Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I was drawn in initially before it existed by the idea that
something like this might happen. In the summer of 2011, I was meeting with
activists from around the world who were involved with different manifestations
of global uprising that year, and I started wondering whether people were
planning something like that in the United States. I started looking for
planning processes. First, I found the group that was planning to occupy
Freedom Plaza in Washington DC. I went to one of their meetings, and it was
through that that I learned about this group planning to occupy Wall Street.
That was late July or early August. Out of curiosity and a desire to see the process of people trying to figure out what joining this global movement might mean in the United
States, I went to my first
meeting on August 10th, 2011.
I had been covering activism in New York for a few years. I didn’t recognize anyone, which was really exciting. They were younger than a lot of the people that I’d been following around and getting to know. There was a sense of possibility that I had never felt before in that group, while also a sense of chaos and madness in good ways and sometimes in frustrating ways. I went as a reporter looking to cover this, and the first thing that happened when I arrived was having to present myself as a reporter and having a debate ensue about that. By the time the occupation began, I had felt a sense of connection with this community beyond the kind of normal reporter relationship. It seemed like such an important and exciting thing, though there was so much uncertainty. Probably if you had polled everybody that first day or the day before, most people might have said, “Well, it will just get clobbered by the cops on the first day, and that will be it, but it’s worth a try anyway.” As the occupation persisted, I stuck around as much as I could and kept reporting. It was such a privilege to watch it develop and, in some cases, pitch in and help it develop.
I had been covering activism in New York for a few years. I didn’t recognize anyone, which was really exciting. They were younger than a lot of the people that I’d been following around and getting to know. There was a sense of possibility that I had never felt before in that group, while also a sense of chaos and madness in good ways and sometimes in frustrating ways. I went as a reporter looking to cover this, and the first thing that happened when I arrived was having to present myself as a reporter and having a debate ensue about that. By the time the occupation began, I had felt a sense of connection with this community beyond the kind of normal reporter relationship. It seemed like such an important and exciting thing, though there was so much uncertainty. Probably if you had polled everybody that first day or the day before, most people might have said, “Well, it will just get clobbered by the cops on the first day, and that will be it, but it’s worth a try anyway.” As the occupation persisted, I stuck around as much as I could and kept reporting. It was such a privilege to watch it develop and, in some cases, pitch in and help it develop.
I write for a variety of magazines. In the weeks
preceding the occupation, I was pitching stories about this idea to a lot of different
places that I write for, and almost nobody was interested. I got such
interesting responses like, “Oh, protests never amount to anything.” “Get over
it. Don’t expect anything from that.” I’m an editor at this website Waging Nonviolence, so I get to decide what gets published there. I had founded it with friends in
2009. We started it as a community blog because we
were looking for a site where we could get news out about activism around the
world, especially around strategy and a conversation. We wanted to create a place where global activists
could interact with each other. It started as a blog just to keep track of our own notes about what was
happening. Other people later started wanting to write for it, and it became a
news website.
In the middle of 2011, we got some initial funding that enabled us to get some paid reporting happening. it was mostly young activist writers and some older columnists. My community at that time was this group of young activists and columnists that included George Lakey, who’s a veteran anti-nuclear and Civil Rights activist, as well as an environmental activist and trainer. It included Mary King, who was on the staff of SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement. As this Occupy idea and this occupation was developing, I was in constant conversation with them, and they were really important teachers in helping me think about what needed to be said about what was unfolding. Once it blew up, once the news started paying attention to it, there came to be a lot of opportunities to write about it. I ended up writing mostly for Harper's and the Nation. I was also writing for Waging Nonviolence and working to make it a place for people in the movement to write about what they were doing and to interact and to articulate their strategic ideas. That was a real privilege to be a part of.
In the middle of 2011, we got some initial funding that enabled us to get some paid reporting happening. it was mostly young activist writers and some older columnists. My community at that time was this group of young activists and columnists that included George Lakey, who’s a veteran anti-nuclear and Civil Rights activist, as well as an environmental activist and trainer. It included Mary King, who was on the staff of SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement. As this Occupy idea and this occupation was developing, I was in constant conversation with them, and they were really important teachers in helping me think about what needed to be said about what was unfolding. Once it blew up, once the news started paying attention to it, there came to be a lot of opportunities to write about it. I ended up writing mostly for Harper's and the Nation. I was also writing for Waging Nonviolence and working to make it a place for people in the movement to write about what they were doing and to interact and to articulate their strategic ideas. That was a real privilege to be a part of.
What was so striking was that, while it was
happening, it was hard for me to be anywhere else. My training is in the study
of religion, and I often think about non-religious things in religious terms. It really felt like sacred space. The whole rest of the world was a
little less real than that place. Part of what made it that was this
sense of creativity that was always going on there, that was always on
display there. Everywhere you’d turn, you’d be struck by someone coming up
with something raw and original on their own and doing it in such a way as to
contribute to a community. To me, it was such a reminder of how the creativity
of our world gets caught up in our jobs and in things that just perpetuate the
status quo. Even just a little bit of redirection of that into one common
place that called for something different was so powerful. I saw so many
people attracted to that. I remember always going there and feeling like time would slip away. I would spend hours drifting
around from thing to thing just because there was so much energy and so much to
be done.
By the middle of 2012, I came to start thinking about all of
the reporting I had been doing on the movement. Only some of it had ended
up in published articles. As the media fixation turned away and
passed on, I felt a need to make sure that what had happened there could be
remembered and could be recovered by people in the future who would be
interested in it. Initially, I thought about just putting things together in an e-book and sharing it with everybody freely, and friends really
pushed me to think about it more as something that could be preserved in a library. My editor at University of California Press
was interested in doing that, so we published it under the title Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.
Putting the book together over the course of 2012 and early 2013 was just such a pleasure—going through notebooks and remembering things, having conversations with people to check that I was getting a story right and realizing I had gotten it completely wrong and having to recalibrate my conception of what had been going on. Constantly as I was writing, the overwhelming feeling was a sense of knowing that there was so much that I had missed, that my perspective was only one perspective. I tried to capture as many voices as I could, but there is so much that I missed. There are other approaches that I could have taken. I’m grateful that this isn’t the only document that has come out. They continue to come out and show the diversity and the many pieces that made the movement what it was, the many lives and souls and experiences.
Putting the book together over the course of 2012 and early 2013 was just such a pleasure—going through notebooks and remembering things, having conversations with people to check that I was getting a story right and realizing I had gotten it completely wrong and having to recalibrate my conception of what had been going on. Constantly as I was writing, the overwhelming feeling was a sense of knowing that there was so much that I had missed, that my perspective was only one perspective. I tried to capture as many voices as I could, but there is so much that I missed. There are other approaches that I could have taken. I’m grateful that this isn’t the only document that has come out. They continue to come out and show the diversity and the many pieces that made the movement what it was, the many lives and souls and experiences.
In
the book, I talk about it as an apocalypse, this Occupy apocalypse, this
unveiling, the sense in which the world is never quite the same again. I think
as with a lot of people who experienced that, ever since I’ve been grasping to
figure out what the next thing is that follows through on that event and on
that experience. Through Waging Nonviolence and through other
reporting, I’ve been trying to keep track of the different ways that the Occupy
diaspora has manifested itself, ways that other movements around the country
and around the world have been picking up the baton. I
think there are ways in which this movement and the other movements around the
world represent a yearning for a new kind of social contract and a new kind of
political philosophy that has been partly articulated and that we only partly
have the language for. Part of what I’ve been trying to do is to figure out
if I can help contribute to that language and contribute to the unravelling of some of the longing that’s in people that our existing political order isn’t coming
close to satisfying.
Why is it so important? Of course it’s so important. To me, the question is, "Why have we not been doing it all our lives, all the time?" Democracy is something that calls us to participation. It’s an ideal that calls us to participate and to be a part of our political system. It’s just amazing the extent to which we just hand that over to others, to people who we know we don’t trust, but still somehow we entrust them. I think organizing is the fabric of life and of society. Learning how to do it, learning how to build power, how to build counter-power when necessary, should be something that we learn from childhood. It’s so amazing to me how the movements of American history, one by one, get tucked away and forgotten. We don’t know that we’ve actually been doing this all along and that our history has been made by these movements. Every generation in some way has participated in essential movements. Not everybody in every generation, but every generation has had them. When something like this comes along, we all have the responsibility to participate in history. Regular people participate in history by finding a way to organize and make their voices heard.
The idea of democracy, of transparency, of accountability has spread around the world, has been sold in some sense around the world, has been promoted, sometimes at the barrel of a gun, but people know that what they’re getting is not that. People know that their systems, to the extent that we have systems that might appear democratic, are completely inadequate in confronting the powers that are really ruling our lives day to day, hour to hour. Most of us spend our lives working for corporations that generally are not accountable to democracy, so we know very well that the idea that we’ve been told is so important our whole lives is just not being practiced. I think it’s really important that a movement like this comes up and tries to articulate what we really mean by democracy.
One of the things that seemed so important about this movement to me personally was how much I discovered I had to learn from it. I saw this with a lot of people. People would come in with some idea of what they thought the movement should look like, and what they found developing was something that pushed them to think even more deeply and more adventuresomely about how society should look. The kinds of encounters that you would have with people from very different backgrounds would force you to rethink your priorities and your sense of what the movement should really look like. The movement to me was such a reminder that the politics that we need are just so far from the politics that we’re used to imagining and talking about. I think on all levels we’ve lost our sense of what it means to build power in our communities and to organize ourselves. We’ve lost a sense that it's even a part of life and that it’s an adventure.
Part of why it’s so important for me to not just show up to something like this but to tell the story is that we are so often told stories in which the powerful man comes in and rescues us. I was so struck by the Batman movie where the people are portrayed as tools of the villain, and the hero is this very wealthy arms contractor who swoops in and saves the day. That’s the message that’s so often repeated in our stories about how change happens and about how good wins. I think we need stories very different than that. We need stories about the drama of organizing, about the drama of building a movement and trying to control it, trying to see it develop and see it succeed. That is a breathtaking drama, and that was what brought me to those initial meetings in the first place. I had met enough amazing activists to know that they were heroes. Their stories deserved to be told as heroes, including their difficulties, including some of the embarrassing stuff, including some of the stuff that reveals that they are also human, and that this is something that anybody can enter and should see themselves entering.
I hope that if we have more stories about this kind of thing that we will have more activists and organizers and people who see resistance against injustice as just part of their lives, where they take a new kind of responsibility for their community and their politics, one in which they see themselves as protagonists and not bystanders. I want to see a society that’s better at organizing people who are vulnerable, a society that is better at hearing the voices of the vulnerable and hearing the voices of people who feel a sense of hopelessness, a society that responds to those voices because it has no choice, because those voices are powerful, and those voices carry weight because those people know how to organize.
I think there have been a lot of lessons in Occupy, ways in which there were illusions taking place, ways in which the movement in some ways dissolved parts of itself because it knew it wasn’t living up to its own ambitions. It knew that it wasn’t speaking with or among communities it needed to be among. Among recognizing those shortcomings, you could see the discussions fall apart. I think that was healthy. I think we need a movement that can take many forms, and that as it progresses, matures in different ways in order to be more effective and more accessible to the people who need it the most. Above all, I think the hope should not be that Occupy goes on forever as such, or that particular ambitions articulated in the Principles of Solidarity in September of 2011, however eloquent they were, should become the new constitution or something like that. I think the best we can hope for is a society in which people know how to organize in many different ways to meet many different needs, a society that knows power resides in that rather than these forces that seem so beyond our control.
I think a glimpse of some of our potential is what we saw in the park. The stuff that I was talking about that drew me in so much, that creativity, that to me is the most powerful force. I’ve seen this testified in movements around the world. People don’t join because they see a strategy that they think can work so much as they join because they see an environment that just draws them in and that feels authentic and creative. I think that’s a glimpse of what we all hope a good society would be full of—that creativity, people who feel free to invent and to better themselves and to come up with new ways of doing things, and to do them themselves and with each other without feeling like they have to hurt others to do those things, without feeling like they have to throw someone under the bus in order to send their kids to school, without feeling like that creativity is compromised, or that they’re doing it just for a wage.
Why is it so important? Of course it’s so important. To me, the question is, "Why have we not been doing it all our lives, all the time?" Democracy is something that calls us to participation. It’s an ideal that calls us to participate and to be a part of our political system. It’s just amazing the extent to which we just hand that over to others, to people who we know we don’t trust, but still somehow we entrust them. I think organizing is the fabric of life and of society. Learning how to do it, learning how to build power, how to build counter-power when necessary, should be something that we learn from childhood. It’s so amazing to me how the movements of American history, one by one, get tucked away and forgotten. We don’t know that we’ve actually been doing this all along and that our history has been made by these movements. Every generation in some way has participated in essential movements. Not everybody in every generation, but every generation has had them. When something like this comes along, we all have the responsibility to participate in history. Regular people participate in history by finding a way to organize and make their voices heard.
The idea of democracy, of transparency, of accountability has spread around the world, has been sold in some sense around the world, has been promoted, sometimes at the barrel of a gun, but people know that what they’re getting is not that. People know that their systems, to the extent that we have systems that might appear democratic, are completely inadequate in confronting the powers that are really ruling our lives day to day, hour to hour. Most of us spend our lives working for corporations that generally are not accountable to democracy, so we know very well that the idea that we’ve been told is so important our whole lives is just not being practiced. I think it’s really important that a movement like this comes up and tries to articulate what we really mean by democracy.
One of the things that seemed so important about this movement to me personally was how much I discovered I had to learn from it. I saw this with a lot of people. People would come in with some idea of what they thought the movement should look like, and what they found developing was something that pushed them to think even more deeply and more adventuresomely about how society should look. The kinds of encounters that you would have with people from very different backgrounds would force you to rethink your priorities and your sense of what the movement should really look like. The movement to me was such a reminder that the politics that we need are just so far from the politics that we’re used to imagining and talking about. I think on all levels we’ve lost our sense of what it means to build power in our communities and to organize ourselves. We’ve lost a sense that it's even a part of life and that it’s an adventure.
Part of why it’s so important for me to not just show up to something like this but to tell the story is that we are so often told stories in which the powerful man comes in and rescues us. I was so struck by the Batman movie where the people are portrayed as tools of the villain, and the hero is this very wealthy arms contractor who swoops in and saves the day. That’s the message that’s so often repeated in our stories about how change happens and about how good wins. I think we need stories very different than that. We need stories about the drama of organizing, about the drama of building a movement and trying to control it, trying to see it develop and see it succeed. That is a breathtaking drama, and that was what brought me to those initial meetings in the first place. I had met enough amazing activists to know that they were heroes. Their stories deserved to be told as heroes, including their difficulties, including some of the embarrassing stuff, including some of the stuff that reveals that they are also human, and that this is something that anybody can enter and should see themselves entering.
I hope that if we have more stories about this kind of thing that we will have more activists and organizers and people who see resistance against injustice as just part of their lives, where they take a new kind of responsibility for their community and their politics, one in which they see themselves as protagonists and not bystanders. I want to see a society that’s better at organizing people who are vulnerable, a society that is better at hearing the voices of the vulnerable and hearing the voices of people who feel a sense of hopelessness, a society that responds to those voices because it has no choice, because those voices are powerful, and those voices carry weight because those people know how to organize.
I think there have been a lot of lessons in Occupy, ways in which there were illusions taking place, ways in which the movement in some ways dissolved parts of itself because it knew it wasn’t living up to its own ambitions. It knew that it wasn’t speaking with or among communities it needed to be among. Among recognizing those shortcomings, you could see the discussions fall apart. I think that was healthy. I think we need a movement that can take many forms, and that as it progresses, matures in different ways in order to be more effective and more accessible to the people who need it the most. Above all, I think the hope should not be that Occupy goes on forever as such, or that particular ambitions articulated in the Principles of Solidarity in September of 2011, however eloquent they were, should become the new constitution or something like that. I think the best we can hope for is a society in which people know how to organize in many different ways to meet many different needs, a society that knows power resides in that rather than these forces that seem so beyond our control.
I think a glimpse of some of our potential is what we saw in the park. The stuff that I was talking about that drew me in so much, that creativity, that to me is the most powerful force. I’ve seen this testified in movements around the world. People don’t join because they see a strategy that they think can work so much as they join because they see an environment that just draws them in and that feels authentic and creative. I think that’s a glimpse of what we all hope a good society would be full of—that creativity, people who feel free to invent and to better themselves and to come up with new ways of doing things, and to do them themselves and with each other without feeling like they have to hurt others to do those things, without feeling like they have to throw someone under the bus in order to send their kids to school, without feeling like that creativity is compromised, or that they’re doing it just for a wage.
In that park, as has been the case in so many movements for justice around the world that have created these spaces of creativity and freedom and experimentation, it was a glimpse, maybe not in terms of how things are actually structured or what things look like, or in terms of so many of the failings of that community. It was this sense of fecundity, which is a nature word. It’s like reproduction. It’s the image of a rainforest, of everything just blossoming and producing and supporting one another, being in some kind of balance in the midst of that producing and inventing and making.
Many of the people who became my gurus in the movement, who helped me understand what was going on the most were the ones who were the most insistent that you couldn’t know where this was going. You wanted to have some sense of what you were looking for. One can have one’s principles. One can have one’s sense of what seems right at a given time. One can have some kind of map, some theories, but you could never really know how it would play out. Who knows what it will look like or how we will go about working out the details, but I think the thing that people want is an experience like that. That’s at least what I want. I would love a world where people can be more creative with each other more freely and with less fear.
You can view the Waging Nonviolence website at http://wagingnonviolence.org/.
You can find Thank You Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse HERE.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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