Friday, November 8, 2013

Brook Packard

Occupy Wall Street One Year Anniversary, September 17th, 2012, The Red Cube
Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I think Occupy gave voice to a kind of disquietude I’ve had ever since Ronald Reagan was elected president. There’s been this kind of creeping calcification of our morals and values and a scarring of our landscape and people. I’ve always been looking for something better, looking for what’s really important. I went down to Occupy with my husband George a couple of weeks after it started. We went down and held our signs and got a lot of attention and really felt community there. There was a big march across the Brooklyn Bridge in November of 2011, and we joined 40.000 people. It just felt like a new energy coming in. That’s really what drew me. It gave voice to something that had been quietly eating away at me for over thirty years. I had felt that there was something really wrong.

What grabbed me the most was this sense of mutual aid and generosity. It just made me feel welcome. I loved how there was the availability for anyone to make a sign and get a chance to say what they were most concerned about. The voice of the people has been muffled since the Supreme Court decided that money is speech, but at the park, I could hold up my little sign. My sign was a Woody Guthrie quote, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” These tourists came over with thick Irish accents and started singing Woody Guthrie songs with me. That was just great. 

I had also been very concerned about the privatization of the commons for a number of years. There’s a county-run park where we live called Playland, and it’s been around since 1928. It’s an amusement park for the people. Then, the republicans elected a guy who came in and just started to privatize it. He started to change the story. It was now losing money. They said they had to close down the pool because it was losing money, and I had a meeting with someone, and I said, “Why aren’t you closing down the county-owned golf course?” They would stammer. It was clearly determined by class and who their donors were. About a year before Occupy, I had started a goofy Facebook page anonymously called Rye Playland for the People, and I posed the question, “Is this for us, or is this for someone to make a profit off of this?”

I was on unemployment during the occupation. I was in a really abusive job, and I quit. To be over forty-five and to be told, “Don’t put your experience down because they can get someone cheaper. Don’t expect to make what you deserve because they can get someone cheaper and younger.” They were pitting generations against each other, and even now I still will talk to someone who is thirty or under thirty, and they say, “We have it really hard now.” I know lots of people in my position, and they're fortunate if they can get that job at Staples. They’re lucky if they can get that ten dollar an hour job. I was told by my unemployment supervisor that they were opening an L.L. Bean and that I should go and get a job there. I was told not to have any dreams and not to expect my pension or anything. 

On the December 17th action (D17), my husband was arrested for going over the fence into Trinity Church's vacant lot. I got beaten up. I was on the north side of Duarte Square. I couldn’t engage in civil disobedience because someone had to go home and walk the dog. My husband George Packard went over the fence wearing his Episcopal Bishop garb and was one of the ones arrested that day. Someone had clipped the fence to let people start to filter into the lot under the fence. Many of us were watching from outside. The cops had started kettling us from the back, and the cops started pushing down on us from the front. It really was severe. I thought, “Wow, my husband is in there safe." He was just sitting in there with cuffs on, and I thought I was going to die. Their intention to terrorize worked. 

People were locking arms and saying, “Sit down.” There was no place to sit down. In that moment, this officer came up to me and kneed me in the chest through the chain-link fence really hard. I went, “Fuck, that hurts,” and he kneed me two more times. I had the wind knocked out of me. Then, a cop came from behind, picked me up and threw me on top of people. It was sort of like a dream. Later, I was like, “Did this really happen?” I met someone later who had someone thrown on top of him, and he had gone to the hospital for a concussion. It was just really terrorizing and anxiety producing. I realized that day that even if you're a middle-aged woman, if you’re perceived as an enemy of the state, you’re an enemy of the state. All I was doing was observing civil disobedience, so I felt it was a real lesson in just how ruthless these guys are. The trial for D17 was all-consuming for us.

After that, I got involved in Plus Brigades, which was a form of protest using street theater. As a singer and someone who really believes in music, I want everyone to be empowered to sing. I’ve done early childhood music education. I’ve taught general music in schools. I really believe in community singing. I think it’s really empowering. I was trying to get that going. One day, I was leaving a meeting at Judson Church, and I said, "We need someone like Ysaye Barnwell from Sweet Honey in the Rock to come and teach people songs." Then, when I walked by the Blue Note, and it read, “Sweet Honey and the Rock this Monday!” And I thought, “This is really synchronistic.” I have an internet relationship with Ysaye Barnwell. One day before they left, Ysaye came down to the street in front of Trinity Church and started teaching songs. It is so clear that everyone can sing, but most people are so afraid to. It’s part of the whole suppression of our very nature. We’re told only certain people are qualified or good enough to do things. We divide people up. People were very afraid to sing. There were nine paddy wagons and a team of 20 or 30 cops that started kettling us in front of Trinity. We were just singing.

I was stuck lying around last summer because my whole back was frozen up, so I ended up setting the Law Enforcement Oath of Honor to music. We tried to teach it to people. I still would like to get a group of people together and record all these street action songs. The Oath of Honor song really works. On September 17th, 2012, when the cops were down at Trinity Church just being really brutal, I would just go down and look them in the eye and sing it to them, and you would see a shudder go through them. You could see them thinking, “Oh my God, I did make that promise.” It’s a national oath. I changed the words a little, so it would work better as a song. It goes, “On my honor, I will never betray my badge, betray my integrity or character. On my honor, I will always have the courage to hold myself and to hold all others accountable, accountable for their actions.” The power of song in the street is really, really great.

The current system is just unsustainable. It’s unsustainable environmentally. It’s unsustainable for our schools. It’s unsustainable for every generation. It’s just brutal and painful. Sometimes it’s hard to wake up in the morning and think about what’s going on. Sometimes you feel like you can’t take it, but you gotta go forward. You gotta keep working for something better. What else is there to do? You can make a lot of money and accumulate a lot of crap and think that you’re keeping the pain away, or you can enter into the suffering and do what you can where you can. I think a big part of what’s wrong is the imbalance of the corporatocracy calling the shots in the world and denying people self-determination and a real genuine way of being in the world. 

This bottom line profit being the only value, this system where nothing else is valued, has created some real suffering in this world. I see it even when teaching music to kids. You see people just denying who they are because they don’t know where they fit into a solely profit-making system. It’s against everything in God and nature. It’s Satan. Sorry, but it’s Satan. I'm absolutely shocked by their lack of values. I can’t even talk to some people because I’m like, “What in the fuck are you talking about?” People buy experiences to give them something to talk about. That’s basically the way a lot of people live, and they think that’s okay. “I’m going to go shopping, and then we’re going to talk about what I bought.” “I’m going to go on a vacation, and then we’re going to talk about how good the hotel was.” There is no relationship. It just destroys all creation and everything that’s good about the world.

A protester friend showed up at the Trinity Church occupation with a sign that said, “Everything for Everyone.” That’s what I hope we have. I really do believe that everyone has a reason for being here, and it’s to help each other and grow as human beings. I’m getting teary because we’re so far from it, but you see parts of it pop up here and there when you see kindness and generosity. Yeah, there will be suffering, but we won’t be causing it. We won’t have school systems that look like factories. We’ll have school systems that elicit the best out of everyone. We will have people doing jobs that they love to do because they’re good at them. We will have small farms and gardens. We will have clean food and clean air and clean water. We will have community art shows and sings and theatre. We won’t be anesthetized by possessions. We’ll have more public transportation, communities and sharing. 

In that world, we will be able to just be. There will be so much potential for learning and evolving and growing and discovering. I think Native Americans had it right. What is more important than taking care of our bodies, our minds and our relationships? I don’t see why we need to race anywhere. Big inventions come from being in that place, new life-improving inventions. We’d have more time for ritual nourishing. This whole world is being run by sociopaths and psychopaths with personality disorders who don’t know what enough means. They have such an empty hole inside that they have to get more and more and more. I have this app. It’s an abundance app. I get a million dollars a week to spend. I don’t know what to do with my money except to give it away. In my fantasy world, I have an apartment building, and the rent is what it costs to run the building. I have communities of artists. I have these things called Heal Mobiles that drive around. They’re for people taking action on the pipeline. I give them food and medical help and psychological counseling. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a billion dollars and that not be enough for you. That’s a really tortured place to live.

I think when there is less commercial crap, it will change our insides. We'll be different when there’s less fake stimulation and meaningless choice, like one hundred channels on your TV, and it’s all shit. Instead of those distractions, we would value spending time with each other. The commons would be an exchange of ideas and skill sets. I also think we should teach every kid meditation. I was just talking to someone today, and I am really into my own anatomy. I studied with this master teacher, and I follow alignment blogs, and I’m obsessed about it. I would teach every kid meditation. I would teach them experimental anatomy. Think of how cool that would be and how that would alter our beings and our world. 

Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/