to normalize something. The kind of work that we do is trying to speed shit up. We don’t wait for things to change. That gets scary when you start to really do good. That’s what happened when we got arrested. We all got the shit kicked out of us. Our forefathers fought for their rights, and they got killed, so there's progress. Occupy wasn’t forcing people to speed up change. It was showing people to speed up change. Speeding things up is scary. Not bad. Good things are scary. Anything good should be pretty scary.
I think it does look like more participation in politics. It’s not that I think hierarchy is the answer. I just think that our level of horizontalism was impossible. I definitely think we need a lot more participation in day to day political life, and that needs to be put forward as something that’s a beautiful thing, not a chore or a vote. It’s not that I’m against voting. Voting is fine. We should continue voting. Voting is an important way to deal with huge groups of people in mass amounts of area around big hard decisions that need to be made. The trick is to figure out what decisions really do need to be made. I unabashedly work within the political system because I think that we don’t want to overthrow our government. It’s not a good idea. I believe in representative democracy. I just think it needs to be a little more representative. I think even two-thirds. The current system is fifty/fifty. I’m only looking for another 30%. There would be more city councilmen and more meetings that people would go to.
We’re seeing that freedom isn’t free. When you start getting successful, things start getting scary. If you’re lucky enough to overthrow your president, get ready. There is a lot you have to work through when speeding up justice because everything changes. People tend to evolve slowly. I think people become more tolerant over time, like gay rights is a really interesting example of a slow build of tolerance globally. How did it happen? A lot of work. Media, like Will and Grace. Never underestimate the power of seeing gay people on your TV to normalize something. The kind of work that we do is trying to speed shit up. We don’t wait for things to change. That gets scary when you start to really do good. That’s what happened when we got arrested. We all got the shit kicked out of us. Our forefathers fought for their rights, and they got killed, so there's progress. Occupy wasn’t forcing people to speed up change. It was showing people to speed up change. Speeding things up is scary. Not bad. Good things are scary. Anything good should be pretty scary.
There is this interesting exercise that I did where someone
asked me what I did, and I told them all about what I did, and they said “Okay,
now you are completely successful at all of those things. What are you going to
do?” We talked some more, and then they said, “All of that has happened in that
world,” and then they asked me how I felt. I went back to this feeling of feeling
secure about having a child. I would feel secure about having a child. I would
feel love. I’d feel solidarity and connected to the world and the people in it.
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/