Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I’ve always been running around
activist circles just because everything is fucked up. It’s obvious. I feel
like—on a certain level—that some people understand this a little more, but I feel like
everybody intuitively understands. At least it’s in the subconscious that
something is just not right or a large amount of things are just not right, but
people just go on day to day surviving. That’s why that question is difficult
for me because it’s like: what didn’t draw me to Occupy, and where the fuck was
everybody else? A lot of people came out, but it was like, where was the rest
of New York?
I first heard of it after it had
been going on for a few days. It was a discussion over dinner. It was talked
about jokingly, and this was within a group of people who were considered
liberal/ progressive. I immediately saw that there was something wrong with
that, cut through it really fast and said, “What is the issue? You guys always
say you want change and revolution and people to get off their ass, and then
when people go and do it, you sit and ridicule them. You don’t go and help. You
sit on the sidelines.” I was living in Long Island City at
the time, and by chance I found this bakery that supplies artisan bread to all
five boroughs. There were some cool people there. When they had excess, they
actually put the bread into these clear bags and put them into the garbage, so
you could really see that this was good bread. There was some dumpster diving
going on at my house. It got to the point where the head chef said, “Just come inside
and take the bread. You can just come in whenever you want, and we’ll give you
the stuff right off the racks.” We had that supply before Occupy. At this
dinner table, I was telling people that we should go down there, and then I was
like, “Hey, why don’t we bring a shit ton of bread?” That’s how it started.
My first impression was that they
were a lot of young kids from out of town. There was a good amount of people,
but not as much as I would have liked, and it was hard to figure out that you
could do something because not many people knew what was going on. I feel like
it was great, but there was still some work to be done. It seemed to get a
little bit more organized every day. People were coming out, people were
doing something. One of the reasons I started to come out with a lot more force
and fervor was because I saw this guy on a livestream. His name was Ted. He was
a black guy from Bedstuy. The way he was speaking was so poignant, visceral and
real compared to the way that people usually speak at these things. He was
questioning what was going on in terms of the agenda of all of these
marginalized people who have been dealing with these issues of injustice forever, and just
not really picking up a vibe that people at the park were really getting that. He was
attempting to broaden the movement and do it in a way that was not canned or
staged. It’s really hard to put into words how powerful he was.
I had some problems with the process
of the general assemblies. I felt there needed to be more room for people to
talk, and there just seemed to be too serious of a focus on process for that to
happen at times. I joined the People of Color Caucus (POC). It was a separate
group of people who were meeting outside of Liberty Square to try and figure
out what our agenda was going to be. It was hard to get a disparate group of
people together from all parts of New York with varying identities and politics
and identity politics to work together in a space that they weren’t familiar
with. We were all feeling super pissed off about how various communities of
color were being fucked over, and feeling that we had to do something now, but we
didn’t know what that was.
Since then, I’ve been involved with
Strike Debt, which has been really great. It’s been a roller coaster at some
points, but overall amazing. I feel like they are a really great group of
people there doing really great work and trying to put together that idea that
all of our grievances are connected. Connected through debt, but in other ways as
well...just really highlighting that we’re not all separate actors within this
situation. It’s been great. I feel like there’s a really good mix of action,
study and alliance building, and just humility that’s going on there that I’d
like to see in other places.
I feel like at this moment in time,
it’s very real. It’s not just like, “Oh, I’m getting evicted from my home,” or “I’m
losing my pension,” or “I can’t find a job,” or “All jobs are meaningless,” or “The
economy is bullshit, and the wars are going on and on and on,” which is fucked
up in and of itself, but there’s also the problem of the environment being
destroyed. All of these other things are kind of moot when you come up to the
fact that it’s very likely that life may not exist in 200 or 300 years, or that
things will be radically different in 50 or 60 years. The urgency seems to be accelerating. With climate change, I believe
you can talk to people more now than ever, and people intuitively get it. I can
go to my parents and ask them what’s going on with the weather, and they get it
on an intuitive level. They might not understand the carbon and the way it
interacts in the atmosphere or what the potential difficulties are, but they
get that the seasons are all fucked up, and that there will be grave
consequences. They worry about whether or not their home is going to be
destroyed by a freak tornado or monsoon or flood or whatever.
There’s a lot of stuff wrong with
the world. There are the GMO crops and the nuclear weapons that are still all
over the place. Shit is fucked up and bullshit, so what are we going to do? Fight
where you can for what is important in your area, in your situation. There are
plenty of things to be legitimately upset about. "It’s important because" fill in
the blank. Everyone has got something that’s important. Just do something about
it, and don’t feel like no one is going to be there with you because plenty of
people are upset.
It’s really important that we redefine
and rethink what work is for the new world that we will create. It’s important
for a number of reasons. Some of us who are in activist circles will understand
that generally a lot of us don’t like to work with people in labor, and it’s
mostly because they are stuck in this conception of work that is from the
mid-twentieth century where they are actually being compensated in a way that
will help them to climb the social ladder. They’re looking to get back onto
that gravy train—to be able to buy goods and services and to have plentiful
money and to be able to buy their dream home, not understanding where all of
those things came from—the GI bill and the transformation of the landscape with
highways, the inundation of the country with cars, the spoils of the end of the
second world war where the US is basically the only country standing and taking
everything from everyone else. The short way of saying it is that we’re not
going to get back there, so we have to rethink what work is.
The way that work is defined now is
destroying the world. The way work is defined now is what is perpetuating the
extraction of resources all over the globe. It’s destroying the environment
with coal-fired power plants and from pulling out black gold from the Tar Sands and
gold from Haiti and diamonds form Africa, looking at nothing but the increase
of the bottom line, which only really benefits people at the top, and everybody
else is just left to rot. It’s that conception of work, where you sit in a
cubicle or you work at a construction site for shit that doesn’t fuckin’
matter, and while you’re doing it, you’re perpetuating the destruction of the
planet through the extraction of resources, and you’re enriching people who
don’t give two fuckin’ shits about you, themselves or the future of the planet,
so a re-conception of work is necessary.
We have to think about what we need
to do that will actually make goods and resources that we need, not that we
want. Not a fucking iPad that’s 50% slimmer than the last version. People that I
work with are obsessed with that shit. They’re extracting those resources from
Africa and everywhere else, and then they throw it all into a garbage heap. We don’t need this shit.
It’s destroying everything. We have got to re-configure what work is. Work has
got to be something that props up people, that keeps us going, that enriches the
environment, that enriches positivity and the life giving essence of the world. We have to stop pushing things past
capacity. When you cut down trees from a forest, you want to make good
with the wood. You want to make tables. You want to make chairs. I’m not saying
not to make the stuff. It’s just that you make stuff that lasts, and you don’t
cut down every last fucking tree to make more chairs, so you can get your
points up in the next quarter for some selfish fucking reason, and then the
chairs that you made last season are broken because you made it with planned
obsolescence in mind. Then, you throw all of that shit into a dumpster, and
then it goes off into a landfill or over to some country and dumped on their
lands. We’ve got to redefine what work is and how we use resources.
I want a world where there is
justice and equity, where countries around the world aren’t being utilized as
free materials factories for this rich insatiable nation of consumers. Grace
Lee Boggs talks about how the greatest challenge in our time is for people to
rediscover what humanity really is, what being a human is all about. It’s going
to be different. We will actually treat each other like human beings. We will actually
look out for one another. We’ll share our resources to the best of our ability.
We won’t throw people in jails. We’ll actually care about people. It wouldn’t
even be rehabilitation. It would be like, “Well, what was the problem? Why did
you steal that? How can we help you?” It wouldn’t be, “How can we punish you?"
Some people in the US might read this and think, “That sounds like utopia.” Look at other countries around the
world. They don’t throw the majority of their citizens in jail. They don’t run
around all over the place stealing people’s shit. I want to live in a world
where health care is a given. Again, people will say, “That’s utopia?” No. Look
at every other industrialized country. We just need to stand up and say, “This
is what we want.” It’s not going to be Obama that brings it to us. It’s not
going to be some republican. It’s not going to be some Tea Partier. It’s not
going to be some libertarian. It’s going to be us. It’s going to be the people.
It’s going to be the masses.
Utopia is not something that doesn’t
exist. It’s something that can exist in our hearts as a guiding post, so it’s
kind of like in calculus with the limit. You can never reach the limit. You can
only approach it. It’s like you shoot for the stars, and you hit the moon. In
that sense, what kind of world do I want? There’s a sort of grounded, realist,
cynic that’s like, “Okay, so maybe we’ll only get this,” but I feel like we
always have to reinforce that utopian ideal. We want that, and even if we don’t
get it, we’re damn well going to get way closer than we ever would have been if
we just settled for some jobs.
I was in this group where we looked
at exponential change both planetary and universal. There were topics like, “What
is the future of food?” “What is the future of the oceans?” “What is the
future of economics?” One time, we had a meet-up about the future of education,
and somebody brought up a really good point. He asked, “Well, what happens if
education is free and just is available to everyone? How do things change?”
It’s at those moments that you actually get what you want. I feel like at that
moment of positive change, we’re going to have a lot of time, and we’re going
to have many chances to figure out, “Well, what do people do during their free
time? How do we live together in a way that’s symbiotic and meaningful and
uplifting, not just for people, not just for humans, but for non-human animals,
for matter that is not alive, like rivers, like the landscape, like geography.
How do we keep this planet going? How do we keep this thing giving back to us
as long as possible?” We’re at a point where we can try to make existence work
and give back in plenty for everyone, for as long as possible. That’s the goal.
How do you maximize the return of life for everything that’s living?
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/