Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I heard a lot about Occupy when I was in Virginia. I was in
high school during the occupation. I knew I was
somewhat on the same page with the movement politically, and I thought it was a
cool thing going on. When the S17 : One Year Anniversary protests were happening,
I had just moved to the city about two weeks before. I was starting college and
making new friends. Me and two of my friends decided to go and check it out. We
spent about twenty-four hours doing all of the protests. There was a big
celebration/ skill share in Washington Square Park a couple days before the big
protest. We live on Washington Square Park, so we saw all of that. We were
drawn in. We met people. We did direct action training. It was such a positive
energy that we really wanted to stick around.
I grew up in rural Virginia, so I didn’t have a lot of affirmation of my more leftist leanings, and I never would have called myself a socialist or an anarchist or anything like that because you just can’t be that in rural Virginia. That’s not an option. When I got involved with Occupy, there were all of these people with the same ideologies as me, and it was super affirming. I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess I’m not the only person who feels this way. It’s okay to think this way.” There was such a community feeling to it.
I lived a few miles outside of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and there was an Occupy Harrisonburg. I think their biggest event was twenty people. It still meets. It meets every Tuesday at 6PM in the Town Square. My mom actually went to some of the Occupy Harrisonburg protests, so I heard about most of that through her. It was definitely a lot smaller, and it wasn’t really an occupation. My understanding is that the people running Occupy Harrisonburg decided not to do an occupation. They did a lot around fracking. There has been some anti-fracking activism in the area because they’re trying to frack there, so they hooked up with some of those groups.
I grew up in rural Virginia, so I didn’t have a lot of affirmation of my more leftist leanings, and I never would have called myself a socialist or an anarchist or anything like that because you just can’t be that in rural Virginia. That’s not an option. When I got involved with Occupy, there were all of these people with the same ideologies as me, and it was super affirming. I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess I’m not the only person who feels this way. It’s okay to think this way.” There was such a community feeling to it.
I lived a few miles outside of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and there was an Occupy Harrisonburg. I think their biggest event was twenty people. It still meets. It meets every Tuesday at 6PM in the Town Square. My mom actually went to some of the Occupy Harrisonburg protests, so I heard about most of that through her. It was definitely a lot smaller, and it wasn’t really an occupation. My understanding is that the people running Occupy Harrisonburg decided not to do an occupation. They did a lot around fracking. There has been some anti-fracking activism in the area because they’re trying to frack there, so they hooked up with some of those groups.
After I went to the one year anniversary protests, we
discovered that there was an active group at NYU called NYU for OWS. We were so
jazzed from the three days we had spent at the anniversary. It was our first ever protests. We
decided to go to a meeting. At my first meeting, we changed the name of the group to Economic Justice. Fifty percent of the people had been involved in Occupy, and fifty percent had not. I think the
group had been much different during Occupy. I got involved in a housing
justice campaign with Chase Bank and started organizing from there. I got to
know a lot more people who had been involved with Occupy, and I started doing
organizing outside of NYU. I ended up organizing around the Cecily McMillan
trial.
I think there was a decent amount of backdoor politics surrounding the trial. I think there is a reason that we ended up with Judge Zweibel. We actually originally had a different judge who was known to be much more fair. The judge controls so much of what evidence is submitted. The jury really got to see so little of the actual incidence that it really showed that even though you’re supposed to have a fair trial with a jury of your peers, the jury doesn’t really matter. What matters is the judge who is ultimately a servant of the state, so he is going to try and get the verdict that he is looking for. He was able to control that verdict by controlling how much evidence was submitted, by controlling the things that the prosecution was able to object to, which was basically everything, and what Cecily’s lawyers were able to object to, which was practically nothing.
The majority of the jury came to regret their verdict after they were able to see all of the evidence and after they realized that the sentence could be jail time. They ended up writing a letter to the judge asking for leniency. I don’t think they told the jury that having a hung jury, which means having a jury that doesn’t agree, was an option because there was one juror who believed she was innocent at the end, and he eventually went with the guilty verdict because he didn’t want to fight a losing battle. You’re putting 2-7 years of someone’s life in the hands of these random people, and you’re not even giving them all of the information they need to make a rational decision about the next 2-7 years of this person’s life. It’s really, really crazy how it works because it is so dishonest, and it is so skewed. It’s ridiculous.
For me, a lot of why I’m an activist is because I can’t be
happy unless the people around me are happy. Even when you’re just walking down
the street, you see so many homeless people. It’s so visible. There are so
many problems. It confounds me that there are people out there who
aren’t actually doing anything to make the world better. There is so much rampant
income inequality and racism and sexism. That affects everyone on
an emotional level. Anytime you have a friend who is broke and can’t afford
food, that is a political problem. I take all of my politics very personally. If you’re
aware of your surroundings at all, it’s pretty clear that there is a lot going
on that really isn’t okay, and then when you dig a little bit deeper, it
becomes even more clear that things are not okay. I think if we don’t act soon, we
will probably end up in a state of depression, and it will be even harder than
it is now to make any sort of change.
I have three main areas of interest. Prison abolition, especially right now, is one of the things that I feel most strongly about. I had done some work on that front before Cecily’s trial. I've believed for a very long time that putting people in jail, even if the jail conditions are decent, is not actually a way of preventing crime whatsoever. If our goal as a society is to have less crime, then we should be looking for a system that will effectively reduce the bad things people do to each other. This current system simply increases it. When you take a close look at what's criminalized and what's not, then it really doesn't make sense at all. It takes a while to realize the racialized nature of the prison system. I grew up in rural Virginia, which is basically all white, so I hadn't thought about it. Then, I started reading and researching and realized that basically all of our jug laws are just ways for our government to put more black and brown people in jail.
Jail is a really horrible place, and once people are in jail, it takes away a lot of the prospects for the rest of their life. One jail sentence does not end when a sentence is over. It affects you for the rest of your life. Most prisons just have inmates sitting around all day doing nothing. The thought that you can take people away just to have them do nothing for so many hours makes absolutely no sense. People who are in our jails are often low income people, so the fight against income inequality is also a fight against incarceration. The less poverty you have, the less crime you have. I think that decriminalizing drugs and opening more rehab communities that work well would be the first step toward prison abolition. Those things are intimately connected. I think we need to build a restorative justice system. I think the idea shouldn’t be punishing. I think the idea should be healing.
The other big area I’m working in right now is student debt because I have a very intense personal history with student debt and the high cost of education. The price of education really is ridiculous. I think there is a lot of movement potential there because you get a bunch of people with fancy degrees who think that they are going to get jobs with their fancy degrees, who paid a lot of money or owe a lot of money for their fancy degrees, and all of the sudden all of these people are not able to get jobs. When that happens, what are we going to do other than start a movement? I think student debt is a good starting point. Corporations are running universities. NYU has the CEO of Chase Bank on its Board of Trustees. Those are the people that run the universities rather than the students, and that is why they cost so much. A lot of what student debt activism comes down to is taking back power and self-governance and democracy in educational institutions.
I have three main areas of interest. Prison abolition, especially right now, is one of the things that I feel most strongly about. I had done some work on that front before Cecily’s trial. I've believed for a very long time that putting people in jail, even if the jail conditions are decent, is not actually a way of preventing crime whatsoever. If our goal as a society is to have less crime, then we should be looking for a system that will effectively reduce the bad things people do to each other. This current system simply increases it. When you take a close look at what's criminalized and what's not, then it really doesn't make sense at all. It takes a while to realize the racialized nature of the prison system. I grew up in rural Virginia, which is basically all white, so I hadn't thought about it. Then, I started reading and researching and realized that basically all of our jug laws are just ways for our government to put more black and brown people in jail.
Jail is a really horrible place, and once people are in jail, it takes away a lot of the prospects for the rest of their life. One jail sentence does not end when a sentence is over. It affects you for the rest of your life. Most prisons just have inmates sitting around all day doing nothing. The thought that you can take people away just to have them do nothing for so many hours makes absolutely no sense. People who are in our jails are often low income people, so the fight against income inequality is also a fight against incarceration. The less poverty you have, the less crime you have. I think that decriminalizing drugs and opening more rehab communities that work well would be the first step toward prison abolition. Those things are intimately connected. I think we need to build a restorative justice system. I think the idea shouldn’t be punishing. I think the idea should be healing.
The other big area I’m working in right now is student debt because I have a very intense personal history with student debt and the high cost of education. The price of education really is ridiculous. I think there is a lot of movement potential there because you get a bunch of people with fancy degrees who think that they are going to get jobs with their fancy degrees, who paid a lot of money or owe a lot of money for their fancy degrees, and all of the sudden all of these people are not able to get jobs. When that happens, what are we going to do other than start a movement? I think student debt is a good starting point. Corporations are running universities. NYU has the CEO of Chase Bank on its Board of Trustees. Those are the people that run the universities rather than the students, and that is why they cost so much. A lot of what student debt activism comes down to is taking back power and self-governance and democracy in educational institutions.
Another thing that I'm very tied to is mountain top removal. I grew up in Appalachia. Appalachian culture is more my culture than anything else. I grew up just across the border from West Virginia. When I learned at around twelve or thirteen that the mountains were getting blown up, it was the most emotionally jarring thing I've ever experienced because that is my home, and those are my mountains, and those are my people who are being forced to leave the mountains basically because companies want to make money quicker. You can mine the same coal a little bit slower without blowing up the mountain. It's also at the intersection of economic justice in that the people who are affected are usually very low income people. It shows that those are the people that our government is willing to sacrifice. It's also environmental because it's destroying the earth.
I would like to see a
world where everyone is just able to love each other all the time. I would like
to see a world where everyone has enough to eat, where everyone has a roof over
their head, where everyone has at least some time to do the things that they
love the most. Everyone deserves a decent amount of time to do what they most
want to do. Everyone should have people around them who love them, and everyone
should have supportive communities. There's a really great essay by Bell Hooks called Love as the Practice for Freedom. It's about during the struggle acting from a
place of love for everyone. I think once we have our basic needs met, like
water and food and living space, then it will be way easier for all of our social
relationships to be healthy and loving all of the time.
I imagine the future we are working to build as a very warm and comfortable place where you just feel like you can rest. In this world, you really can't rest. You can't just relax. I want to see a world where you can relax a lot of the time. I think if we lived in that environment all of the time, we would have so much art and so much building and so much writing because everyone would be able to do what they most want to do. It would be very physically beautiful. I think realistically there will always have to be people doing some sort of work to make the world a better place, but if we all lived in a world that is close to that, then that work would be so much easier. I think we would see a lot of smiling faces. There would obviously be unhappiness, but that would always pass.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
I imagine the future we are working to build as a very warm and comfortable place where you just feel like you can rest. In this world, you really can't rest. You can't just relax. I want to see a world where you can relax a lot of the time. I think if we lived in that environment all of the time, we would have so much art and so much building and so much writing because everyone would be able to do what they most want to do. It would be very physically beautiful. I think realistically there will always have to be people doing some sort of work to make the world a better place, but if we all lived in a world that is close to that, then that work would be so much easier. I think we would see a lot of smiling faces. There would obviously be unhappiness, but that would always pass.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/