Why We Occupy
November 1
Josh II
What you do here in Comfort?
What I do kind of shifts every day. That’s not enough of a prompt.
Well, how does the Comfort station work?
How does it work? I mean, we hand people things. Internally, it’s fairly amorphous. The personnel change a lot.
Actually, there’s been this strange evolution. We started a good ten feet that way as our front wall, and then we started moving out this way more and more and more. I am ashamed to say that I pushed for the first step out—I mean, storing stuff in front of this wall—and since then, we’ve been moving a little bit in front of that. We’ve just been inching out and reorganizing. I feel that now there’s some wasted space back there. We were just having a conversation about this.
You need to move back that way?
That’s what I want, but different people want different things. Back there, the space that used to be the center of Comfort is now tents.
So how long have you been occupying?
I started on, like, the second or third of October, but it hasn’t been a full month. I took a little bit more than a week off, occupied D.C. a little bit. I went down and saw some friends in Pennsylvania. D.C. is nothing, in my opinion, compared to Wall Street. I love it here.
What’s the difference?
It’s cultural. And, well, the energy and the population are different. I was only there for four days, but a big difference in the culture is that defusing is an important thing here. You could say metaphorically that this exercise on a larger scale and a smaller scale is a big practice study of defusing and calming and slowing.
Something that I often do when somebody comes up with a great idea that’s really . . . I don’t think it’s a great idea, but they love it. They pursue it loudly and talk about it for a while. I’m often not interested, and so the way that I don’t take responsibility for it? I say, “I don’t really understand, but I support you in pursuing that.”
That works plenty well in New York, and I do that all the time when it comes up. But in D.C., there was this one guy—I said that to him and he was really upset about it, that I wasn’t accepting the responsibility from him. He was trying to give me responsibility, and rejecting it was something I shouldn’t have done. He was upset about that, and he said I was rude and my parents had raised me wrong or something. He was fairly vocal in that regard, which I thought was pretty silly. I didn’t think I did anything all that rude, although maybe there was a little spark at some point that I didn’t notice. Whatever, that kind of thing seemed more common there.
I was working in the kitchen over there and there was this one guy who . . . am I talking too fast?
No, not at all.
There was this one guy who . . . when it’s difficult to get food out, we invite people in. I always say, “If you want food faster, come back here.” But he was, instead, protesting. There were a bunch more crazies in D.C. than there are here. I don’t like that term, but if you’re going to reduce it in that way, he was protesting, saying, “We want food and we want it now!” It wasn’t a pragmatic approach. It was clear that this was a city where Congress took place.
You mean how they can’t get along that well?
I mean there’s not a whole lot of honesty. Not that people lie; people don’t go all the way. They don’t allow themselves to be persuaded. They remain distant and sturdy in their flimsy beliefs.
How would you characterize the New York occupation?
It is not that way here. That is all distinguished from New York. I like people, and getting to know people here is different than getting to know them elsewhere. It’s a fairly intense lifestyle. Something about it brings out the multiplicity of roles that everyone has to be, has to em-person. People seem a little more human and complicated.
How’d you hear about it?
I was a rambling man. I went to a college last year. It was not the place for me, Juniata College in Pennsylvania. I didn’t like it, and I decided I would take a year off, hitchhike across the country looking at colleges, then return to an academic life, which I’m very interested in. Once I got started, I loved it. After a month, Rosh Hashanah fell upon the land. I came down to New York City for family, and my sister was interested in Occupy Wall Street. I dropped by, and having a significantly more free life than her, I stayed.
Your sister didn’t come with you?
She had a chance to visit. She’s up in North Hampton. She wants to be here, but she’s got other obligations there.
What does your family think about your occupying?
My immediate family loves it.
They’re politically-minded.
Yeah.
Is there a red diaper story in the family?
Diaper?
Red diaper babies. When you come from socialists, that’s what they call it. Has your family been politically active?
Uh . . . politically-minded. They’re very proud of my presence here.
Have they been down, other than your sister?
They came down. We were all here together, but they just dropped by. One of these weekends they’re going to show up and stay awhile.
Here in Comfort, do people requisition stuff? Or they just show up and they’re like, “I need boots,” or whatever?
That’s actually switching right now. We’re switching to a program for, I hope, only the more valuable items and less specific items. We have a storage unit, and when somebody wants something, they say, “Can I have this?” Then we say, “Come back in an hour.” We get the stock—a specific list of what we have, what they want—every hour.
Oh, you have storage off-site? If you don’t mind me asking, is that because people were walking away with stuff?
I mean, that’s one of the reasons. Also, we have way too much stuff to store here. We’re switching to that other program because people were walking off-site with stuff, and people who weren’t staying here were getting things that—I don’t want to say they were getting things that we need, but . . . I want to motivate those who have commitment. An hour of commitment is good. That means they’re here for an hour, they’re coming back, and they’re organized. I don’t want to say no to anybody, but there are certain people who I also don’t want to say yes to. This is a way where it’s okay. We don’t have to say either.
What’s your dream for Comfort? What direction—
Move that way. [Points.] That’s the direction we need to go in. That way, because this path gets so crowded. ❖
Priscilla
Are you sleeping over?
Yes. I go to work on Long Island, and then I come here. It’s, like, an hour and a half travel. I come here and I work in Comfort as long as I can. I’m really trying hard not to exhaust myself, because for the first couple weeks, I definitely was. But to me it’s a beautiful place. I feel really good and empowered here.
How long have you been here?
I’ve been here since . . . October first? I think October first is the day of the Brooklyn Bridge thing. I’d gotten arrested, and it empowered me more to come here.
You weren’t staying here when you were arrested?
No, no, I was not staying here yet. That’s true. I stopped by once or twice. I’m here alone. Not alone—I don’t want to say alone because I’ve met so many people here, but at first I was scared of coming here alone. I didn’t know what the situation was. I didn’t know what was up with here, but as time progressed . . . you meet so many beautiful people here that are truly looking out for each other.
Do you sleep in the Comfort area?
I don’t have my own setup. We give our own things away. Often I don’t have a sleeping bag or anything like that. I have some friends; sometimes I stay in their camp. I don’t have my own spot. I’ve even slept in the tents back there. We just put them up.
Is this your first stint in activism?
Yeah, actually, it’s my first full-fledged. I’m out, I’m doing things, I’m alone. Yeah, I’m really doing this.
What brought you on board?
Just the whole life of being comfortable with being uncomfortable. You know, people always come here and they’re like, “How are you protesting? You’re so young. Blah, blah, blah.” Yeah, I don’t have parents that are paying for my school and my necessities. When rent comes before food, you know that there’s a problem. It just took a lot of time for me to figure out how to do something about it. I think that this was just the best opportunity to. So yeah, that’s why I’m here.
Are you in school?
No. I can’t afford school, and I’m extremely afraid of loans. I don’t have the money to pay for it, so I don’t want to apply for it.
Is that something you would like to do if you could figure it out financially?
Of course. Yeah, I would love to go to school. I think it’s a really great thing, you know what I mean? A lot of people here would love to.
But don’t have the resources.
It’s difficult for a lot of young people.
Any great moments you’ve had so far at the occupation?
It’s a really great community, and everyone’s really truly watching out for each other. It’s great when people come here to donate things. They experience it, and they’re like, “Wow! This is so much different than trying to figure out what’s going on by watching T.V.” So for me, the best part is teaching people by showing them what’s going on.
Here at Comfort, we do so much. People are very surprised that all of this is working, and that we are able to support people here and beyond. A lot of things here are really astounding to people.
Can you tell me a little bit about the evolution of Comfort?
Comfort is in a constant state of construction. We’re constantly trying to minimize, and get things to where they should be going. We do have issues where people come here with bags and stuff them all day long. We’re asking people for sizes now. I don’t know what Josh told you . . .
Not about sizes.
We’re trying to implement a system where people request things that they need. We’re going to have necessities here like socks, hats, gloves, things like that to keep warm, but we’re really trying to get people to hold more responsibility for the things that they’re taking, and be more accountable for them.
When it rains, a lot of people ditch their things. It’s sad to see a really large pile under that tarp when it rains. Now that there are tents here the past couple weeks, there’s plenty of space for people to, you know, actually take care of their things.
Not just giving things out at random.
Yeah, we know who’s taking it. We don’t want control of anyone, but it makes our job easier to get the right kind of clothing on people.
That makes a lot of sense.
I like those boots.
[Laughs.] A lot of people donate great things here, things you wouldn’t even imagine. Things like, “What is this silk shirt doing here?” or, like, really big name brands or whatever. And all these fur coats. They come in, and I don’t know where they go, but I see people wearing them, so it’s good. People are wearing all kinds of things here. It’s interesting.
So it’s, like, fancy ladies coming with fur coats?
I mean, some people. I guess they just had it sitting there. Yeah, not exactly all fancy ladies . . .
Just people with old furs. Well, I have old furs, so. . . .
Yeah, in the beginning of me coming here, there were a lot of fur coats, and I was like, “What’s going on?”
There are a lot of vegans here, I would imagine.
I don’t even think this is fur. I’m hoping it’s not. [Laughs.] Someone gave it to me personally yesterday, and it’s keeping me really warm.
That’s a really nice coat.
Yeah. All I had was the jean jacket, so I was just like, “Aagh!”
That’s terrible.
It’s okay. I layer like crazy to be here.
Do you have winter plans?
We’re trying to get more wool things and less cotton so we can actually stay warm. When it rains, the absorption is totally different, so we’re working on getting less cotton, more fleece, things like that. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the tents and things. We’re trying to get porta-potties off-site. We’re actively working on that.
Comfort specifically is working on that?
Yeah, because it’s a Comfort thing. But we need a permit. That was put on the back burner; there’s a lot of things going on.
Where would you put them?
We’re hoping not to put them on-site. That would be a really terrible thing, if they were. The thing is that we do have sanitation crews. We have sanitation crews going to McDonald’s and the areas where we are going to the bathroom, and cleaning up as much as they can. We have a lot of things going on.
It’s like supper. As disheveled as it looks sometimes, it’s so beautiful. Yeah, I can’t describe it. It’s something I’ve been waiting for, this community, and everybody realizing that things are messed up, and that they should stand up as opposed to, like I said, being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
I didn’t realize Comfort was responsible for other stuff besides the physical comfort stuff.
Yeah, it’s just general comfort. We try to take care of all aspects. There are a lot of parts of us. Right now, we’re having a problem with laundry and things like that.
I had heard that they do a big collection on Fridays.
No. They did it a couple days ago, but there’s so much. And when it rains and everything gets left out, someone’s got to pick it up. That’s a huge pile over there, and it was bigger. There’s always a really large pile. It’s unfortunate, but we don’t have a working group for laundry, exactly. It’s all volunteer right now . . . it’s going to be a great thing in the winter when someone wants to escape from the cold.
To go to the laundromat?
Yeah, I think it’ll be great. There weren’t that many people this time. Josh went the other day, and it was, like, sixteen hours of doing laundry. They filled a whole truck, and they went to the Bronx or something.
Is there any way to pay for a service?
It’s expensive. Comfort doesn’t get help from Finance, as far as I know. It’s pure donation, and we try to keep it separated so we can make sure that we are making decisions with the community.
Not many people here go to the G.A. I know I definitely don’t, and a lot of people don’t that are working damn hard here. There are people from the park, I’m sure, but a lot of us don’t have the time for it because everyone’s trying to do their job. You have to come up with proposals for things and stuff like that.
We’ve kept separate from that, and I personally think it’s better that way. We have more say, as opposed to someone telling us what people need. We know what people need. I mean, it’s hard for a group that’s not exactly working here to know what people need.
Would you say that they’re not exactly working here, the people who are more involved with the G.A.?
Everyone’s got their different personal opinion.
What other groups are totally self-contained?
Actually, a lot of groups are. We have a tobacco-rolling station, and we have Nick @ Nite also. Nick @ Nite has been here for a while.
Do they charge? Someone told me they charge, Nick @ Nite.
No, it’s pure donation, but I think they started getting some help from Finance, maybe through the G.A.
That’s magical.
Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on with that. I was just talking to them briefly the other day.
It’s very unclear where the—
Yeah, it’s unclear where a lot of people stand here. A lot of people get frustrated with us, you know what I mean? They’re like, “Don’t you have all this money to do this and that?” Uh, no, we don’t. When we get donations, we spend it on things that we need here, like, to keep more organized.
Like the racks.
Anything that we need. I’m going to go buy a bunch of deodorant because I can’t find any in storage. There are things that need to be bought with donations.
What kind of things do you need, other than clothes? Toiletries?
We’re fine with, you know, wipes. We’re fine with things like that. I feel like we’re good.
Fine in that you don’t need any more, or fine in that you could use some?
I guess we could always use them, but there is a lot in storage at the moment. People are constantly donating simple things like toothbrushes and toothpaste in bulk, so I know that we definitely have lots of that.
Who’s donating that stuff?
Oh, a lot of people. People from New Mexico and California came together in a small group to donate all these yoga mats and things. It was so good. There are a lot of congregations coming together. There are so many different groups—it’s incredible—that support this, from small non-profit groups to large companies—even C.E.O.’s. They come in here: “Oh, hey, what do you guys need?”
That’s a little weird.
Yeah, it’s weird.
I guess there are all kinds of companies.
They’re small. Not Wall Street companies. Not like J. P. Morgan Chase, no. I’m sure they don’t want us here, no. Brookfield’s not exactly sponsoring us. I mean, you could say that they’re sponsoring us. We’re here, so they are helping us.
By not kicking you out.
Well, not just yet. They tried, but we were like, “Uh-uh-uh, we know your deal.” I mean, cleaning a third of the park at a time, whatever the deal was, and then implement all these new rules where we can’t do anything but basically stand there without any of our belongings? Yeah, that really works! I don’t know if they think we’re mentally challenged here, or we’re all deranged, whatever . . .
Were you here for that?
Yeah, I was here. I was here when they were rolling by. They came with a bunch of cops—I guess five cops—and they were passing out these flyers that I still have somewhere. It was, like, a two-page thing. The second page was warning of all these new rules, but the first one was all kind, like, “Oh, hey, we really need you to get this place clean, and we need you guys to be sanitary.”
A cop was passing by. We do Copwatch, so I took a picture of him with my cell phone camera. He was like, “I’ll see you later!” I think they were maybe afraid because there was supposed to be a lot of support coming in at six. Not many people were here, actually.
Really? I’m hearing different things about that.
There were a lot of people here, but there could have been more. It was supposed to be organized that people were coming.
You were a little disappointed.
There weren’t that many people here, numbers-wise. It was kind of scary. I mean, there’s a constant threat from the police. It’s hard because my uncle’s a cop. I feel for them. They have the same issues we do. Of course, there are some corrupt cops, but I’m totally not against them. I just want them to do their job and take care of us. They have no right coming in here or anything like that, and they don’t.
They don’t.
No, because we have our own security. Oh, yeah, and there’s this security group—I have the card that they gave me last night when I was walking around—they come here on their own accord, but they don’t have anything to do with the actual Security. There are a lot of great people that have come here.
[A crowd of people starts shouting nearby.]
Is that supportive or razzing?
I can’t tell by their faces. Maybe it’s not supportive. I can’t tell. ❖
Christine
Christine sparked a joint as the interview got under way.
You’ve been working in Comfort for a while, haven’t you?
Yes. Since, like, day five or day six. I have an apartment in Brooklyn, so I do what I can to work. I like to work.
So you’re coming during the day?
No, it’s actually my day off today. I work five days a week.
What field are you in?
Fine art paper retail. [Laughs.]
Are you a paper artist yourself?
I’m actually a painter. I like to paint on wood. I don’t have the facilities to make canvases, so I’m trying to get into paper.
Are you sleeping in the park?
Sometimes, yeah. Like, when I’m here late.
How is that working?
It works. I have a weird sleeping schedule. When I was in school—I just graduated—I would sleep in studio all the time, sleep in my chair. So this is no new thing for me.
Let’s talk about Comfort. I didn’t know you guys had a shower schedule. How are you able to get showers?
Well, we used to have a shower guy who was here during the day, but he got kind of burned out, so he left. Anyway, he used to be in in the morning. People would come by and say, “We need a shower.” And then at noon, we would make the calls, and give people the showers. We had a paper list going on.
Wait—you had a shower here?
No. People tried to install showers here, and I was like, “No, no, no.” That was my vote, at least. But people in the area come in, and they’re like, “You can use my shower. I really want to help. Here’s my shower. This is what I can do.” So we send occupants there.
What kinds of people are volunteering for that? I mean, who offers up their showers?
What I assume to be normal people! [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] With cameras in the bathroom?
I’ve only written down the list maybe four times, but there are these two girls from Staten Island that came by, and they’re just like, “Hey, we want to be in the shower list. We came in earlier, but we never got the phone call, so we want to remind you that we have a shower in Staten Island.” You can take a free ferry over there—thirty minutes, awesome ride—and then just walk to their place. It’s a free ride to a free shower, and they were going to feed people also, which is awesome. Creating a sense of community is really integral to this occupation site and the movement, so I feel like they’re really helping.
What other services do you have? I know there’s laundry—
That’s become a separate thing because it was too much for Comfort to handle. We can’t hold both laundry and fresh clothes here; it gets kind of confusing. So we make a pile, and the laundry people just, like, take it. They do the laundry, and they bring it back here or to storage.
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How did you first get involved in the movement?
I have an anarchist friend who I follow on Facebook. A couple days before September seventeenth, it was just like, “Oh, Occupy Wall Street!” I was like, “Cool. I intuitively agree with this, but I want to go there and learn more about it, see what people have to say.” Day one I got lost, so I didn’t come. Day two I started coming here all the time.
Back then I would just hang around and make posters, but I wanted to have a place to help people. I tried Comfort, but they didn’t need volunteers at the time because it was just, like, open bins on benches and “look under the tarp for whatever you need.” People were more honest then, also, as far as strangers go. They really just took what they needed, which was pretty awesome. I mean, anyone who’s been here since the beginning can tell you it was different back then.
And then Comfort became bigger. I would always come after work, and so I learned how to make a bed. I’m learning how to camp out for the winter. I’m learning how to survive outside, so I feel like my knowledge is really helpful.
What are some of the things you’ve learned?
Wool. [Laughs.] I mean, that’s obvious, but I didn’t know how much of a science wool clothing could be. And I’ve learned a little bit of physics on how to create the tarps. Like, this [tarp draped over Comfort] is bad because it would flood, so we need a way to get rid of the water. We need to think of where the water will drop.
Let’s talk about organization. I heard you guys got a phone?
We do have a phone. I don’t really want to talk about that phone because I have disagreements with that. They’re giving out phones for working groups that stay here. That’s the organization, but each group has their own internal organization, and there are other groups who just try to manage communication between groups.
Priscilla was telling me you guys are kind of autonomous here. Financially you are, at least.
Yeah, and that’s become a problem.
Would you want to be more financially tied in?
I would. I understand it’s weird to work with a financial committee, but from what I can reason logically, I think that it just makes sense. The money that Occupy Wall Street has gotten is for the occupants, and Comfort works with the occupants. It makes sense to tap into that money. We need to make sure it doesn’t go anywhere else.
Autonomy is running away from the problem. This is my opinion. Why are we raising our own money? We should be taking that money because donators voted to support the movement. We need help! Why are we going outside when we can just directly take those votes?
And it’s taking control of the money. You know, what if they want to do something crazy and absurd? We’re doing what the money was meant to be used for; they can raise their own funds for that stuff. And then it’s the right group of people doing that. That money, decisions are made through the Spokes Council or the G.A., so it’s a community decision, but us? Our autonomy? I don’t think it’s really working for us. It’s sketchy and uncontrollable. It’s a wild animal. I prefer order, but I understand the moral issues.
My perspective is: We understand what money can do. Let’s direct it to where it should go. This [clothing] is money. We need to make sure it goes to the right people. If it goes to the wrong people, they take it for themselves. But there are a lot of sincere people who donate things, and I feel like it’s our responsibility to make sure it works out.
I work nine hours a day at a really shitty job. It’s so shitty, I’m weary from how terrible it is. But I come here and do work, and that’s part of my contribution to the movement. You know, other people need to find their place, and if it’s giving the blanket to the right person, let’s do that, man. Let’s make sure each tent is warm, you know? We’ve got to think about the future. What’s going to happen in the winter? “Oh, sorry, all our wool blankets were sold on Canal Street because they didn’t feel like buying from China this week,” or whatever.
Over by Nonviolent Communication, they’ve shored up their tents[putting up] with pallets. They were talking about going around and making sure everybody’s tent is good. Maybe you should form a coalition.
There are groups doing that. I would love to be a part of that.
So it’s not just rogue people who care? There’s actually someone doing that?
[Laughs.] Yeah.
But rogue people who care—that’s how Comfort started.
Oh, really? Who started it?
It was a woman named Lizzy from San Francisco. She was like, “I have socks! I have a lot of socks! Come take socks!” And you know, people took socks. Or we just got blankets or carpet from the street, and used that to keep warm. I got bed bugs. [Laughs.]
Or, like, Shon, who started Medical? He was just around. He was a street medic for an organization, and he’s political, so he just hung around. And then people came in. Doctors started getting interested, and the right people were doing what it took to organize and create that. It’s amazing!
And Paulie, who’s on this [shower] list—he’s one of the main contacts—he’s really one of the important people in Medical. He didn’t really do anything. He was just a traveling guy. He just wanted to swing by here, and he ran into his old friends from doing medics in Haiti and Dominican Republic. He just used his skills here, and that’s what’s come out of it. I don’t know everybody’s story, but that’s really, really, like, forty percent of it, at least. And there are about nine to fifteen people that work there. Yeah, they have applications for people to work there, which is understandable because you don’t want chaos.
It’s amazing how organic this whole thing is.
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Comfort people need to know how to keep people warm, not know how to pass out stuff. This should not be a retail job, you know? We run out of socks. Comfort runs out of socks. We can’t keep people warm, so people are like, “Fuck it! I can take care of myself.” They get hypothermia. Endless problem. Automatically, we’ve developed a relationship to the Medical tent.
Because of the sock thing.
Yeah, because of socks. They don’t have warm socks because they’re wet, or we run out of socks, or nobody teaches them to put plastic over their new socks. Or it’s because their shoes are wet Converses. They keep getting wet, so they’re just going to get sick. Their body isn’t becoming warm; it’s not insulating itself. So that’s a really interesting relationship between weather, Comfort and what we do, and Medical. It all balances around. When I go to Storage, I make sure I drop off socks to Medical or fresh blankets, so that they can warm people up and give hypothermia patients a new bed.
Are you finding that a lot of people are getting hypothermia?
During the snowstorm there were twenty-four.
Oh, my God! Really?
Yeah. All day, all day.
Did they have to go to the hospital?
I think some of them did. This is what’s happening around here. This is why I take really seriously what we do here. I don’t know if you saw me yelling at the girl taking six sweaters. I don’t care if you work in Media. If you work in Media, you’re here all the time. When you’re cold, you know, you come here. You don’t have to store stuff.
She was hoarding sweaters.
Yeah.
And what did she say when you yelled at her?
I told her just to come back. And then she was speaking in Spanish to somebody, trying to get around what I was saying. “I’ve been here since the first day!” That’s fine, you know? You should know this is communal property. Sometimes we slip and give it to the wrong people, but we’ve got to do what we can to make sure that everybody’s warm. Serious problems can arise, and we have to be ready for it.
Like weather problems?
Weather problems or . . . like, we had so many socks the third or fourth week, we were just like, “You need socks? Here, take two.” Then, during the snowstorm, we only had one bag of socks to give out to people. We had to use those as gloves. We had an open bin of gloves, and we were like, “Yeah, take that.” I don’t know . . . we’re not thinking as far ahead as we should be.
And the moral problem is that on a nice day like this, we get cold people here who don’t have a place to stay. Last week, there was a mob that went to S.I.S., the storage facility, and they were like, “We heard you have sleeping bags here!” And it’s true, because they are freezing-weather sleeping bags, so we have to store those. The money was allotted by the G.A. for winter, so that the movement can survive.
People have needs, yeah, but I feel like a sense of personal responsibility is lost in desperation. You can go to McDonald’s if you have a problem. You don’t have to give us a problem when we’re just trying to think of the future, think ahead. It sucks! Isn’t that, like, a Republican thought? I don’t know. [Laughs.] But I just think it’s important to keep things in reserve.
Do you have enough sleeping bags for everybody?
Yeah, we do.
So you’re going to start rolling that out when it gets colder?
Dead winter? I don’t know about that.
But you have a fair amount.
Yeah, and I’m sure some people here are going to buy their own stuff, whatever works for them.
So you’re putting together a deep-winter Comfort plan?
People are trying to work on that. That’s between a lot of different groups, yeah.
You don’t have a specific working group that meets for that?
No, and I don’t think there should be. A lot of different groups know what’s going on in a lot of different areas. It should be a conversation. It would be Medical; Comfort; Safe Spaces; Sanitation, because they have to pick up the mess; Sustainability, so that they can handle the trash and, you know, keep up the green thing; and I think that’s it.
What are they doing with the trash? Do you know?
We put it off to the side. I mean, I do what I can to recycle. I’m trying to get money for bins and metal blankets and all that shit, excuse me.
Is the city picking up garbage from you guys?
Mm-hmm, yeah. And we also have someone pick up cardboard, and they put it off to the side over there. They keep it clean for the media, since it’s just on the sidewalk.
Do you have anything else that you’d like to add for the record?
I don’t know . . . I really wish that it was easy to educate people on things. I only have wishes. I wish the world was this, that, I don’t know. You could come back next week, and things would be different. ❖
Red
I’m a street medic. When I’m here, I man the clinic between two and eight in the morning. Also, I kind of just do whatever needs to get done. I’ve been here for a while, so I can give a certain level of direction to people who are new.
As the clinic and the street medics separate, I’ve been doing less on the clinical side, leaving that to the trained nurses and doctors. I just do street-medic-related things. You know, bandaging people up after actions, before actions, during actions, and small stuff when they’re around the camp. Around here, it’s a lot more general-well-being-type things. Like, during the storm the other night, I was running around knocking on tent doors, making sure no one was freezing to death inside their tent.
Christine told me twenty-four people had hypothermia.
Might be a little low. People weren’t prepared. It was nasty out here. It would have been a lot worse if we hadn’t been running around all night, because barely any of those people actually came here and said, “I need help.” Most of them were shivering their asses off, or couldn’t walk. They were just sitting there, wherever they were.
What do you do for that? Do they have to go to the hospital?
If it’s really bad. We sent one or two people to the hospital. Most of them we just warmed up. We had space heaters in our tents, and we just nursed them back to health. Yeah, that was one hell of a night.
Was that before they took away the generators?
No, that was not. We didn’t have any generators. We had a propane space heater, and that was it.
Did you ever get them back?
Nah.
Do you think you’ll ever get them back?
Well, we had a biodiesel generator. They took our generators because they said it was a combustion risk—it was a fire hazard—but the biofuel generator isn’t a fire hazard. We were working on using that to create an electrical grid for the entire park. That plan is still moving forward once we get that back. We have the lawyers working on that, because there’s no real reason for them to take that from us.
They are right in a certain respect, that having generators in this park isn’t necessarily the best idea if there’s a way to avoid it.
Tell me about how you became a medic.
Well, there was this action that happened in Union Square. It was the first time we got real press. I don’t know if you remember the picture on the cover of the Daily News of that girl screaming after being maced? Right when that went down, I was working in Food. There were two medics, and that bench there was just a pile of medical supplies. There was no real order to it.
That was early on?
That was pretty early. I think it was, like, the second week. Food had everything down pretty well, and I just walked over and was like, “Hey, do you guys need help?” And they were like, “Yeah, we need help.” Since then, I’ve gotten a plethora of street medic trainings, and have become someone who can actually contribute.
Have they been training you in here?
We’ve been reaching out to a lot of groups—street medic groups—and having people come from all over the country to do training.
What does the training consist of?
We did a seven-hour basic street medic training in the old J. P. Morgan Chase building at Twenty-Three Wall. We did eye-flush trainings for mace and pepper spray. We did a basic first aid one. We did an herbalist one. We did a Narcan overdose training. A.E.D./C.P.R. training.
What is Narcan?
Narcan is the drug you administer to someone who has overdosed on opiates.
Have you been called to a lot of things?
Yeah. I mean, it varies depending on what’s going on that day. Some days it’s a lot of hand injuries from drumming. [Laughs.] Some days, you just get guy after guy coming in with their hands all bloody, like, “I need to go back out and play!” Other days, after a brutal action or something, they’ll come back with sprained ankles, they got hit, they got maced, stuff like that. Most of the time, especially at night, we stay pretty busy, but what that is depends on the environment for the day.
You said you’re working the overnight?
Yeah. When I’m here, I work the overnight.
Are you able to sleep?
If I’m here, I’ll sleep. I’ll work during the day, then I’ll do an overnight shift, and sleep the next day. But if it’s really bad . . . I went three days without sleep, like, a week ago. Sometimes things just keep coming up, and unless you want to feel like a terrible person in the morning, you can’t just be like, “All right, I’m going to sleep!”
It’s kind of like in a hospital.
Yeah, something like that.
How did you originally get into the movement?
How I originally got here? People have been asking me that a lot. I’m not entirely sure . . . something having to do with the Internet, I guess. I found it somewhere on the Internet. Then it started up, and I watched the LiveStream when I was at the job I used to have. I’m like, “Man, this is great! I never thought something like this would happen! I need to go down there! I need to go down there!” And a couple days in, I finally just said, “Fuck it!” I took a couple days off work and came down, and haven’t been able to leave since.
Are you from New York?
Yeah, I’m from upstate New York. I used to live down here, but it was too cutthroat for me.
I hear that. Tell me about how you quit your job.
So I took two days off work and I came down here. I took a bus, and then a train. I came down, I spent the day here, and I slept here. Woke up the next day, did it again. Around Saturday or Sunday, I realized I can’t leave. I just . . . I don’t think I’m physically capable of doing it.
I’ve been bitching about the state of the world and the state of this country for years. I never thought something like this would happen. Part of what I was bitching about was how my generation were too content with their Xboxes and their reality T.V. shows to ever get up and try to change things. And then they did. I couldn’t pass that up; it was such a large part of my philosophy on why things have declined.
That’s funny because I used to bitch about your generation, too. Now I’m eating my words.
Give it a little while. [Laughs.]
I’m impressed, though. They did get a bad rap.
[Laughs.] Deservedly so.
I’m an Xer and we didn’t do shit, so I can’t criticize you guys. We didn’t have Xboxes, but we didn’t do shit, either.
◆
Did you know people who were down here?
Not when I first got here, but I made friends really quick. It was a lot smaller when I started coming. Most of the people I know now—we’ve all been here since either the beginning or right near the beginning. Then, it was much more like everyone was here for the same reason. Everyone was here to try to make this work. There was a lot less people just here to party, just here to hang out. We were all busting our asses working ridiculous hours, and we got to know each other and became good friends. So now I know plenty of people here. ❖
Shon
I’m part of the Medical crew here at Zuccotti Square. Street medics. We basically provide medical support for the occupation, for the different marches and demonstrations that are in line with the broader scope of the occupation, and for the ninety-nine percent.
You go along on the marches with your equipment?
Yeah. We’re there to treat anything from blisters to pepper spray to baton wounds. We do jail support; when people get out of jail, we’re there to provide medical support in case they have any injuries.
In addition to pepper spray and baton wounds, what other kinds of things happen on the marches?
A lot of cough drops being handed out. We keep people hydrated. If they don’t bring their own water, we try to have water for them. We’ve also been able—in some cases, like on the Brooklyn Bridge—to negotiate with the police about providing emergency medical attention. We’ve been able to get some people out of being arrested.
Are the street medics also active in the park?
Yeah, the street medics do rounds. If there’s somebody that needs medical attention, we’ll go find them and assess them. We see if they can be treated there on the spot. They might need to come to our clinic here, or they might be rushed to the emergency room.
Have you sent a lot of people to the emergency room?
There’s been quite a few, yeah.
I’ve heard some horror stories about the big snowstorm, and the number of people who had hypothermia.
There were a lot of cases of different stages of hypothermia, but it’s a hard number to count. There were wet and shivering people that felt like they didn’t need any medical attention. A lot of them did self-care—went to Comfort, got new clothes, dried out, went to a restaurant or something—and got to feeling better. That night, it was easier to count those who didn’t show signs or symptoms than those who did.
Were you a medic before the occupation?
A little experience in street medic work, but this is a new type of experience, the occupation. The ongoing occupation is something new in the medical field.
How’d you get involved in doing it?
I found out there was no organized street medic presence here. I did want to come down and help out and be a part of it, but when I found out there was no street medic crew, I came down to help with that.
When I got here there was medics, but most of them had to leave. So then we made a call out to the General Assembly for anybody that had medical experience.
Were there a lot of people who had experience?
I think that night we got seven. We started out with, I think, two trash bags full of supplies, and we put our own personal funds together and got other stuff we needed. We had some donations coming in, and it just started growing and growing. Now we’re at the point where we have a really well-operated medical clinic here, with doctors and nurses on staff. We have emotional support and alternative health. Our crew’s gotten a lot bigger, and we’ve evolved immensely.
How many street medics do you have?
It’s hard to tell. Right now, I think we have on-site . . . there’s four right now. We’ve got maybe around twenty that have their own schedules and can be here when they can.
How many doctors and nurses would you say you have?
We probably have four doctors, and somewhere between six and eight nurses. We also have other-skill-level people working in the clinic.
And where are those guys coming from? The city?
All over.
Can you talk about why you decided to get involved?
To participate in direct democracy. This is a wonderful chance to experience it and watch it grow, and to work out all the things that come up. We’re constantly facing new walls in front of us. We find positive ways to take down those barriers, and to make different pathways from what we experience in our normal lives. That alone is priceless. To be able to have this opportunity in direct democracy is a beautiful thing.
Had you been an activist before this?
Yeah.
What kinds of things were you involved in?
Day-to-day community activism: social justice issues, human rights issues, free food programs.
In New York?
Philadelphia.
Like, soup kitchen kind of thing?
Food Not Bombs. Free food distros.
Have you been involved with food distribution here?
No. I love doing food, and I love sweeping and sanitation, but my calling here is Medic. I haven’t done anything else here. [Laughs.]
It seems like a lot of people find a new calling here.
Anything else that you’d like to put on the record?
I think one thing is important: What we’ve learned from this, we can take to our own communities. I would love to see direct democracy in the form of General Assemblies and Spokes Councils in every neighborhood. That would allow us to work on the issues that directly impact where we live, and directly impact our neighbors.
The Spokes Council just started up, didn’t it?
Yep. I think tomorrow’s the first one.
Can you explain to me how it works?
All working groups go.
The whole working group goes?
If they’re able to. You know, we have to have people on shift here. They won’t be able to go, but the whole working group that’s able to goes. One person is the representative, and it rotates; there’s not only one representative. The representative, at any time during the meeting, can be switched out. So it’s not a matter of authority, or any leadership taking on that role. It’s just a spokesperson, speaking to represent the group, and they’ll be with their working group.
So what kind of issues is the Spokes Council going to handle, as opposed to just General Assembly?
Logistics of this park, I believe. What’s going on here, things we’re working on. Medics will be talking about self care, winterization, other things that have been going on. We’ll be able to speak at the Spokes Council about those issues, and address those to the other working groups and caucuses here, which I’m really excited for.
The General Assembly, from what I understand, will be working on issues—the movement as a whole, nationally or globally. Personally, I haven’t been able to sit in a whole General Assembly for a long time. I’m glad that I’ll be able to participate again, to have the time to talk about the issues and things that we’re working on. A lot of working groups—they just meet on their own, work out their own issues, and try to send somebody to the General Assembly to do a report-back. It wasn’t effective. So I’m excited for the Spokes Council.
I’d heard, also, that some people who were not in the spirit of General Assembly were shouting.
Oh, yeah, since the beginning. People thought that was their opportunity to get up and say why they’re here, and list off all the things that are wrong in the world. The General Assembly had set up what they call the People’s Soapbox at the end of the General Assembly to give them time to do that. A lot of people are new to the process. They’re really hyped and have a lot to say.
There are some disruptions, and there will be, but the facilitators, especially, are working really hard to correct that, to make the meetings go smoother so more can get done.
Is the Spokes Council closed to the general population here?
No. They can either join a working group, which everybody is encouraged to do, or there’s the Occupiers Working Group. People that live here can join the Spokes Council as an Occupier. I think that’s great. That addressed a lot of concerns that it was closed.
But I encourage everybody to join a working group. It’s a very productive way to plug in to what’s going on, have something to do, and help out. We do need a lot of help here. There was just a call for help from the kitchen, to do lunch.
Just today?
Just a few minutes ago. And Sanitation always needs help, I know. There’s stuff that has to get done.
I know some people are bothered by the people who are not working and not helping out. Where do you stand on that?
I would like to talk to the people, and find out what are some of their concerns with working groups that they might have an interest in joining. I’ve talked to some people, and they wanted to join some type of working group, but they felt, for whatever reason, it wasn’t a good place for them to be. So I encouraged them to start their own. We really haven’t made it clear that there is that avenue, too.
What kind of working groups need to be made that aren’t there?
I would like to see a group of people who were homeless in New York City before the occupation started. Let them have the opportunity to put their heads together and see what they can come up with. Some of their ideas could make this occupation better. ❖
Walter II
What brought me here is that I’ve never felt that the people had a voice. Big Oil has always been telling us what to do. They took out the trolleys when the trolleys were working, so people could buy more cars. It’s all about politics—being bought—and I never really felt I had a voice. Kind of depressing. But everybody votes every year, and the same stuff happens, basically. The people’s voices are bought.
When I finally had the chance to come down, I stayed for twenty hours straight just talking to people. When it started, I watched it, but I was a little busy. Every day I would read any kind of news articles. I would go to Google News and type in “Occupy Wall Street” and see what kind of articles were being written.
From the beginning, a lot of the articles were slanted, trying to put everybody into one basket of hippies or freaks or something like that. I knew that that wasn’t the truth, because usually, when you read an article that’s based on truth, you can see some facts. Whenever someone calls somebody a name, it ruins the argument for me. I want to know what your facts are. Don’t just hurt somebody because of their clothes or their lifestyle. What are the facts?
So I came down to find out for myself, and the fact is, everybody is down here: directors, lawyers, doctors, nurses, unemployed, poor, drug addicts—yes, people who live a life in and out of the prison system. There’s union members. There’s one-percenters that I’ve stood with and talked with.
Really? Who are in favor?
Yeah, she was a woman from Pennsylvania. She inherited her money. She told me a story about her grandfather. Before F.D.R. started the income tax, there were twenty-six plates at the Christmas dinner, and under each plate was a million dollars.
What!
Because he didn’t want the I.R.S. to get it. She’s a pastor in Pennsylvania. Being a pastor, I believe, has given her compassion for others. Basically, the compassion for others is what’s missing for our society to be strong, for any company to be strong.
I think it’s not too hard to take care of people. Unions have fought for health care and safety issues, which only makes work on the job safer. Your bottom line will go up because you don’t have accidents. When you have to replace the worker, you have to retrain them, and it takes all that money. So for a society to be better, we have to really be compassionate for the poor. We have to help them become better in society, and healthier. The poor have to have health care.
I haven’t been to the doctor in a very long time, and it’s too bad. I’m lucky and I’m healthy, but if something were to happen . . . we hear stories about people having to sell everything they own once they get sick. If they do survive, they’re destitute. This compassion for others is missing, and a lot of it is because of the corporate greed.
The voices of the people haven’t been heard for a very long time. The founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence; we’ve never lived up to it, and that’s a human fact. When Copernicus said we revolve around the sun, “No, no, no! That’s not good enough!” So as humans, we do take a long time to catch up to our ideals. I think this movement is going to change that.
Does your union support your being here?
Yeah, Local Six, Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, Manhattan. Here [on the table] are the signs for all the unions. In the last four to six years, when Bush came in, he started repealing a lot of the workers’ rights, and they said, “Just watch.” And then in Wisconsin, they’re taking away people’s right to collectively bargain, which is slavery in the sense: “You’re going to do what I say, or you’re going to walk, and I’m going to get somebody else to do it.” You know, we’re going backwards.
There’s many different problems, and they’re trying to throw that into the mainstream media as we don’t know what to do: “They don’t even know what their demands are.” If you go to the Occupy Wall Street Web site—I’ve looked at it—it talks about a lot of problems.
It basically stems from money and politics. They buy the Republicans and the Democrats. Whoever wins, we lose.
In the best possible world, where would you see this going?
I would see this going to where lobbyists cannot lobby any more, and actual real people from the communities are in power, and people can vote and have it mean something, and we protect our food supply.
Monsanto has patented the seeds, and they’re putting farmers out of work. That’s their business, but now people from that business are in the F.D.A. That’s collusion. That’s conflict of interest. They’re not interests of the people, they’re interests of their business, and that in itself is wrong.
But it’s been going on. Sophocles, Aristotle, everybody has seen it. We’re human. All we can do is evolve and become better. I was thinking about something last night: U.S.A. 2.0. You know, this is just another growth. And it looks impossible. It does look impossible.
I didn’t know what anarchism was, but basically, I thought it was people running through the streets and burning everything. No. It’s the people, together. People working together is anarchy.
I’ve heard that it’s not necessarily the general union membership, but the people at the top making the choice to support this.
Well, yeah. I think that’s everywhere. Everywhere there’s people on top telling us what we need to do.
[Walter greets Randy in passing.]
There’s a great movie about him. I just saw it about six months ago, and then I saw him down here. I said, “Hey, Randy.”
We do a show on Wednesday nights for the benefit of Occupy Wall Street. It’s at Nine Bleecker—at the Yippie Café, which is a Yippie museum. Come cover it. There were some great people last week. I was going to perform this week with my group, but I cannot. I’m directing a play. This Wednesday, we open for dress rehearsal.
What’s the play?
The play I’m directing is called Divine Intervention. It’s about a woman who goes to confession. She’s sorry for a couple things, but she’s on her seventh husband and she’s not sorry for that. It’s a little comedy.
Anyways, where were we? We were talking about the unions. A lot of people will come to me and say unions are corrupt. There’s corruption everywhere, yes. I think this movement will try to have more transparency. Why not? I don’t have a problem with that. But the unions are in place right now, and they fight for workers’ rights, and it’s the best thing going right now for people to get together. Yeah, we can work towards getting corruption out as well.
Do you think the rank and file support Occupy Wall Street?
Well, I think what’s going to happen is: You will see in the next week or two some major activity, and the unions are going to call their people out like they did when they were going to shut the park down. So when it’s needed, we will show up. There’s people waiting for a chance to help out, and when that chance comes, they will arise just like anything. When we need them, they will be there, I believe. I have faith in that totally because it’s their vested interest as well.
They’ve stripped away our powers as people and as workers, and they’ve given it to the corporations. They can step on our necks and say, “We have somebody who can work for less.” It defeats all of our gains that we’ve made for human rights and workers’ rights, health and safety. It just becomes unhealthy, unsafe, and our communities suffer—our families; that’s the most important. If we can just take care of our families, we can grow up healthy and wise and productive. ❖
George
Before this whole experience, I was a student at American University.
Where is that, D.C.?
Yeah. I was studying philosophy and international relations. I dropped out last May because I couldn’t pay for it anymore. I came back to the city. I started interning for this record label here, Greedhead Entertainment—this rap group Das Racist.
I love Das Racist!
Yeah! I’m Heems’s personal assistant. They went on tour, and I kind of just stuck around. I came down here October fifth and I haven’t left since, so that’s pretty much my story.
I’m Dominican, from very low socio-economic status growing up. Just met the right people, got to the right places, got a liberal-arts college education.
You went to school in the city?
Yeah, I went to public school here. P.S. 87 for elementary school, then Crossroads for middle school on a Hundred and Eighth Street. I was about to go into Stuy, but then we moved to Providence.
Rhode Island?
Rhode Island. Providence is terrible if you don’t know anyone from Brown or RISD. They’ve created this awesome cultural bubble that’s bursting with amazing things, but if you’re not in this circle, you don’t get any of it. It doesn’t spill out into the rest of the city. It’s kind of sad, hopping back and forth between worlds. It’s sad how much is in that bubble that doesn’t get out to the rest of Providence. East Side, Wickenden Street—it’s all there, but nowhere else. It’s just kind of sad.
I went to high school in East Providence. Rhode Island is, like, the bane of my existence. It’s a vacuum. It’s a black hole—a soulless, lifeless black hole for culture. It’s devoid of any substance.
In New York, every place has its own cultural renaissance, all over the city. But if you go to Rhode Island, it’s only in that small area of Providence. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, living there in that soul-sucking vacuum. People are just stuck in this self-centered, vapid, shallow existence, you know? Your Jersey Shore, twenty-four-hour-news-cycle-type deal, all over.
But then I got over that. I went to D.C. for school, then I came here, and then I started doing this.
How long were you in school before you had to drop out?
I did two years. I don’t have a bachelor’s yet. I don’t think I’m going to get a bachelor’s because I just found out that you don’t need a bachelor’s to go to grad school.
Really?
Yeah, it’s not necessary. I met a woman—she’s doing a documentary on this [Occupy Wall Street], and has been following me around for some time. She studied philosophy, just like me. She told me that she dropped out of Columbia, and then a few years later, applied to grad school. She just asked: “Um, I haven’t finished my undergrad, but can I apply to grad school?” And they were like, “Yeah! No problem!”
So you could have a Ph.D. but no B.A.?
Exactly. Apparently, they just want you to have that base understanding. So I think I’m going to go for that.
I’m fascinated.
This is much better than undergrad, this whole thing right here. I’ve learned more in this park in the last four weeks than I have in any classroom in the last twenty years, so I think I’m going to be all set for grad school by the end of this.
I’m actually putting philosophy into practice here, which is so much better than sitting in a classroom reading all these theories and writing papers about them. Instead, I’m like, “No! Let me go try them in an actual open public space!” This experience has been so much more fulfilling than actually just studying philosophy in a classroom.
Tell me something about what work you’re actually doing here. Are you working with the Media people?
I do some work with Media. Well, I stopped doing work with Media after my laptop got stolen, because it’s really hard to handle any media without a laptop.
Did it get stolen here?
Yeah. It happens. This place is not utopia, by any means.
Yeah, yeah. It’s the city, it’s the city.
Exactly. So mostly I’ve been involved in Facilitation[working in] and Direct Action, and I help out in all the other working groups.
Is Facilitation different from Nonviolent Communication?
Yes. Facilitation is . . . I guess, the keepers of process. We’re the neutral people, there just to help facilitate the conversation and make sure everyone sticks to process—our direct democracy process here. So everyone gets a chance to speak, and no one is speaking over each other, and we can have a conversation. All the facilitators do is just make sure that it stays in control and happening.
When you’re facilitating a G.A., none of your personal opinions or feelings come through. It’s just, “I’m sticking to process. We’re talking about this right now. We’re talking about that right now. Someone would like to talk about something else? We could possibly do it later, if there’s time.” Or, “Wait until after G.A., for Soapbox.”
Meetings, too. When you facilitate a meeting, it’s just sticking to the agenda. This is an evolution in how we communicate with each other, because honestly, language is incredibly limiting. The way we talk to each other—it’s kind of sad that it’s taken so long for something more to develop. I didn’t realize that hand signals add so much to language and to the way we communicate.
We’re not trying to remove the passion from conversation; we’re trying to direct it better. People want to talk right now, but you have to foster respect for everyone else in the group. Everyone would like to talk about something that they feel is important to them, but we’re in a group, and we’re trying to have a group conversation. We’re going to stick to the agenda agreed upon earlier. We’ll move forward through that, and if there’s time, we can add things, we can have discussions, we can do all that stuff.
Basically, facilitation is the allowing of conversation to happen constructively, so every voice can be heard and we’re not just yelling at each other. That’s what happens in the outside world. They meet, they start talking, and then everyone just starts screaming at each other because there’s no process to handle all of that.
It’s not anything new. These things have been developed over the last forty, fifty years, but no one has tried using them on the scale we’re using them. A lot of different movements have used these techniques and processes. Maybe some things were better than what we have, but nothing here is static or set in stone. Nothing’s codified. It’s all changing and evolving, and we’re flexible. If there’s something that works better, we’ll incorporate it. That’s how we grow and change.
What’s so special about this is that no movement has had as much press as we’ve had. We’re using all of these techniques. We’re using consensus and we’re really getting it out there. Consensus has been used for a long time. It has been successful in a lot of movements. The tribes in Latin America used the consensus model—things like the Spokes Council—to come to decisions all the time. We’re just trying to bring these things to the rest of the world.
America is the best democracy on record. By no means is it the best democracy or the best democratic system in any way, shape, or form. It’s not even a democracy anymore, really, but let’s not get into that.
It’s the closest, but it could get closer.
A lot closer. But right now, it’s in no way functional. I think it was a lot closer after the Revolution than it is now. Now it’s just, like, leaps and bounds away from what it should have been.
And it’s not just about America. Why I’m really here is because this is what I’ve been waiting for my entire life. This is it. This is do-or-die. This is a shift in the way we think as human beings, the way we act to one another, how we think of one another. And if this fails, we’re done. We’re fucked! It’s the end! If this doesn’t work, I give us, like, two, three hundred years at most. Three hundred years is being really generous. So this is it!
And it’s a daunting task. When you really think about it, we’re trying to enlighten the entire human race right now—all of humanity.
It’s exhausting!
It’s really scary, but we have to keep going. We have to do it, take it day by day. Remind ourselves every day that we are just starting out. It’s been a month, almost two, and this is just the beginning. We’re going to be here for years.
In this park.
In this park, and all over the world. But if this doesn’t work, holy fuck!
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I love the demands question the most. I’m like, “You can’t demand anything of a system that’s completely broken. Anything it gives you is intrinsically going to be broken.”
The toughest thing for us to do right now is to teach people how to think outside the box. There are those who are in love with the system. Any kind of attack on that system is an attack on their reality, but the world doesn’t work the way they think it does. Most of this is education—teaching people that we can live differently. It is possible for another system to be created.
My mother can’t even comprehend this at all.
She’s not into it?
She’s not. Well, she’s like, “Oh, cool! You’re fighting for this!” She’s behind it—like, she’s always voted left—but she can’t see the bigger picture. A world without a hierarchy doesn’t make sense to her. For her, there’s always going to be someone on the top, always going to be someone on the bottom. That’s just the way the world works. She thinks that things could be a little better, but there are always going to be people that are exploited and oppressed. That’s the way it works! Breaking that is the most difficult thing. Allowing people to think—not even to do—to think of the world differently is the issue.
Speaking to that, me and my friend Nicole are working on this really great kind of teach-in involving Children of Men.
Yes. The D.V.D. actually has comments from Slavoj Žižek, and then this twenty-minute documentary on how all the themes in the movie perfectly apply to the world today.
I’ve never seen a film just show the world as it is. That movie should have gotten every award. I think it didn’t because it just told the truth, and they can’t have that. It covered social inequality, economic injustice, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex. It literally covered everything. Global warming! It was nuts!
The thing about that film is that it doesn’t make any judgments. It doesn’t tell you, “Look, this is bad!” or, “This is good!” It just says, “This is the world we live in today. You make your own judgment.”
So we’re using that, and the way that we’re trying to build is: We have the comments from Žižek, and we want to show that first because it primes people to look at the foreground and background. Probably a lot of people saw that film, and it didn’t have the same effect it had on me because they’re just watching the movie. It’s a thriller; they’re following the plot. But I’ve never seen an attention to detail in film like that. Those extras should have gotten Oscars. It was amazing!
So the Žižek piece primes people to pay attention to that, and then people watch the movie. At the end, we show the other thirty-minute documentary about how it applies to the world today. Along with that, we have a chart mapping out huge problems of the world and showing how they’re all interconnected, because that’s another huge problem: People see these issues as separate issues when they aren’t. Literally every problem we have in this world is connected to another problem we have. None of them are in a vacuum.
You could get a doctorate based on just making that flowchart.
It’s not just me. My friend Nicole over there—it’s a passionate project we have because we both feel exactly the same way. We want it to be really representative, like a giant digital web, and you can actually fly through there like a kind of Google Earth-type thing. We’re feeling out how to structure that right now—how to be interactive, so people can pick out a problem that’s in the world and plot it on the web, and then we can show how that one single issue connects to a myriad more.
That’s why it’s so easy for people to ignore everything. People are really good at isolating things. “This issue, that issue, don’t worry about it. This has nothing to do with that. You care about children in Africa? Okay, children in Africa. That has nothing to do with our fossil fuel reserves in Africa. No, they’re not connected.” People see that, and then they tackle these one issues, when it’s just everything.
That’s why it’s really hard to come up with the demands. The demands are: everything.
Exactly. I tell the media and the press constantly, “I’m not here to make reforms. Reforms will happen along the way—let’s make it better as we progress—but I’m looking to build a new system, completely outside of the one that already exists.” That’s what I want to do. That’s my endgame. Build these occupations, create these communities, foster these relationships with people.
If we come together, we all are empowered to spread our ideas, and to work together toward solutions. They’ve convinced so many people that they can’t do anything: “It’s not up to you. It’s up to Congress.” But it’s up to them to get together and think about their world and their localities, to think about how to fix problems locally. We have armies of people who just can’t think critically.
What do we do about that?
Therein lies the rub! How do you wake all these people up? We’re hoping that our web will help a lot.
I want to have open source schools in the neighborhoods I’m from, in East Harlem. I want to have schools that cover everything from your basic arithmetic and grammar to, like, theories on how to kill communism, free for people to just come in and sit and learn. I want to show people that there’s value in knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Maybe that’ll drive them to start thinking on their own.
We can’t just tell people, “Oh, look! There are all these problems!” I want people to feel as strongly as I do about them. I want them to have the drive to learn more, not just come somewhere and have someone feed it to them. It’s tough! It’s literally undoing centuries of socialization. How do you begin to do that? I think we’ve begun to do that, because in this place, ageism has been destroyed.
But in which direction?
In both directions. It’s insane! There are those who are older and it’s hard for them to not feed the system, but a lot of older people can do that perfectly well. Now, I’m twenty years old here. I’m probably the youngest of the really hard-core activists, but that doesn’t matter at all. There are people who have been doing this for thirty years who have been like, “Hi!” We’re on the same level. We’re completely equal. They respect all my ideas. Yes, I put more weight on their ideas because they’ve been doing it a lot longer. I’m not going to come in here and say I run shit when I don’t have as much experience, but that experience doesn’t make them better than me.
They share their experience. They help me get to where they are so we can bounce ideas around. I throw out an idea . . . people listen, which is insane! Men and women who are thirty years older than I am, listen. That doesn’t happen outside of this space. I can go and walk into an office and talk to a manager, and they’re just going to disregard me because I’m twenty years old. That’s one of the things that in this space is completely gone. It’s crazy!
That’s better than college.
This is much better than college. Seeing that—seeing the barriers that are falling as we continue to do this—is why I’m here every day from seven in the morning to three a.m. I don’t like leaving this. I have to leave New York sometime soon to go visit people, and I don’t think I can. I’ve never been more fulfilled in my entire life. I’m stretched so thin right now and it sucks sometimes, but then at the same time, I wouldn’t want it any other way. It’s just amazing.
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It’s going to take a long time to get people to think on the meta levels that you and I are thinking on, but that’s my endgame. We did an action recently called Occupy the Boardroom, which was a Web site created by this dude Austin, and this nonprofit he works with, Align. Basically, people send in letters that they want to get to the executives of the major banks. He collected, like, six thousand letters, and we went and delivered them on a march to Bank of America, J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs.
The day went like this: There were two marches—a march that hit the Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and a march that hit Wells Fargo and Citigroup—and then we all met at J. P. Morgan Chase. We handed the letters to these reps, and then we made symbolic paper airplanes and threw them to the top of the building. It was really a festive, fun march.
Everyone on the march wrote a letter themselves. What I wrote was: “My main concern is not with foreclosure, student debt, or economic disparity. It’s with you, as human beings, working in these places. How can you come to work here and not see the effect you have on the world entire?” There’s a disconnect with reality once you’re up there. I don’t think all of these people are evil human beings; I think they’re just completely disconnected. “Look at yourself. Look at what the system does to you.” They’re smart, educated people. They’re not dumb. You don’t get to be an executive at any of these banks being dumb. So they either see it and don’t care, or they can’t see it at all.
That’s the more charitable way of trying to connect with them, as another human being.
Exactly, because vilifying them all the time is just going to make them shut down. Again, there are some of them that do need to be vilified. I’m sure there are some who just are not good people, and completely are okay with everything that’s going on. But there have to be some—a few—that just see numbers all day, and they just don’t see the people. This is another reason why I love Children of Men. It shows that disconnect with other human beings so perfectly. It’s technologically great—all these things are fantastic—but there are people in this world.
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Another thing we started talking about is Rosetta Stone.
The language course?
The language course. It’s five hundred dollars to learn one fucking language, right? It’s that much for a reason, because . . . oh, I don’t give a shit, I pirated it. I pirated it in every language. It works beautifully! It is magnificent how well Rosetta Stone works. It’s really, like, the golden tablets. I feel like John Smith, like, “What? This is language?”
I feel like it’s so expensive for a reason, because to learn those languages would destroy so many barriers between people. The second you meet another human being and they can’t understand you, you automatically categorize them as unintelligent. It’s so much easier to dehumanize them—to see them as less than you are—because they can’t understand you. It’s so difficult for the people who need these languages the most to learn them and to access them.
The people who can afford that five-hundred-dollar language program don’t even need it. Anyone they’re dealing with is going to be speaking their language anyway because they have enough money to spend five hundred dollars on a language program. I think I’m just going to start pirating Rosetta Stone and giving it away.
I don’t have a headset. It’s really difficult to do it with my laptop mic, but I was practicing German with my step-dad’s headset for a week, and I picked up basic German. I’ve forgotten it since—its been a few months—but I was just starting to think, in basic terms, in German.
I had a French trip in high school, and I didn’t speak shit after taking French for, like, seven years. Some German girl staying in the same house spoke fluent French, and they’re like, “She’s been taking it two years.” So it’s a weird American problem.
Oh, definitely. But even then, in Europe you’re only going to get that education if you are middle class to begin with. Like, the Roma aren’t getting that education in France.
This was, like, the late eighties.
Less disparity, yeah.
It’s definitely heated up.
Everything is going to shit! And everyone—they’re just coating over it. “It’ll be fine!” As of now, the damage we’ve done to the climate is irreversible. We can only slow it down at this point.
And people are still fucking not even paying attention. Going forward with their, “Now let’s go for natural gas through hydrofracking!” It’s like, “Fuck water! Who needs water? I want some gas!”
And it’s like, “Say what?” You have incredibly intelligent, super smart chemists and biologists and engineers working to do this stuff. They’re really smart people! I can’t do that! The engineers to decide all these pipes, and the chemists that need to come in to make these chemicals to break up the thing . . . “I can’t do what you do.”
And that’s what they came up with.
“What are you doing? What is wrong with you?” It makes no sense.
What about this pipeline from Canada?
Yeah, the tar sands.
The superpipeline!
Yay! We went on an action against this thirty-centimeter pipeline they wanted to put through the fucking Village, one of the most populated areas in the world. This company, Spectra Pipeline, has the worst track record for safety in, like, the history of pipeline companies. A pipeline in Southern California that they had blew up; killed, like, eight people; destroyed, like, eighty homes; and did more than fifty million worth of damages. And that area is so much not as densely populated as the fucking Village! And not only that, it’s going to pump radon gas into your stoves, so that’s just, like, lung cancer for everyone. It was FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, that the pipeline has to be approved by. They have never denied a permit to build a pipeline.
We got there. We came with, like, two hundred people—the largest amount of people at a FERC public hearing in the history of FERC. The second largest was seven.
So people don’t go to those things.
No.
They’re not publicized.
They’re not. They put this on this Web site, on this page in the middle of nowhere . . .
You have to know that you’re looking for it.
Exactly, to find it. No one knocks door-to-door in the neighborhood that it’s going to be put through. They don’t tell these people. And they wanted it to connect to Con Ed’s infrastructure. Con Ed’s infrastructure is decrepit. Like, “No, that’s not good!”
So we went to the public hearing. They brought what we had to say to Washington, and if they pass it anyway, I’m lying down in front of a backhoe. I’m literally not going to let it happen. That’s what we’re trying to get people to do here. It is completely okay for you to just say, “Fuck you! I don’t want this!” You can definitely just go, “No!” On marches, I’ve straight-up told cops, “No!”
You can do this! They’ve indoctrinated people into thinking that you can’t, that you have to listen to them. “If it goes through here , that’s it, the argument’s over.” No! You are a person with a voice. And as long as you’re willing, and you can stand, and you can say something, that’s the power you have. It’s so powerful. They’ve convinced you that your voice is not powerful, when it is. It’s the most powerful thing you could use now, because voting is just a completely arbitrary process. Voting does nothing. This Electoral College doesn’t work—another thing that’s just completely broken. I don’t know how shit stayed together after 2000 and Bush v. Gore. ❖