Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I remember reading about it on the Daily News and other publications. I saw how the police were beatin’
on the protesters, and I saw a massive amount of support. People were pouring in. In the
years before, I had been following up on income inequality and imperialistic
wars oversees. I come from a disadvantaged background. I come from a poor
background. I Grew up in the Bronx, and I
come from poverty. I know what’s the grind. I’m
twenty-four years old. I never had to work like my parents did or their
grandparents did, but I know the struggle. I’ve seen it day to day. Now that I’m in the real world, after college, I really know how people are feeling. I really know how paying bills and all that
feels. That’s what really drew me to it. I felt like it was a time for change. I felt like it was time to stop business as usual.
I saw early on the radical potential of the movement. I saw that it had the potential to radically push America in a new direction, to take America in a radical direction for the better. I understand that Wall Street for the past thirty years or so has been off the roof when it came to profits, like excess records. I feel the problem is the system. What I mean is the state and capitalism. That’s what I mean about a really radical departure. We’re not talking about reform. We’re talking about structural changes that really will alter the system.
I saw early on the radical potential of the movement. I saw that it had the potential to radically push America in a new direction, to take America in a radical direction for the better. I understand that Wall Street for the past thirty years or so has been off the roof when it came to profits, like excess records. I feel the problem is the system. What I mean is the state and capitalism. That’s what I mean about a really radical departure. We’re not talking about reform. We’re talking about structural changes that really will alter the system.
I went down to the park for the first time the second week of October. When I first got to the park, I liked it because you had a very diverse crowd, and a lot of those people came from a lot of different places. They came from California. Some of them came from overseas—Spain, England. I loved that there was just a lot of information at the park. A lot of people were sharing information. It was basically a platform for debate, and you had a lot of different political ideologies. You had Tea Partiers. You had liberal democrats. You had anarchists. You had all different types of groups that came together. Why? Because they knew we needed a big change in a positive direction. That’s the energy that drew me, that revolutionary energy, that energy of, “We can create something different.”
I was really focused on the info table, and when we had the Occupied Wall Street journal, I would hand those out. Social statuses kinda disappeared in the park, or there was the illusion that they had disappeared, for a while. Everybody, more or less, interacted as equals, and the barriers that would stop people from interacting were temporarily not there. People who you would not approach, you would share information with. Maybe I wouldn’t approach a homeless guy, or maybe I wouldn’t approach a girl who looked like a punk rocker in the past. Maybe the girl from the suburbs wouldn’t approach me because I’m the urban guy from the Bronx, but at the park that kind of disappeared. That was the energy that was there. There was this idea that it takes all of us to make that change.
It’s so important because we don’t have a lot of time left.
We have a window of opportunity that’s closing. What I mean is the
environmental crisis. The current system of hyper corporate capitalism is
pushing us further and further down the road of no return. We’re
emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere. We’re passing a tipping
point in the next five or ten years, maybe already. We’re going to start
feeling the effects. We already felt it with Hurricane Sandy. The effects of
global warming are going to start to really hurt the population. Ultimately,
that can be a death sentence for many species when the environment is eaten up to
the point where it can’t sustain life on this planet.
Another problem is income inequality and the whole system of
capitalism. That’s what kind of undergrids all of the problems—the system of
profits and hierarchy and basically having a few people controlling everything
at the expense of everyone. I feel it’s so important that people don’t waste
their lives. I think one of the most insidious things that you have is the way people have to work every day. Basically, you’re wasting your life
working, and you can’t even get by. You’re making someone else rich. The thing
is that you can’t get that time back. Time isn’t money. Time is time. Money doesn’t
buy time. Maybe that’s not the way they teach you or they indoctrinate you, but
that’s the truth. Every day that you’re on these jobs, it grinds you down. People
are wasting their lives away working for other people. It’s a tyranny every
day when you go into your job, whether it’s your office or a factory, even a
school. You have really little control over what goes on. You have to show up at a certain time. You have to dress a certain way. You have to conduct yourself in a
certain way. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t conduct yourself with respect. That’s
always a must. However, bosses can carry it to humiliating extremes. They can
basically censor your basic rights.
I feel like in the twenty first century, that’s modern slavery. Why are people working so many hours? Why are people struggling when we are at a technological level in society where everyone’s basic needs can be met, where we don’t have to have people working forty/ fifty/ sixty hours a week, where we don’t have to have people working in finance. We don’t have to have people being bureaucrats. That eats the soul every day, every week, every month, every year. It hollows you on the inside out. By the time you’re forty, you can see the difference. You can see how your soul is being crushed. With students, you have people who are dedicating their energy and time, and they’re getting out with all of this debt, and they can’t even start a career. They don’t even have the opportunity to be a good slave. That’s how bad corporate capitalism has gotten. They're not even throwing bones at the people they usually throw bones to.
I feel like in the twenty first century, that’s modern slavery. Why are people working so many hours? Why are people struggling when we are at a technological level in society where everyone’s basic needs can be met, where we don’t have to have people working forty/ fifty/ sixty hours a week, where we don’t have to have people working in finance. We don’t have to have people being bureaucrats. That eats the soul every day, every week, every month, every year. It hollows you on the inside out. By the time you’re forty, you can see the difference. You can see how your soul is being crushed. With students, you have people who are dedicating their energy and time, and they’re getting out with all of this debt, and they can’t even start a career. They don’t even have the opportunity to be a good slave. That’s how bad corporate capitalism has gotten. They're not even throwing bones at the people they usually throw bones to.
I want to bring about a world of equality, a world of
justice, a world where people can imagine, where people can meet their basic
needs without much effort, a world that allows for leisure time, a world that
allows people to express themselves, a world where you don’t have to fear not being
about to pay your light bill, your rent or your student debts, a world where
you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re going to have enough money
to pay for the week’s metro care, a world where people don’t have to work sixty
or seventy hours, a world where you don’t have to worry about getting bombed
anywhere in the world, a world where the people control their own destiny,
where you don’t have a few bureaucrats
or a few businessmen controlling the destiny of the people. It’s a parasitic relationship.
It’s hardly a symbiotic relationship. I want to see a world where the system
doesn’t torture men and make them butchers, where is doesn’t make men cheaters
and liars, where is it doesn’t make men shady, where it doesn’t make men hate
other men. I think the system essentially destroys families. It destroys
individuals. I want a system that works, a system that’s not only rational, a
system that’s humane.
If we bring about that world, it’s going to be a world where
people have the opportunity and the right to meet the basic necessities of
life. With that freedom, people can develop their creative impulses. People can
pursue what they like to do. They can express themselves in the way they want
to express themselves. I think once people are unshackled by economic
necessity, people are going to be able to relate better to each other. They’re
going to have more time. There’s going to be more time for people to be
educated. I feel like if you have strong community bonds or solidarity, that’s
going to foster individuals who are willing to look at society as a whole, who
are willing to look at society as something that you have a stake in, that you
care for, and they’ll learn to respect and admire their fellow man. They’ll
learn to tolerate them too. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. There’s
always going to be a difference of opinion, but it’s going to get to a point where we work together through those differences.
I see a world
where the community and individuals can get together and really pursue what
they want. If we want to build the park, we’ll do that. We don’t have to get
the go ahead from bureaucrats or developers. At the same time, there has to be
respect, and there has to be a sense of obligation because we’re still going to
have to produce. We’re still going to have to produce the necessities. Individuals
in a healthy society would know that there is an obligation to sacrifice a
little bit of their time to make society work, especially in an industrial
society. It’s not like we just lay down and sleep all day. We’re still going to
be productive, but people are going to be able to assert themselves through
productivity. It’s not going to be forced labor, so people are willingly going
to want to volunteer to build bridges or to grow fruits or to cook or to teach.
It’s for the better of the community, and we'll be doing it as something we like, something we want to do. Without all of these economic constraints, we can make that system work. With the number of people in society, we should be
able to have a way to rationally coordinate that. We need to keep on fighting for that change.
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/