Restore the Fourth 1984 Day, August 4th, 2013, Bryant Park
Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I was aware of Occupy from the Anonymous promo videos before September 17, 2011. What made me come down to the park was the incident
with the pepper spray at that march on University Place on September 24th.
Being a black male, police brutality has always been a key issue to me. I saw
that video. I saw that there was a march on Police Plaza on September 30th.
I came down to the park the day of the Brooklyn Bridge march on October 1st.
As we were going onto the bridge, I saw the cops leading hundreds of people
onto the bridge. I was like, “Nah.” I’ve done organizing with other
organizations for years. I was like, “This is too good to be true. The cops aren’t
going to let us close the Brooklyn Bridge. Don’t follow them onto the roadway.”
I took the walkway and watched 700 of my comrades get arrested. Those of us
that did not get arrested marched back over the Manhattan Bridge and went over to
the park. I saw a bunch of people I knew from other activism organizations and
pretty much stayed for the rest of the weekend. Actually, for an hour or two, I
considered quitting my job and staying, but I knew the park couldn’t last that
long.
It was something I had been waiting to see as a New York activist. People
from all of these different single cause organizations were in one place having
a discussion about, “Alright, we all know that there’s something that’s key to
fixing all of our problems, and it’s right down there on Wall Street.” It was a
beautiful thing. On October 1st, there were no tents yet. I don’t even
think the medical tent was even up yet. It was just maybe two hundred people
that were putting out yoga mats and sleeping every night and then waking up to
march again the next morning. For the first three weeks, I would just come by every day after
work and sleep over on the weekends. It wasn’t until the NYCGA website really
got going, which was right before October 15th, that I got involved
with anything specific. I’m a systems administrator. I run websites, so I got
involved with Tech Ops and did that for a while. I still try and go by Liberty
Plaza every day because there are still around two dozen people that sleep out
there whenever they can. They make sure people know Occupy isn’t dead. They put
signage up. They make announcements, distribute info. I make sure they have
support. I try and drop off food, coffee and chalk. I still try and show up to
any marches or actions that I can.
I’m a second generation activist. I was razed by an activist.
I’ve seen all of these silos of acivists, which is a term my friend uses. There
are all of these different organizations that function within one sphere of
influence or around one issue, but they don’t really interact with each other,
or they didn’t before Occupy. For the two months the park was going on, it was
great. It was like we suddenly had this big office where everybody could come
together. It was like a two month activist convention. It was awesome. I try to
make sure that that dynamic keeps flowing, that people in one sphere of
influence don’t go back and wall themselves into the silos. We need to keep the
network up and running. That’s what’s so important to me.
There are a lot of things wrong with the world. The symptoms
of what’s wrong with the world would be people going hungry, homelessness, war.
Like the posters last year for S17 said, all roads do lead to Wall Street. It
all goes back to usury. People making money off of the possession of money is
the key. You can’t make money just for having money because it ends up where
you are owed more money than actually exists, and you own us. That’s slavery.
Interest is slavery.
From doing outreach on the street, I’ve found that a lot of people just assume because the word federal is in the name of the organization that it’s a government organization. It is not. It is a consortium of twelve private banks that happens to be known as the Federal Reserve. I’m sure that was intentional, so that people would assume that it was part of the government. One of those banks is actually JP Morgan Chase. Jamie Diamond, who is the president and CEO of JP Morgan, sits on the board of the Federal Reserve. How is this not a conflict of interest? Somebody running the second biggest iBank in the country also sits on the board of the organization that lends money to iBanks. It’s basically the mafia. It’s really that simple to me, but the education isn’t there. People don’t realize this isn’t a government organization. They charge interest to the government. A good portion of the national debt—that giant seventeen digit number you see up on the ticker in Times Square—that number isn’t, “Oh, well we’ve screwed up our money, and we owe back rent.” No, we owe interest on our own money to this consortium called the Federal Reserve because we print money, and they charge us 5% on the money, which goes back into usury and indentured slavery. This is how a private consortium of banks that was ratified to do so on December 22, 1913 has been enslaving us for a century.
The reason I have an interest in police brutality is from growing up as
a black male in New York. When I was a kid, sometimes when the cops roughed me up, I was doing
some stuff that was illegal. I also had a big mouth, but I’m
thirty-five now, and cops still look at me as if I am a physical threat, and
that really bothers me in my heart. I’m thirty-five. I have a day job. I don’t do
anything that endangers anybody. I still have to worry about a cop losing their
temper and hitting me in the head or pulling out a firearm. When I
saw protesters that had stood to the side on University Place getting pepper
sprayed in the face because the cop was having a bad day, apparently, I felt
that right here in my chest. I made it to the park as soon as I could.
As far
as police brutality now, a lot of people still have this perception that police
brutality is something that only happens to black males. You go to the inner
city, you go to Harlem, you go to east New York, you see black males getting
roughed up. That’s where you see it happening on a regular basis. Through my involvement with Occupy, I’ve come to realize that anyone the police state sees as a threat will get
roughed up. Your skin color doesn’t matter. Your income doesn’t matter. Your
gender doesn’t matter. Your rejection of gender doesn’t matter. I know people
who make six figures a year who have been roughed up at protests, because once
the police state sees you as a treat, you are a threat, and that’s all you are.
That’s especially a big issue here in New York where there’s 35,000 cops. Like
Bloomberg said, he has a standing army. This standing army is being paid by my
taxes. I think they need to stop seeing me as the enemy.
Cops are selected on
the basis of being good at following orders. That’s why they get an IQ test and
a psych test before even going to the academy. They want to make sure you’re
going to follow orders. For the most part, the people who actually are
participating in the violence are just following orders. They just want to get
a raise and get their pension and all of that good stuff. It’s hard for me to
stay very angry at them over it, but the management that puts them in a
position where they feel that unless they act with physical violence against
people using their first amendment rights, they’re not going to get a raise, I
have a real problem with that. The NYPD brass has got to go. I’d like to think
that there is an intermediate step between these people being fired and the
current situation, but I don’t think that someone who’s got twenty-five years
in is going to change at this point.
What I would like to see as a result of all of our effort is
a world where mutual aid isn’t just something we toss around at meetings. I
want to see where if one of our comrades loses their job or loses their
apartment, we have a network in place where we have a place for them to stay
and where they will be provided food. I want to see the social safety net being
the society, not the state. I think the first step is people realizing that the
labor is the key to the economy. I’m not a communist, but I feel that Marx was
right about that. Nothing functions without the bottom rung labor. If someone’s
not shoveling doodoo, if someone is not delivering the heavy packages to the
stores, then nothing else works. I'd like people to realize that if you work in a large
corporation that has investors, those people are
basically shaving a cut off of your labor, and they’re living real nice off of
a cut on a hundred thousand people’s labor.
We can form small cooperatives out
of the lower levels of giant corporations, and these people at the top would have to go
and get real jobs. Unions are a first step in that direction. You don’t see
teamsters getting exploited. People have this idea in their head that really
has to go away first, which is that executives do something besides take a cut.
We need to learn to do our own management, do our own logistics. It’s cross
training. That’s what the park was really good at. It allowed us to
have a space to cross train and participate in every aspect that one would
participate in in a cooperative, and cooperatives are the first step. We have
to learn to function without these debt pyramids above us because all they do is siphon off of our work.
I think the first challenge is education. That’s why when
the Montreal student uprising took off last spring, I was very big on
participating in the solidarity marches here. There is free education in the
United States, but most public schools suck, to be perfectly honest. If people
have the necessary training to do their manager’s job, which in most cases you
should by the end of high school, we’d already have a lot more cooperatives,
but people finish high school and can barely read. What kind of education
system is that? First, we’ve got to fix education. The other challenge is
psychological. I noticed this a lot when the camps were going on, not just here
in New York, but I would hear other cities having the same problems. People
were so used to hierarchy that some people would immediately show up and try to
become the top of the hierarchy. It’s kind of ingrained in us. I’m sure it’s
instinctive to some level too. We’re hominids. It’s so ingrained in our
culture. “Alright, who’s in charge here? No one is in charge? Alright, I want
to fill that void.” Or the opposite goes on. Some people show up and are like, “I
don’t know what I want to do. I don’t have any direction in my life. I need to
find someone to give me orders.” And there’s no one giving orders, so they sit
around all day with their finger in their nose. I saw a lot of that going on
too. Nothing against those people. It’s just training. I think that training
has got to be broken.
There is something I keep in mind just as a light at the end of the
tunnel. Buckminster Fuller wrote a short paper in the late sixties outlining that the biological level that the planet can support is a trillion humans. The
reason that it doesn’t is because we’re greedy and because we want more space
and more resources than we actually require to survive. I think all of the
unnatural scarcity that we see around us—twenty four vacant houses to every
homeless person, yet people sleep on the street, and people in Africa and Asia starving, while people weigh 1000 pounds in the United States—all of those
would go away if we didn’t participate in these debt pyramids. I would like to
see something like what Buckminster Fuller had in mind, not necessarily a
trillion of us, but where we don’t start hitting real limits on our potential
until there is a trillion of us. There is only about seven billion of us now. That gives
us a lot of running room. Who knows what could happen with that much running
room.
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/