Melanie Gold

May Day, May 1, 2012, Bryant Park

Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I was just starting to do some activism on Facebook myself when Occupy was coming out. To me, what was important was that our politics were just becoming so polarized, that everyone was so polarized that there was an inability to have a conversation with people. I was a drama teacher at a middle school for a long time. Having that as my background, I wanted to stage a theatrical action in the streets. I was working on an idea where we would be shouting from rooftops, and somehow it would wind itself down a street and bring people to a public square where they could have an actual discussion with each other.  I started to see these announcements about Occupy Wall Street. I was upstate at the time. I thought I would just go down on the 17^th. I didn’t get to go down, but I kept seeing stuff on livestreams. Then, I became glued to the livestreams. I started thinking, “Oh my god, this is the thing that needed to happen.” I wanted to bring people to the public square, and I guess I wasn’t the only one. 

I went down on the 22^nd of 23^rd of September. It was amazing to see this gathering of minds that all were saying, “Okay, this is it. It’s enough, and we’re not going to take it anymore.” It was just exhilarating to be there. Everyone you talked to, you would learned something. Once I went down, I was hooked. I thought, “This is it. This is our hope.” Some of the people I saw there were people I already knew. I had old students who would walk up to me and say, "Ms. Gold?" I was using my apartment in the city at the time as income and living upstate.  I was an unemployed teacher. Who needs a drama teacher when you can’t afford a math teacher? I thought, “Okay, I’m going to take whatever I have in my savings and live off for it for as long as I need to be down here.” I, literally, made it my job to be at Occupy.

I was involved in a couple of things. The first thing I got involved with was the Facilitation Working Group. I had never heard of the concept of consensus. I was drawn into it. I was a vibes checker. In the middle of a big GA, it’s the person who senses if things were getting too heavy. The vibes checker stops the assembly and talks to people a little, sees how everyone is feeling. That’s just not me at all. I’d be one of the people sucked right into feeling heavy. I ended up being in that group for a while, and I learned a lot from my experience with that. 

The other group I was involved with was Women Occupying Wall Street. It started as the Women’s Caucus. Then, it became Women Occupying Wall Street. At the time, it was all about being safer in the streets. There was one night when I was there really, really late. It was the first time I had stayed there that late. Being in my late forties, I didn’t feel safe sleeping there, so I never slept there. The one night I was there really late was around the second week of the occupation. We had some people who were doing security. They were going around and scaring the shit out of everyone and telling them how dangerous it was. I was hanging out with a woman from Wisconsin, who had been part of the protests at the capital, and this young girl came up to us and said, “We want to go and sleep on Wall Street, and we’re sick and tired of the guys always doing brave stuff. We want to sleep there. Do you want to come?" We weren’t sure she should do that because the previous night was when a lot of people had been beaten with batons by the police. We were both older women, and we looked at here and said, “You’re statement is amazing and brave, but you could get really hurt.”  

Later on, we saw her sitting with a group of women, and people were sharing some of stories of abuse they had experienced. We decided to create a women’s support group, so we could support each other. That ended up becoming Women Occupying Wall Street. I ended up doing most of my work with that group. Later on, the group did a lot of outreach work with the Fem GA. It was our attempt to reach out to the people who were already doing this kind of work. We organized four general assemblies. I was a part of the first three, and there was disagreement within the group about how radical we should be and how things should be. The group dispersed because of that. It had some real potential, so when I think about it, I feel sad at the way it turned out. If we can figure out a way that people could disagree and still work together, that would be a miracle.

I was involved with Occupy Broadway. We did a 24-hour performance in a public space on Broadway. I think that things that are performance-based tend to get a different kind of attention from people than just protesting. I feel like if I hadn’t gotten so involved with the Women Occupying Wall Street group, I would have gotten more involved with the performance stuff. Whenever I have a conversation with anyone about Occupy, the one thing that keeps coming up for me is how much I have learned. I feel like I could have gotten a doctorate with everything I learned, not just information but stuff about how people interact with each other, stuff about myself and the way I am in groups. It’s intense being an activist. I feel like activists could use a lot of meditation and self-discovery in order to be successful. 

Once I moved back up to Orange County, I was involved with Occupy Orange County. It has morphed into a time bank. It's called the Hudson Valley Hour Exchange. We were building it for quite some time. It only recently become more of an outreach thing. How a time exchange works is if someone knows how to cook vegan recipes, they help someone who doesn't know how to do that. The person who learned how to cook might be good at web design, so they would contribute by helping with website design. I no longer work with that group because there were disagreements. There was a decision the suggest a $25 donation a year, and if you couldn't pay that, you would owe the group four hours of work. To me the idea of a time bank is people helping each other. I’m at a point where I believe the real true currency should be trust. I think we’ve been taught to distrust each other. We’ve been conditioned to blame and shame people, including ourselves. I felt that equating four hours of work to twenty-five dollars actually devalued people's efforts, as well as entrenched people in transactional thinking. To me, that defeats the purpose.

I don’t think we can survive any longer the way we’re operating. I really think the human race is on a suicide path. The Keystone XL Pipeline and fracking and all of these events that are happening to the environment is also happening in our own bodies and our own minds. Sometimes when I talk to people about that, I get that eye roll. I walk away thinking, “My god, maybe people do live in a bubble and would rather not hear about what is happening.” That makes me think back to my dad who died of prostate cancer because he didn’t want to know that he had it. He would rather just not know. I don’t know that that’s the best thing to do. I think it’s better to know even if knowing is painful. Otherwise, how can we grow? We’re not going to grow. We’re just going to die. The planet will go on, but we won’t. 

I see it in every single sphere in our world—in education, in work. People are working themselves to death. Our education system is not really about learning. It's not really about questioning. It's not really about critical thinking. It’s really about, “How much information can we cram into this kid, so he can pass the test, so he can get into college, so he can get a job, so he can support his family." We’re like hamsters in a wheel. We’re not really living. I think people don’t like to hear things that are in conflict with the way they think because they don’t know how to deal with it. If we don’t talk to each other, we’re never going to know how to deal with it. To me, Occupy has become that conversation. It’s the conversation everyone has been uncomfortable having. I believe that’s the reason a lot of people react to it the way they do. Ultimately, that conversation is the kid standing up in the middle of the room and saying, “Mommy, there really is an elephant standing up over there in the corner.” I feel like if we don’t do this, it's going to be too late. We’re just going to kill ourselves. 

I’m also very passionate about animals. I’ve been a vegetarian for over 25 years. I became a vegetarian when I worked for Greenpeace in my early twenties. I read a book called Diet for a New America. It is an expose on factory farming, and it was shocking to me that this goes on in our world. Once I became entrenched in Occupy and learned more about feminism and what feminism really meant to me, which really was that everyone should be treated equal, I saw that connection with animals. I started to realize that if we’re going to look for equality, then it doesn’t make sense to me that humans are not also equal to other living beings. I tend to believe in the Gaia Theory, which says that the earth is one living organism and that we all inhabit it as part of it. I don’t see humans as the top of the food chain, which has been banged into our heads. I don’t think we are the top of the food chain because we have the ability to create the harm that we are causing. Might does not mean right. I just didn’t understand anymore why that didn’t extend to every living being, since we’re all part of a cycle. 

I tend to become extremely passionate about new wake-up calls. I tend to delve deeper and deeper. I just finished reading Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows. It was a real eye-opener. Having finished reading that, I realized that by eating an egg, I’m not harming the chicken, but the fact that we’re doing that is harming all chickens based on how they are treated in these factory farms. The same goes for milk cows. People will say to me, “What’s wrong with drinking the milk? They have too much milk anyways.” Well, you probably don’t know that the calf is taken away from the cow and killed shortly after it is born in a many cases. It’s not okay. It’s only okay in people’s eyes because of this ides of speciesism. How is that different from feminism? It isn’t. It’s the same concept. We want everyone to be equal, everyone to be treated with kindness and respect. If that’s what we want, then we’re going to have to wake up to the idea that animals are also everyone.

There is a change happening in the way people think. People are sharing information about permaculture, about ways to live with nature instead of controlling and being separate from nature. I’ve had an ongoing conversation with a farmer in Canada who latched onto my veganism. He said. “I have a very kind farm. I have animals here, and I treat them humanly." He went on to ask, "How are we going to live? What are we going to do with all of the animals that are alive?” I understand these questions, and I think if it weren’t for Occupy, I probably would have been more defensive about those questions. Because we are having that conversation, he is being exposed to information that I’ve been exposed to, and with every new piece of information that I share with him, I can see him waking up to that. 

Over the last few months, I’ve done a lot of introspective work. I think it’s important that everyone does that because until we understand that everything is all really, truly one, we’re just running around in circles and arguing with others about what’s right and wrong. What I’d like to see is smaller tribes of people who all take care of where they live together.  I see us living in smaller, denser communities, being more respectful of each other, being more in tune with the fact that we really are all part of the same organism. I see a lot of eco-villages and intentional communities. I think taking money out of the equation will be miraculous in and of itself because it will change everything. It will bring us to our real currency, which is trust. If we can start building trust with each other and forgetting that separateness and remembering that oneness, I really think that we can have an incredible future.

We’re capable of becoming one society, so nobody ever looks at each other and says, “That person is illegal.” Nobody ever would have a reason to say, “Well, that person got stuff that I didn’t get. I have to compete with that person for resources.” There wouldn't be that idea of a shortage of things because we would realize when there is a “shortage” of something it’s just because we didn’t make enough of it, and we can always make more. People would realize that if they trusted each other there wouldn’t be a necessity for crime. It would eliminate things like crime. It would eliminate the need to be smarter than someone else. It would get to a place where if something fabulous happened to someone, we’d be as happy as if it had happened to us. It would bring us to a place where we wouldn’t have to compete for resources because all of the resources would be everyone’s. If you wanted to build a house, you'd get your neighbors together, and everybody would build a house. Sharing would become the way of life because you wouldn’t feel like you’re giving something up. Everyone would be getting what they need. 

Interview by Stacy Lanyon

http://elementsofoppression.blogspot.com/

http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/