Photo: Stacy Lanyon
Then, they started talking about the Olympics and the World Cup and how the funding for those events is happening. They started saying, “We need hospitals and education, not new buildings and new stadiums." They’re frantically trying to build all of these stadiums to host all of these events, and people are pissed. They want access to education and health care. They recently found oil offshore in the oceans of Brazil, so the president comes on the TV, and he says, “Okay, we did not use any money that was supposed to go to health care and education to pay for the Olympics and World Cup. We financed it.” They are trying to pacify everybody to get them to settle down, but that’s even more terrifying. They are going to put the country into further debt for an event that’s just going to put money back into the hands of people who already have money. People are fed up. The media is being controlled by the government. Just like the media is owned by corporations in America, one family owns the media in Brazil, and it’s really tied to the government. Like with Occupy, there’s now independent media streaming in Brazil.
During the occupation, it was the direct
action that was taking place that drew me in, and now it's the small intimacy to it that keeps me involved. I’ve become even more active because of that. There are a
lot of things that drew me to Occupy. I think the social justice work is
beautiful and needs to be happening. I think the way that change can happen is
through direct action with the community and of the community. I believe in
mutual aid, and I believe in transparency, so I identify with all of these
things that are going on in the movement. I've personally endured social injustice, and I like working to
prevent that from happening to other people.
I first went down to the park on the day of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, but later that day. It was mostly the rallies that I participated in. I wasn’t part of organization or any of the assemblies. The energy there was amazing. That was phenomenal. I had mutual friends who were working in the kitchen and who were working in other aspects of Occupy. I was in school at the time. I had just left BMCC to go to NYU, and the way it was being talked about at NYU was way different than the way it was being talked about at BMCC, which is a CUNY school. At CUNY, I marched with a professor at a rally. I can’t speak for the whole school, but in the undergrad classes I was taking at NYU at the time, it was being spoken amongst the student body as something that was over there and not relevant to us. My first interaction was, “Let me just look and see what’s going on.” I didn’t really go as much as I wanted to in my heart. I would go by myself a lot. My social circle at NYU at the time was not an active social circle in that way. I more recently found an amazing group of student activists at NYU.
I’m involved in the May Day organizing and student organizing. This idea of outreach, it’s so important. It's important to be working with a community that shares the same desire to organize and take action and not just philosophize about how awful things are, but instead wants to contribute to making changes that will improve people's lives. The way people get broken up into little working groups and do things that their skills are strong in and work with each other, it’s really beautiful. There’s no hierarchy. It’s horizontal, and there’s a lot of autonomy in that, and that really inspires you to keep doing it. I’m in the Student Bloc community right now. I graduated last May. I’m not technically a student, but the way I look at it is that we are all students. You don’t have to be in an institution getting a formal education where you get a piece of paper at the end. I’m learning. I’m learning today at these workshops, and people are going to these workshops who don’t have a student id, so I really appreciate the openness and allowing everyone to participate in these things that can mobilize people, inspire people. It’s a really open space, and it's not happening inside a building that’s filtering people.
I first went down to the park on the day of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, but later that day. It was mostly the rallies that I participated in. I wasn’t part of organization or any of the assemblies. The energy there was amazing. That was phenomenal. I had mutual friends who were working in the kitchen and who were working in other aspects of Occupy. I was in school at the time. I had just left BMCC to go to NYU, and the way it was being talked about at NYU was way different than the way it was being talked about at BMCC, which is a CUNY school. At CUNY, I marched with a professor at a rally. I can’t speak for the whole school, but in the undergrad classes I was taking at NYU at the time, it was being spoken amongst the student body as something that was over there and not relevant to us. My first interaction was, “Let me just look and see what’s going on.” I didn’t really go as much as I wanted to in my heart. I would go by myself a lot. My social circle at NYU at the time was not an active social circle in that way. I more recently found an amazing group of student activists at NYU.
I’m involved in the May Day organizing and student organizing. This idea of outreach, it’s so important. It's important to be working with a community that shares the same desire to organize and take action and not just philosophize about how awful things are, but instead wants to contribute to making changes that will improve people's lives. The way people get broken up into little working groups and do things that their skills are strong in and work with each other, it’s really beautiful. There’s no hierarchy. It’s horizontal, and there’s a lot of autonomy in that, and that really inspires you to keep doing it. I’m in the Student Bloc community right now. I graduated last May. I’m not technically a student, but the way I look at it is that we are all students. You don’t have to be in an institution getting a formal education where you get a piece of paper at the end. I’m learning. I’m learning today at these workshops, and people are going to these workshops who don’t have a student id, so I really appreciate the openness and allowing everyone to participate in these things that can mobilize people, inspire people. It’s a really open space, and it's not happening inside a building that’s filtering people.
My mother is from Brazil, and I identify as a Brazilian
American. I grew up in a single parent household by a Brazilian. Growing up as part of the immigrant community, I've witnessed what it means to immigrate to a different place and endure being a third-class citizen, what it means to pay taxes but not get to vote. What’s
happening in Brazil really resonates with me. I’ve been working with the
Brazilian community here. We’ve had a lot of protests in solidarity with the
revolution that’s happening in Brazil, as well as with the police brutality that's been happening there. In relation to Student Bloc and
Occupy, there are people who are part of Occupy who are Brazilian. They were able
to organize the Brazilian community here in New York, and we’ve been meeting
here regularly and having actions in solidarity with what’s been happening in
Brazil.
There has been police brutality, and people have been disappearing, and the cops are being violent and covering up their id's and attacking people who are having peaceful protests. This is all over the nation. The protesters have stormed the equivalent of the congress. It started with an activist community wanting free bus fare for students in São Paulo. They went to protest against the twenty cent fare increase. People took to the streets. The police started smoke-bombing protesters. People got angry because they were being violent towards protesters, and more people came to the streets. It grew and grew nationwide. They were banning vinegar because vinegar is known to protect your face from smoke bombs. They were going through people’s backpacks, and they started shooting rubber bullets at the protesters. They shot a photo journalist in his eye, and he was blinded. The violence from police towards the protesters made people even more angry.
There has been police brutality, and people have been disappearing, and the cops are being violent and covering up their id's and attacking people who are having peaceful protests. This is all over the nation. The protesters have stormed the equivalent of the congress. It started with an activist community wanting free bus fare for students in São Paulo. They went to protest against the twenty cent fare increase. People took to the streets. The police started smoke-bombing protesters. People got angry because they were being violent towards protesters, and more people came to the streets. It grew and grew nationwide. They were banning vinegar because vinegar is known to protect your face from smoke bombs. They were going through people’s backpacks, and they started shooting rubber bullets at the protesters. They shot a photo journalist in his eye, and he was blinded. The violence from police towards the protesters made people even more angry.
Then, they started talking about the Olympics and the World Cup and how the funding for those events is happening. They started saying, “We need hospitals and education, not new buildings and new stadiums." They’re frantically trying to build all of these stadiums to host all of these events, and people are pissed. They want access to education and health care. They recently found oil offshore in the oceans of Brazil, so the president comes on the TV, and he says, “Okay, we did not use any money that was supposed to go to health care and education to pay for the Olympics and World Cup. We financed it.” They are trying to pacify everybody to get them to settle down, but that’s even more terrifying. They are going to put the country into further debt for an event that’s just going to put money back into the hands of people who already have money. People are fed up. The media is being controlled by the government. Just like the media is owned by corporations in America, one family owns the media in Brazil, and it’s really tied to the government. Like with Occupy, there’s now independent media streaming in Brazil.
It’s important on so many levels. I’m a first generation citizen. I
was raised by an immigrant, and I was on welfare most of my life. Social and
economic injustice is really real to me. I think it’s important to be
addressing the system that creates this oppression. We need to create a
community where people are not alone when this stuff happens. I think the first step
is having dialogue about it, and this space creates it. There are
a few problems I’m particularly interested in addressing—the gender
violence, the patriarchy and the socioeconomic. This idea of social mobility
through education is really interesting to me. I’m kind of a victim of that. I’m
a high school dropout. I saw getting an education as
a means of social mobility. I’ve
worked for everything from the phone girl at Papa John’s pizza to a hostess to
Home Depot to working at Enron to being a personal assistant at hedge funds. I’ve
worked for movie stars. I’ve done every type of job that doesn’t require you to
have a piece of paper documenting your education.
I got laid off from a real estate development firm, and I decided to go to college. I took out loans, and it was framed like it was for my self-improvement and that it was something that I needed in order to be able to make a high income. 50K a year is the most you’d ever make as a personal assistant in New York City. You need a piece of paper with your education on it to go any further. Now I have 68,000 worth of debt, and I got the highest scholarship NYU offers within the institution through the Transfer Opportunity Program. NYU goes to community colleges and picks people out who have high GPAs and tells them to apply to NYU, and that they’ll give them a 20,000 scholarship, which is about half the tuition. The rest I have in state grants and student loans. I have a lot less debt than some of the other students who participate in that program. I now work for NYU, and I can’t make ends meet. I’m caught in the wheel. I end up in the negative every month still. This system and those in power are keeping us focused on our day to day lives trying to stay afloat, which keeps us from looking up and saying, “No, something is wrong. I want my liberation.” This is important because I want my liberation.
I envision this beautiful, peaceful place with non-violent interaction and respect for human dignity, where people aren’t measured by what they produce. They’ll be respected as a human in and of itself. I’d like to see a world without boundaries, without passports and visas and immigration status. I’d like to see a world where you don’t have to fit into the heteronormative lifestyles that exist. I think things like class would be eradicated. I think it would be a world full of creativity and acceptance. There wouldn’t be war. There would be spaces where diversity and discourse is still happening, but there would be an understanding that these certain frames don’t have to fit everybody. I think that would be beautiful. I think everyone would be respectful of the earth and each other. It would change out interactions with each other tremendously. We wouldn’t be scared. My partner’s mother lives in New Jersey, and she’s sixty-five, and she picks up people to be able to get in the carpool lane, and I remember everyone in the family would say, “That’s so dangerous mom. No! Don’t do that!” I want to live in a world where people wouldn’t be scared to pick-up people to go into a carpool lane. People would stop living in fear. I think we’d be in a less anxious state overall. This system keeps us living in fear, and we turn to hyper-consumption as the solution. I think that would be eradicated.
To learn more about Sudent Bloc, you can go to http://studentblocnyc.org/.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
I got laid off from a real estate development firm, and I decided to go to college. I took out loans, and it was framed like it was for my self-improvement and that it was something that I needed in order to be able to make a high income. 50K a year is the most you’d ever make as a personal assistant in New York City. You need a piece of paper with your education on it to go any further. Now I have 68,000 worth of debt, and I got the highest scholarship NYU offers within the institution through the Transfer Opportunity Program. NYU goes to community colleges and picks people out who have high GPAs and tells them to apply to NYU, and that they’ll give them a 20,000 scholarship, which is about half the tuition. The rest I have in state grants and student loans. I have a lot less debt than some of the other students who participate in that program. I now work for NYU, and I can’t make ends meet. I’m caught in the wheel. I end up in the negative every month still. This system and those in power are keeping us focused on our day to day lives trying to stay afloat, which keeps us from looking up and saying, “No, something is wrong. I want my liberation.” This is important because I want my liberation.
I envision this beautiful, peaceful place with non-violent interaction and respect for human dignity, where people aren’t measured by what they produce. They’ll be respected as a human in and of itself. I’d like to see a world without boundaries, without passports and visas and immigration status. I’d like to see a world where you don’t have to fit into the heteronormative lifestyles that exist. I think things like class would be eradicated. I think it would be a world full of creativity and acceptance. There wouldn’t be war. There would be spaces where diversity and discourse is still happening, but there would be an understanding that these certain frames don’t have to fit everybody. I think that would be beautiful. I think everyone would be respectful of the earth and each other. It would change out interactions with each other tremendously. We wouldn’t be scared. My partner’s mother lives in New Jersey, and she’s sixty-five, and she picks up people to be able to get in the carpool lane, and I remember everyone in the family would say, “That’s so dangerous mom. No! Don’t do that!” I want to live in a world where people wouldn’t be scared to pick-up people to go into a carpool lane. People would stop living in fear. I think we’d be in a less anxious state overall. This system keeps us living in fear, and we turn to hyper-consumption as the solution. I think that would be eradicated.
To learn more about Sudent Bloc, you can go to http://studentblocnyc.org/.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/