Why We Occupy

November 5

Daryl

My name is Daryl. I didn’t originally plan to come here at all. I was skeptical about the movement, and I had just moved back into the city. After living here for a while and working, I went traveling. Then I went back to Las Vegas, where I’m from. I’m a writer. I do freelance writing. I decided to come back here and get started on my career again.

I heard this was going on, and I was like, “Do I want any part of this?” It didn’t seem like it was very focused. I’d done some activist work a couple years ago. I got really discouraged, and felt like there was no energy or anything. It didn’t feel like anything was moving forward. But with this . . . I was seeing that this was sustaining itself. After the Brooklyn Bridge march, I felt like maybe I should come down.

Also, I didn’t have a place to live. I was living with somebody, and I knew that I needed to be out soon. I was thinking about subletting, but then I started to feel that maybe there was a little bit of alignment [with Occupy Wall Street]. I wanted to be part of this movement. I wanted to be part of a community and live somewhere, and they need people here to try to advance the cause. So you know, I prayed about it a lot, and I came.

One of the first nights I came down here, I just wasn’t sure if this was really the smartest thing for me to be doing, given, like, the weather and everything, you know? I slept down near that flower bed over there. I was just sitting there, and this woman in a business suit came up to me. She extended her hand to me, and she said, “Thank you.” I had done nothing, really, to deserve her thanks, but I felt moved all the same. I shook her hand, and I said, “Thank you,” and she went on her way. And then it started raining that night, so I felt like, in terms of an answer to my prayers, I got that I was doing the right thing, but that it was going to be difficult, so to gird myself for that.

Then when I came down here to camp, there was no space. I sat over in that flower bed again. You know, coming out here was a leap of faith for me. I consider myself a reluctant Christian. I believe that all religious and spiritual traditions have truth in them; there just happens to be one set of symbols and stories that appeals to me the most. So I started praying, and I was like, “All right, God. I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to wait. I’m just going to let the spirit move me where I need to go.” And within a few minutes, someone said, “Hey, this space right here just opened up!” I was like, “Okay,” and I moved in. Mike was over there, and he was like, “Hey, do you need cardboard under there?” He hooked me up, and made my experience here completely dry and water-free when it rained again. So I definitely feel like the spirit has been working with me, helping me to face the challenges that I have to face in the days from now on.

How long have you been out here?

A week.

But you came down before that?

I came down once, just to get a feel for it. Then I came on Friday, and then it was the day of the storm. I was going to stay, but my friend was like, “Come crash at my place.” So I did, and I came back on Sunday. From Sunday on—that’s when I’ve been staying.

Can you talk a little bit about the ebb and flow of your days?

I wake up. I check my tent out. I try to see how I can further secure it, because as you can see, it’s in a walkway. It gets bumped into a lot. The other day it was really windy. My tent had blown completely aside, so I weighted it down with bricks on this end and a chair over there. I need to re-duct tape that. I thought I was moving, but it turns out I’m not.

Sometimes I’ll take my pack, and I’ll leave and go to my friend’s place; shower, check email. Then I try to get back here around five or six, and I get dinner. I talk to people about why I’m here; I feel like I’m doing that a lot. I’m trying to figure out what I want to bring to this movement, just in terms of my strengths and skills. Mike and I are both Christian, and we’ve talked about reaching out to some of the peace churches—like Mennonites, maybe the Quakers—and just seeing if there are any institutions that will help support the movement and be more of a presence.

I just talked to someone with a Mennonite connection.

Really?

I’ll introduce you to him.

Yeah, I’d love to meet him.

He’s not from New York, but he might have some insight into what’s going on around here.

Sure. Well, I know that Judson Memorial Church down by N.Y.U. had a quote . . . it was like, “O.W.S. is not simply a jobs issue or a bank issue or even an immigration issue, but it’s a spiritual issue about what is happening in the United States.”

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I think that all my activist work has really come out of when I started doing meditation and studying mysticism. I started feeling as if I really believe in “do unto others as I would have them do unto me,” and the idea of being compassionate towards other people, and being peaceful and loving. Then, I can’t just simply be silent in a world that is not at peace, that’s destroying the planet each passing day.

I feel like that’s where the change is going to have to begin; it’s going to have to begin within ourselves. We can pass all the laws that we want, and those are definitely helpful—I mean, during the civil rights era, people didn’t want integration to happen; it took a law to come in and make things happen—but the ultimate ideal, for me, is that people need to look into their hearts and see that, “Look, we’re all on this planet together, and we’re all sharing the same space. We need to work together to pull ourselves out of this . . . this hellhole, otherwise there’s not going to be anything left for our grandchildren.”

Before I came here, I was working with Picture the Homeless in the Bronx. We were looking for buildings to reclaim—to occupy—and it was really hard getting a group together. A bunch of people showed interest, and then not everybody showed up. We found a building, but then we weren’t able to get into it. And while I was doing that, I was actually being paid to protest, if you can believe it, by . . . it was a union, to boycott Amish Markets.

Really? What’s wrong with Amish markets?

They had stolen a bunch of money from their employees by not paying them back pay.

Aren’t they supposed to be, like, religious dudes?

No, no, not the Amish! They’re not the Amish!

Oh! It’s the name of a—

It’s the name of a chain. They’re not actually Amish!

I was like, “What?”

Not the Amish people.

Not the people themselves, note to self.

There was a campaign from September 2009 to January 2010 by the U.F.C.W. I was doing that, and I also went to a couple of antiwar protests. Obama had decided to do the troop surge in Afghanistan, and that’s a lot of what people were out protesting. I guess I got discouraged really quickly. I wasn’t staying anywhere, and I was hoping to find a building that I could occupy. I ended up spending a night on the subway. I was completely exhausted, and I wandered into Grace Church, on Broadway. I sat there, and I realized that I’m not going to be any good to the movement if I’m exhausted and hungry and tired and whatever.

So that’s when I decided to go back home. I was focusing more on my writing career, and feeling, you know, “I’ll let somebody else do that. I need to be behind the computer knocking the stories out.”

But then you decided . . .

Here I am, yeah. I think writing is important, but I found that I needed balance. It was getting to the point where my characters were living lives that were more interesting than my own. Thoreau has a really good quote, which is, “One cannot really sit down to write until one has stood up to live.” And I feel like the stuff that I write is always a reflection of the life that I’m living. I want to write about things that are happening in the world, and to do that, I need to be in the world, and I need to actually live a life. My life is really more important than my art. So it’s about finding the balance between doing this, and then taking the time away to work on stuff and reflect and all that.

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What I think is an issue—what concerns me—is drug use, and people here who need treatment, who need help. I don’t know if this is necessarily the place to be able to get it. That’s really what concerns me. When that need—that addiction—starts to take hold, the sort of behaviors that can manifest destructively . . .

Regardless of why people are here or what they believe, we’re all here together. We’re part of a community, so it’s definitely something that concerns me. But I don’t think I’m the only one that it concerns. We’ll work it out. We’ll work it out.

As you were saying before, people need to form a more cohesive group in order to make it through the winter.

I’ve been here during the winter, when I was doing the protests against Amish Markets. I was standing outside when it was, like, ten degrees, and it can get even lower than that. It’s very taxing physically, emotionally, mentally, and you can get frustrated. You can get depressed. You can get angry. And I can just see that leading to lots of conflict.

The other day, there was almost a fight in line because somebody was flashing a flashlight in somebody else’s eyes and wouldn’t stop. That almost led to a fist fight, you know what I mean? That’s not what we need. What we’re doing is too important to let bullshit like that throw us into a tizzy.

Already, there are people who want this thing to fail. We already have enough working against us between Wall Street and the weather. I mean, the weather alone is enough, so in order to survive, I think that we’re going to need to come together. It’s not to say that we’re not going to have disagreements, that we’re not going to have fights, but I just think that we really need to be of one mind and one heart to be able to make it. It’s going to be really tough, and we’re going to need to have to be there for one another, in a way that I don’t know if we’re quite there yet.

What would be the way to move in that direction?

Don’t know. Well, for one thing, we need to kind of know each other, even if it’s just knowing the people in our respective neighborhoods. That’s why I’ve been trying to introduce myself to anyone I see.

I definitely feel like I’m part of a community here. There’s a bunch of us in this block, and we look out for one another. If we see somebody who’s futzing around with somebody else’s stuff and we don’t recognize them, we’re like, “Hey, do you need something here?” And then if someone needs something, we try to be there for one another.

That’s something we can at least do within certain sections of the park, if we can’t do it in the park as a whole. I think that’s the beginning is to know who your neighbors are, make friends with them.

Do you feel like people don’t necessarily know their neighbors?

I’m sure people do, but I don’t know. I pretty much stay in this section of the park because it’s more peaceful here. I mean, I go down there, obviously, to eat and walk through, but . . .

What would be interesting would be to have representatives from each neighborhood come and meet and discuss various issues that are concerning us as a whole.

That’s a great idea.

I kind of think it is too.

You should bring that as a suggestion.

Yeah, I should.

G.A. would be the place, right?

Well, I think Town Planning might already be on top of that. They took a census to see how many people are living in each tent, and they set up that [big tent].

Is Town Planning a new thing?

I think it’s new.

I’m having a hard time keeping on top of everything. There seem to be new working groups every day.

There’s a lot happening. You really need to be plugged in to the working group thing to know. I haven’t really been. I’ve just been focusing on getting myself settled and forming a routine, and also just working. I work part-time on the weekends, and then there’s a blog that I’m trying to get off the ground, too. So there’s projects of my own that I’m trying to work on. I’m related to this, but I don’t directly get involved in the official General Assembly thing that’s happening over there.

I would like to get more plugged in, because I feel like there are things that . . . I just got up one day and I saw that [tent], and I was like, “What the . . . ?”

That just happened yesterday, right?

Somebody decided for that to go up. That’s my fault for not being at the General Assembly or in a working group. Considering this whole thing is about us having more political say and more political power, it would probably be a good idea for me to take more of an interest in what’s happening politically in the camp. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] I read about that this morning in the paper.

Oh, it was in the paper?

It was in the paper. But it’s funny, because I was here yesterday and I didn’t see them working on it at all. I guess they had to put up a frame?

I saw the frame going up, and then the next time I saw it, it was up fully, so they move fast.

That’s the Women-Only Tent?

Yes.

So Town Planning is responsible for the big tents?

I think so. They’re going to be in charge of that, and maybe of dividing the neighborhoods up into sections and whatnot. And hopefully, out of that will come a congress, if you will, of people who actually speak for the community that they come from. That’s my hope. I’ll try to plug in and see if it’s heading in that direction. Otherwise, I’ll have to get my ass to a G.A.!

Well, keeping warm and doing all the basic stuff seems to be a lot of work here.

It is. I spent the better part of three hours figuring out if I was actually going to move from here to there, and then finding support to lift my tent up off the ground so that when it rains, the water won’t collect. There’s so many things. There’s never a dull moment.

And then the beef jerky people came through and threw jerky at us. There’s so many distractions here.

Yeah, the beef jerky thing was a little wacko. I don’t know what’s going on with the beef jerky.

One thing I think is that not enough people know about mic check, so I can never hear what the announcements are.

[Listens.] Yeah, that’s a problem.

You know what I mean? It’s not really that helpful, is it?

Yeah, you say, “Mic check!” and apparently, the mic’s not working.

No, the mic is really not working.

The mic is broken.

Is that for today, that big puppet? [Points.]

Yeah, they’re going to Foley Square with the puppet. That’s Obama. ❖