Monday, March 10, 2014

Dennis Trainor, Jr.

Citizen's United: A Wedding, January 19, 2013, Wall Street
Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I was engaged with a group that was calling themselves the October 2011 Coalition, and we were calling for the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC to begin on October 6, 2011. We were calling for this long before I had seen Adbusters calling for it and long before I knew people were meeting and planning for Occupy Wall Street. I was in New York City doing a fundraiser for the Freedom Plaza event. We were going about it much differently. I was working with a lot of older peace groups. They  were frustrated by their lack of ability to mobilize people in the Obama era the same way they were able to mobilize people during the anti-war protests of the Bush era. They were trying to connect the dots between peace and anti-war movements, social justice, environmental issues and economic issues. 

I came down for the first time around September 20th, 2011. I remember thinking at the time, “You guys, this is awesome. You should really go home and get some rest because you know you’re all coming to Washington DC on October 6th."  By the time I got to Washington, The Brooklyn Bridge had already happened and occupations started popping up all over the country. We realized at that time that even though we had been planning for so long that we were just one chapter in a bigger story. What captured me about the park was the youth. I’m forty-four years old. The October 2011 Coalition is made up of a lot of veterans of social justice activism, so I was the young kid in that group. All the sudden, I was the old guy in the park. That felt fantastic. That's what affected me. I thought, “This is real. This is much bigger than anything I’ve ever been working on." 

I left my job as a teacher at a boarding school about seven years ago. I had a very cushy job. I worked about forty weeks a year. I had all of my summers off. I taught theater. It was really an easy job. I grew up on Long Island. As a teenager, I was involved in Act Up in the early nineties doing some actions and things like that. Being an activist and social justice has always been a part of who I am. When I left teaching, I was trying to write a TV pilot. I had a little opening, and it didn’t work out. Waiting for the pilot to pan out, I started to do these political videos using the pseudonym Davis Fleetwood. I started to make a living off of making videos on YouTube instead of making TV pilots. There was this whole democratization of publishing that happened. You didn’t need the middle man. You didn’t need someone in an office in New York or Hollywood to put a stamp of approval on what you were doing. Now, we’re getting to the point where we’re starting to find grants in order to fund people. We’re being able to drop advertising all together. 

I tell stories with words and pictures. I write, shoot some video, and I try and put them together to tell a story. I made a movie called American Autumn: An Occudoc. I believe it’s the first feature length piece that came out about the movement . We had a limited theatrical release in New York. It focuses on three cities primarily—Boston, New York and Washington DC. I had rented an apartment for a small film crew. We were able to raise about 35,000 on Kickstarter for a movie we were originally calling Taking Freedom Plaza. The first time I called my film crew to come up was when Bloomberg said he was evicting the park. We arrived at about 3 o’clock in the morning, and five or six thousand people showed up. 

Since then, I've worked with a group called Move to Amend. In 2013, we created a half hour piece called Legalize Democracy. The Constitution states explicitly that money is not free speech and that corporations don’t have the same constitutional rights as people. Move to Amend is a group that sees themselves as more than just a group that’s coalescing around getting an amendment, but also a grass roots group that’s coming together to create a democracy movement here in the United States. The documentary focuses very heavily on the historic issues of racism, sexism, classism and oppression that built this system. A few years after the Constitution was ratified, "We the people" meant five or six percent of the population—white, male land owners. The story of democracy is for the people to be included in the phrase "We the people." We’re not there yet. Corporations were granted corporate personhood before women were given the right to vote, so corporations are more entrenched in "We the people" right now than women. 

I think it’s so important because because I’m aware of my privilege. My wife still teaches at a boarding school. She makes a decent living, and we have two kids who are going to have the benefit of an education. We’re not rich, and if you look at our bank accounts, you probably couldn’t even call us middle class, but the truth is that my kids eat. They’re very healthy. If they want clothes, we can buy them. If they want to take a yoga class or a dance class, we have money to do that. There are kids in the richest country in the world who are hungry every night. The world is fucked up and shit. It’s wrong. I stay awake thinking about drone attacks and the fact that our tax dollars go towards that. We should have the agency collectively to stop it. I do think it’s a crime that the Waltons have as much value as about 40% of the rest of the country. I think it’s morally wrong.  

I think it’s important not to just shine a light on it. It’s not enough to stop the machine. We have to create these new worlds. As someone who focuses on media, I don’t want to recreate the same thing that we see on MSNBC. I don’t want to work for MSNBC. I want to build an alternative media that’s not relying on the money from GE and all of these other profiteers. I don’t want to work for that media machine. We want to create a new media.  We want to identify and support alternative banking systems. Why is it important what we do? It’s not enough to say, "This is wrong." We have to work at creating and living in those alternative systems.

I hope to bring about a world where my children, who are stepping into a shit tons of privilege, don’t have to work as hard to rectify the wrongs that I didn’t necessarily create, but that I certainly inherited. I hope to bring about a world that is not based on oppression and exploitation. I want a world that’s based on justice, equity, fairness and cooperation. Everything that we do, even within the Occupy world, is so infected and affected by competition. It’s part of our DNA in capitalist culture. If we remove that, if we shut that down, if I’m not competing to get something better than you, if everything I do is part mine and part yours, I don’t know what that will look like. Maybe that’s the cure for cancer. Maybe cancer will go away. I think everyone will be happier. My favorite place is the beach. I like to go to Montauk. I sit on the beach, and I can picture myself on a map right there looking out at the horizon. To me, it’s just very peaceful. That’s where I feel peaceful. Everyone deserves to have their own Montauk, whatever that looks like for them. 

You can find information about and watch American Autumn: An Occudoc at http://www.occudoc.org/. 
You can watch the Legalize Democracy Documentary at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2-q-RBiWhk.  


Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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