Photo: Erik McGregor
It was curiosity that drew me to the park. I had been watching
from afar through livestream and reading a lot of the articles that were
being posted at that time. I really didn’t go to the park with the expectation
that I was going to get involved. I just wanted to see what was happening there with my own
eyes. I actually went to the park the last
day. My first time at the park was the day of the eviction. Since I came at the very end, most of my experience early on was in recovering from a lot of the traumas. I didn’t know about the eviction until the next day when I woke up. I went back to the park not knowing that I would be tied into the community in the way that I would become later. I saw what had been this beautiful community with all these different ways to engage was now a barricaded park filled with police officers.
The main thing that really stuck in my head was the general assembly and the fact that it wasn’t just one group of people that were leading it and making decisions for everyone, the fact that there was this entire process that aimed to raise people’s voices and to make decisions that came out of the group. I was captivated by the energy that was there, the way that people were impassioned, the way that the facilitation team really tried to make sure that different voices were being heard, the way that other people were raising the voices of those that were speaking during the people’s mic. I think at the time in using the people’s mic in that way, it really meant that the people were actively listening. It was amazing. I realized that there were a lot of things that I had felt and believed and hadn’t really had a community that shared those beliefs and saw the world in the same way that I was seeing it. Suddenly, there was this group of people that were really impassioned about all of these important issues and wanted to address them in a way that felt really natural to me. I think that's what kept me there.
I had some experience with horizontal decision making at the alternative high school I attended. My first year of high school, I only went to school thirty days, so at the end of the year, the teachers convinced my parents that while I was really intelligent, the school wasn’t addressing my needs appropriately and that maybe there was an alternative school that would do that more effectively. I ended up going to this alternative school called the Village School. At thirteen, I had no understanding of a lot of the anarchist or other alternative communities out there who organized in a really horizontal way. This school was as close as I got to that kind of system. There were only forty students and five teachers. We made a lot of the major decisions for the school through general assemblies.
The main thing that really stuck in my head was the general assembly and the fact that it wasn’t just one group of people that were leading it and making decisions for everyone, the fact that there was this entire process that aimed to raise people’s voices and to make decisions that came out of the group. I was captivated by the energy that was there, the way that people were impassioned, the way that the facilitation team really tried to make sure that different voices were being heard, the way that other people were raising the voices of those that were speaking during the people’s mic. I think at the time in using the people’s mic in that way, it really meant that the people were actively listening. It was amazing. I realized that there were a lot of things that I had felt and believed and hadn’t really had a community that shared those beliefs and saw the world in the same way that I was seeing it. Suddenly, there was this group of people that were really impassioned about all of these important issues and wanted to address them in a way that felt really natural to me. I think that's what kept me there.
I had some experience with horizontal decision making at the alternative high school I attended. My first year of high school, I only went to school thirty days, so at the end of the year, the teachers convinced my parents that while I was really intelligent, the school wasn’t addressing my needs appropriately and that maybe there was an alternative school that would do that more effectively. I ended up going to this alternative school called the Village School. At thirteen, I had no understanding of a lot of the anarchist or other alternative communities out there who organized in a really horizontal way. This school was as close as I got to that kind of system. There were only forty students and five teachers. We made a lot of the major decisions for the school through general assemblies.
They wanted me to use the skills that they had recognized in me. They felt that I was leading the student body in this way that was not productive. In trying to nurture that, they decided that I should lead the assemblies every week in hopes that I would support these initiatives and then get the other people who were behind me to also support the initiatives or decisions that were being made by that body as well. The way they did it was hierarchical, which is not keeping with what I believe. Before that, we had changed the people that led the general assemblies every week. I had forgotten all about that experience. It wasn’t until months after I was with Occupy that I was like, “Wait, this is a general assembly. This is the thing I have been doing since I was thirteen years old.” I think in some ways because of that history it felt really natural.
I ended up being involved with facilitation because the way that the organizing was happening really amazed me, and for a long time, that was my major involvement. I had never seen organizing happening in a horizontal way where an effort to allow for all voices to be heard was made. There’s obviously arguments that can be made on either side on how real that ended up being, how effectively it was executed. That was what really amazed me, though. It was on Thanksgiving Day of 2011 that I ended up facilitating my first general assembly, which was literally a week and a half after I had gone to my first general assembly. It was kind of ridiculous and super intimidating. The reason I ended up facilitating that meeting was because it was Thanksgiving Day. There were so many people that were gone There were only five of us at the Facilitation Working Group meeting that day, so we were like, “Can we put a team together that can actually facilitate a meeting today?” We decided that we were going to go forward. It ended up going as well as any general assembly. I think there were lots of lots of lessons that were learned from that process that people are actually using in their organizing now.
I went on the Occubus. That was a radicalizing moment, being on that tour and seeing how this movement was manifesting itself in different cities, how it was adapting itself to different cities. There was this kind of belief that, “Oh, here are people from Occupy Wall Street. They’re going to teach us how to do this.” What our intention was was to go in and say, “Okay, here are the lessons we’ve learned. Now, tell us the lessons you’ve learned because we’re not getting it right. Hopefully, together we can come up with something that works in the way that each of our communities needs it to work, recognizing that it should manifest itself differently in different communities based on the needs of that community." The tour was about 5 weeks, and there were 8-10 people. People came and left each week. Some people stayed for extended weeks. I stayed for about a week and a half. There were folks that stayed for the entire time. I was in Boston, North Hampton, Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, and I left just before they went to Ithaca. I also worked with The Direct Action Working Group on Spring Training and Summer Disobedience School. The intent was to pass on these skills and let other people pick it up and take it on. There probably should have been a little more overlap, but those were all lessons that we learned.
Now, I organize with Mutant Legal, which is a legal activist collective. We do Know your Rights training. We continue to do that work with different groups. We really saw how if people were given access to information about their rights, they were really able to become active participants in engaging and advocating for their civil legal rights, and they were better able to make informed decisions on what they did with their bodies. We saw that working really effectively within the activist communities. We realized that the communities that are being the most targeted, the most effected, don’t have reliable information, so we do a lot of work supporting unions and activists, but also our hope is to expand that into communities, to make sure the communities that are being targeted by things such as Stop and Frisk have access to this information. Another group we work with is Just Info. It’s a 24 hour hotline that people can call and ask about legal information. You have to be a lawyer to give legal advice, but we can give legal information, which is based on what the law says. We also offer referrals if people need to speak to an attorney.
As activists, a lot of the times, we enter into situations advocating for our rights and the rights of others, but very importantly, making decisions to go into these spaces knowing that there is a potentiality of arrest. We put ourselves in those situations because of something we believe in, whereas many communities are not ever given the opportunity to make that decision. Interaction with the police is something that happens to them as a factor of life. It’s a reality that many people have come to accept on a level that’s upsetting, but it’s not a decision that they are actively making. Communities that are continually being targeted by the police, if they have access to this information and know who they can call, some of their collateral damages can be mitigated. That’s the work we are doing.
A lot of the evils in the world and a lot of
the challenges that people face can be linked to their own apathy. Martin Niemöller said, “First they came for the Socialists,
and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist. Then, they came for the
Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then,
they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then,
they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” If we continue to
sit back and say, “This doesn’t really affect me,” things will never change. Our collective liberation is so
intertwined. We need to stand up for the things that affect the
communities we belong to. There is the organizing that I do because I’m a member of the community that is regularly targeted, but I don’t limit the work I do to that community because I realize all of it is so intertwined, and if we don’t fight for the liberties and the rights of all of us, then we’ll never actually achieve any of it.
I’m mixed race. I grew up being stopped by the police. There was a period of time that I was stopped three or four times a week for either minor infractions or for infractions that never actually happened, just because I was a minority living in a predominately white neighborhood at the time. I was going back and forth between Great Neck and Crown Heights. My grandmother lives in Crown Heights. My parents live in Great Neck. In great Neck, it’s a predominately white middle class neighborhood, and I was a minority with a fairly nice car. I was being stopped regularly. That was a suburban version of a stop and frisk. Those were some of the realities that existed for me. As I get older, that happens less often. People age out of Stop and Frisk. They are looking for kids 18-24. Once you get out of that, it’s really easy to look back and say, “Oh, those kids must be doing something,” and not remembering how this actually affected you.
A friend of mine build a tree, and it’s really great for visualizing. It’s this tree of capitalism. You have the base of this tree, which is capitalism. That’s the trunk of the tree, and the fruits of the tree are the Prison Industrial Complex, destruction of the earth, variation in wages for women and me, access to education or lack there of for different folks, debt. All of these things are the fruits of this tree. You look down at the root of this tree, and the roots are racism, heteropatriarchy, sexism, fear. A lot of campaigns, especially non-profit campaigns, are focusing on one fruit of this tree. That just means that you’ll pull off this fruit, and another fruit will grow. If you don’t actually focus on all of the roots that are feeding these things, it will keep coming back in a different form. I think we need to show people that the things that are affecting them are fed by the same things that are affecting people that don’t look like them. If we don’t actually do this work in a way that really brings awareness to the fact that our individual liberation is tied into our collective liberation, then we’ll continue to fight. It will be a different fruit, but the fight will never change.
I’m mixed race. I grew up being stopped by the police. There was a period of time that I was stopped three or four times a week for either minor infractions or for infractions that never actually happened, just because I was a minority living in a predominately white neighborhood at the time. I was going back and forth between Great Neck and Crown Heights. My grandmother lives in Crown Heights. My parents live in Great Neck. In great Neck, it’s a predominately white middle class neighborhood, and I was a minority with a fairly nice car. I was being stopped regularly. That was a suburban version of a stop and frisk. Those were some of the realities that existed for me. As I get older, that happens less often. People age out of Stop and Frisk. They are looking for kids 18-24. Once you get out of that, it’s really easy to look back and say, “Oh, those kids must be doing something,” and not remembering how this actually affected you.
A friend of mine build a tree, and it’s really great for visualizing. It’s this tree of capitalism. You have the base of this tree, which is capitalism. That’s the trunk of the tree, and the fruits of the tree are the Prison Industrial Complex, destruction of the earth, variation in wages for women and me, access to education or lack there of for different folks, debt. All of these things are the fruits of this tree. You look down at the root of this tree, and the roots are racism, heteropatriarchy, sexism, fear. A lot of campaigns, especially non-profit campaigns, are focusing on one fruit of this tree. That just means that you’ll pull off this fruit, and another fruit will grow. If you don’t actually focus on all of the roots that are feeding these things, it will keep coming back in a different form. I think we need to show people that the things that are affecting them are fed by the same things that are affecting people that don’t look like them. If we don’t actually do this work in a way that really brings awareness to the fact that our individual liberation is tied into our collective liberation, then we’ll continue to fight. It will be a different fruit, but the fight will never change.
I think the problem is this fear. I
don’t think that the world is all bad. I think people are generally
good. I largely don’t think that there are people who do things out of this real
maliciousness. We can talk about illnesses. We don’t actually help people
address their illnesses. Too many things are looking at treating symptoms
rather than treating the root causes, so there are people who have illnesses
that need to be dealt with, and we don’t actually provide the services that
would help with that. By and large people do things basically because they
want to protect themselves and those in their circle. Sometimes the scope of
people they are trying to help is really small, so they make decision that are
going to be beneficial for the people that are immediately around them or the
people they see they are in affinity with regardless of how that might
affect everyone else, but even that comes from a positive place in their mind.
I think that the more that people understand that such behavior comes from fear, the closer we'll get to finding solutions for these problems. If you weren’t afraid of losing your space, then you wouldn’t actually be making these decisions that are really detrimental to everyone outside of that space. Look at corporations, they think they are trying to protect their shareholders, but at what cost, though, to the global community? Even that is not from this really malicious place. I don’t think the world is a horrible place. I think the world is a place that does have a lot of fear, a lot of belief in scarcity. I think that the more we can education people and the more we are able to build each other up, the more safe we’ll all be in that space. We need to create opportunities to help people understand that by helping others, they’re actually creating an opportunity for all of us to share that in a way that’s much more beneficial and much more sustainable long term. I don’t like to believe that the world is a bad place. I like to believe that there’s a lot of work to do.
The world that I would like to see is a world where people are as concerned with what affects them as they are with what affects other folks, where people are really concerned and engaged with their communities and where they are playing a role in taking care of those who need it. There’s a phrase that says “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” We really need to recognize that we all have different abilities and that in a community there are people who will be able to and are passionate about doing different kinds of work. Everyone should have access and opportunity to pursue the kinds of things that they need. They should feel an affinity to and compassion for others around them that don’t share the same abilities. They should openly use those abilities in order to make sure that others around them also have what they need to flourish. We need to give value to people’s work in a way that actually encourages people to follow their passions.
I think that the more that people understand that such behavior comes from fear, the closer we'll get to finding solutions for these problems. If you weren’t afraid of losing your space, then you wouldn’t actually be making these decisions that are really detrimental to everyone outside of that space. Look at corporations, they think they are trying to protect their shareholders, but at what cost, though, to the global community? Even that is not from this really malicious place. I don’t think the world is a horrible place. I think the world is a place that does have a lot of fear, a lot of belief in scarcity. I think that the more we can education people and the more we are able to build each other up, the more safe we’ll all be in that space. We need to create opportunities to help people understand that by helping others, they’re actually creating an opportunity for all of us to share that in a way that’s much more beneficial and much more sustainable long term. I don’t like to believe that the world is a bad place. I like to believe that there’s a lot of work to do.
The world that I would like to see is a world where people are as concerned with what affects them as they are with what affects other folks, where people are really concerned and engaged with their communities and where they are playing a role in taking care of those who need it. There’s a phrase that says “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” We really need to recognize that we all have different abilities and that in a community there are people who will be able to and are passionate about doing different kinds of work. Everyone should have access and opportunity to pursue the kinds of things that they need. They should feel an affinity to and compassion for others around them that don’t share the same abilities. They should openly use those abilities in order to make sure that others around them also have what they need to flourish. We need to give value to people’s work in a way that actually encourages people to follow their passions.
There might be someone who is super passionate about making sure that effective, environmentally friendly waste management is taken care of, and that brilliant mind, who may not really care that much about medicine is maybe going to follow medicine or something else because that’s something they have been told is more valued in society and is therefore going to be compensated at a higher rate. Those things are both super important, so I'd like to see a society that really values all work and doesn't create these hierarchies of what work is and isn’t important. I think that’s all tied into a society that’s built around compassion and love and understanding. I think it's really important for people to really care to understand their neighbor and why they do the things that they do.
In that environment, I think we could create systems where workers in
one industry will be empowered to make decisions collectively about what will
best allow for the advancement of that industry and for the day to day of that
industry. You may have someone who is empowered to make a decision in certain
situations that needs to happen on the spot, but that person is still accountable
to that community. Once they make those decisions, they will then have to answer to that community on why that decision was made and how that
decision affected people within and outside of that community. You would have
that structure within each industry, and then you might have a larger
community body that meets and discusses the interactions that are happening
between people from different industries because the different industries will
have to be able to relate in effective ways. I think that is possible in an environment
that has let go of the ideas of false scarcity, that has a goal of making sure
we are cognizant of how each of those industries affects the environment and
the place that we’re living in. That's one way I can see it working, but I don’t think that’s the
only way.
I hope we come to have a respect for each other’s histories
and a respect for people’s cultures and what each person can add to the
situation in a way that doesn’t create systems of supremacy over anyone
else. I’d also like us to leave behind systems of patriarchy like where the
father is the head of the family, which just builds the larger
patriarchal system. I hope for more of a respect for each other’s individuality and a system that's not built on hierarchy. I think that most communities do naturally
operate in a way that is very much what I’d like to see. I think in most
neighborhoods, if someone is not eating, the people in that neighborhood will help
that person out. On a small scale, we operate in those systems already, so it’s
not anything that’s that far from what people are already doing. It’s just that
we’ve got these systems in place that are contrary to that, and these systems are enforced by
a military police force. People aren’t always able to do the things they
would do because of that. They enforce things that are actually foreign to the
way people naturally interact. We’d actually be building onto a system that
already exists and creating a society that operates off of
that natural interaction.
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/