Why We Occupy

November 6

Scales

At the occupation I go by Scales. Before I was at the occupation, I was a dancer. I still am a dancer. As an aside, I don’t really like the idea of someone being a painter or being a dancer; you just are. But I was a dancer before I was at the occupation.

Professionally speaking.

Professionally, yes. But the problem was that that was very connected to people having the money to pay for your services. If no one wants to buy a dancer, then you’re not going to get any work. So I was feeling sort of, you know, the economic problems of the United States in that sense, but that wasn’t really the reason I came to the occupation.

I came to the occupation because I wanted to be productive. The most important thing to me is to be productive—as productive as possible—in things that actually matter, whether it’s art or politics or just talking to people or . . . I don’t know, building something, whatever. I knew that I could be productive down here within some sort of construct of the occupation, which is why I joined the library.

So to answer your question, “How does why you came here differ from why you’re here now?” I came here with sort of a loose idea . . . like, I knew that this was a space where I could be productive within a system that I believed in, but I didn’t really know how. And then I got involved with the library. Once I got involved in the library . . .

First of all, I’ll say that I’d never cared about libraries before I came to the occupation. I rarely ever went to libraries; I didn’t think they were important. But now that I’m here working in the library—literally running this crazy outdoor library for free social media—it’s taught me how important it is to have that space. It’s important to have space that’s free for people to have access to literature and access to media and access to . . . just books. A lot of people don’t have Internet access. I hope that eventually, we can create a working computer lab within the library, too, but I don’t know.

There’s something very special about the idea of providing people with the tools to educate themselves. That’s what I think this occupation is about. It’s not about, “Here’s the party line,” or, “Here’s what I believe,” or, “This is why we’re here.” No, this occupation is a learning experience for everyone, and I want to make sure that people have the information and the tools to educate themselves.

Give me an update on the library. How’s that been going?

I mean, it’s been going pretty well. I was quoted in a different newspaper where I mentioned that the library was sort of this immaculate conception. It never really started, it was just here, which is sort of true. You know, the library started out just as a pile of books on a tarp and someone called it a library.

But when there’s that source of literature, people often bring more literature. They’re like, “Oh, there’s some books! I’m going to bring more books!” So people brought more books. People came and said, “Maybe I should organize them into bins!” They did that, and it just snowballed, and now it’s really big and huge.

Now we’re getting books from publishers. We’re getting, like, hundreds of copies of the same book! [Laughs.] It’s not that helpful, but it’s great. Naomi Klein’s been down here. The creator of The Vagina Monologues has been down here. It’s been great.

It’s definitely been an interesting experience working in the library because it’s not just working in a library, it’s building a library. It’s also sleeping in a library, which I never thought I’d do. Two months ago, if you’d said, “Hey, you’re going to be sleeping in a library . . .”

“With no ceiling . . .”

“Sleeping in a library with no ceiling, and being a librarian there,” then I would have been like, “No.” But I like it. It’s nice.

What first drew you to the movement, politically speaking?

To be honest, I was here on the first day and I was very skeptical. Like, I didn’t come back for about a week after the first day because . . . because of all the reasons that people come here and are skeptical. Like, “Oh, it’s disorganized! They’re not saying that they have any necessary goals! All these people aren’t here for a unified reason!”

But the more and more I wasn’t here, the more and more I said to myself I really need to be here. I really need to inject myself into that system so my voice can be heard. That’s when I realized all the value of that “disorganization” or that autonomy between people. It’s not just, “Here’s what we want! Here are our demands!” We are all here for different reasons, but we’re all unified because we’re all angry.

When I realized that, a lot of my reasons changed. I used to be a Marxist, but now I sort of consider myself a nothing. I don’t know what works, but I know what doesn’t work. That’s why I’m here, because this is a community-building exercise, and we’re figuring out what works within this application.

So to sort of synopsize your question—because it was a good question—my political views before I came were very concrete, and since I came here they’ve become much looser. I’m here to figure out what works, and I’m going to learn what doesn’t work at the same time. And I don’t care what people do as long as they’re not hurting others, and I think that’s a very concrete statement. Certainly, I’ve been trying to inject that into the system as well.

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I think that there’s a lot of centralization going on here, which I don’t like. I believe in the freedoms that people should have to do whatever they like as long as it’s not negatively impacting anyone else. I know that’s sort of a broad statement, and there can be discrepancies within it, but I’m sure you understand what I’m talking about.

What about the centralization are you not into?

I have a lot of problems with the centralization. I’ll give an example. Before the library was part of Finance and pooling our funds with them, we were an autonomous entity, which is quite important for a library. A library needs to be a neutral zone. It can’t be censored. If someone brings us . . . I’m having a brain fart right now. What’s that book by Hitler?

Mein Kampf.

Yeah, if someone brought us Mein Kampf . . . I don’t like Mein Kampf, but we’d put it in the library because you have to give people free access to literature, regardless of what that literature is. You can’t be censored.

And that’s why I really didn’t want to get in bed with Finance. Now we’re in bed with Finance. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think all this centralization is necessary. I don’t like the idea of having to go through the G.A. for every single proposal because I don’t think it promotes a sense of community.

I’ve always said: If I want to go and check up with Sanitation or figure out what they’re doing, or if I need something from them, I know a lot of people from Sanitation because I’ve taken the time to get to know my neighbors. If I need to talk to Info, I talk to my lovely friend Cynthia over here. If I need to go to the kitchen, I know people from the kitchen. I can do that.

I understand that there’s a place for the G.A. as a space for everyone to get their voices heard. I don’t really think it’s functioning as that right now because there are just so many people. It’s not really their fault, but I don’t think this massive centralization and homogenization of working groups into, like, a structure is necessarily conducive for becoming a community of neighbors, you know what I mean?

So you’re not into the . . . what is it called? The Council?

The Spokes Council.

I keep calling it the super PAC, but that’s not it.

You know, you’d be surprised, because I’m not as against the Spokes Council as you would think, specifically because I see the Spokes Council as something to fix, in a way, the problems that we’re having with the G.A. All the things that I like about the Spokes Council are things that I hate about the G.A. The thing about the Spokes Council is: Now we can make decisions in a G.A. form, but in much smaller clusters, which I like because then more will get done, and more will get done faster. So I like that about the Spokes Council.

What I don’t like about the Spokes Council is that I feel like the structure of it is very . . . I think it’s very neutralizing to those that are not the spoke. And I realize that the spoke is rotating, and again, I want to say that I’m not against the Spokes Council. I like the Spokes Council, but there’s some things that I don’t like about it. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s necessary at this point because of the problems we’re having with the G.A.

What is the spoke, exactly? Maybe you can just explain that.

So the spoke is, basically . . . I would describe it as the speaker. The spoke is always rotating, so it’ll never be the same spoke unless you’ve gone through all the people in the working group. But basically, I would describe it as, like, bowling pins. There would be the front bowling pin, and that would be the spoke. And then the rest of the bowling pins, which are the rest of the working group, are behind the spoke. The spoke is representing the working group so that their voices can be heard in organized fashion. And of course, to make sure that there isn’t this crazy power structure like, you know, a Speaker-of-the-House situation, the spoke is always rotating.

Each meeting it’s a different spoke.

Each meeting it’s a different spoke.

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You’re also involved in Info?

I mean, I’m involved in a lot of working groups. Info, I sometimes do cover for Cynthia when she’s not around, but my major focuses are within S.I.S.—Shipping, Inventory and Storage—and of course, the library. I occasionally help with Comfort when laundry needs to be done and things like that. But majorly, it’s S.I.S. and the library.

S.I.S. and the library are basically the same entity because without S.I.S., we would have this crazy influx of books that we wouldn’t be able to deal with. It’s very important to have that storage facility. I tend to go over there and do cataloguing, and then bring books back. I help with any organization that needs to be done there as well.

How big is the storage space?

It’s big. It’s really big. It was donated by the teachers’ union. It’s supposed to function as a bank, but it’s not, obviously, right now, because it’s a storage facility. It’s quite large. It definitely fits a lot of stuff.

So it’s fitting your books. It’s got the books and the Comfort stuff.

There’s a lot of Comfort stuff. This is why S.I.S. is so integral to this movement right now, because we are getting such an influx of donations that we can’t physically deal with it at this small park. We need that storage facility, and at S.I.S., we just make sure that it’s organized and that it’s distributed to the working groups appropriately. That’s basically what S.I.S. does.

That’s what I do at S.I.S. is make sure that things are organized and are going out to the working groups that need them at the times they need them. Like, if I send people blankets at twelve o’clock in the afternoon, then that’s kind of stupid because no one needs blankets; no one’s sleeping. But if I send them at eight o’clock, then people need them. So you know, that’s the idea is that we need to get them rolling at the right times to the right working groups. I’m not going to be sending books to the kitchen, you know?

Logistics.

It’s difficult logistics, and I think a lot of people at S.I.S. get very pissed off, because you know, people tend to come into S.I.S. and just be like, “Oh, we need this, blah, blah, blah,” and they just take it. And I don’t really think that there’s a problem with people necessarily taking stuff, but there needs to be a structure in place so that people don’t abuse the system. We’re not rationing anything. We have plenty of everything, but we make sure that it’s going to the right places at the right time and in the right quantities.

And also coming in. While it’s coming in—while we’re getting all these donations—we make sure that they’re organized properly.

It seems daunting, trying to keep everybody in all the supplies they need.

It’s very daunting. No, absolutely. We get so many donations a day. We got three hundred boxes of down comforters the other day. Yeah, they’re piled as high as the sky. It’s crazy.

Where did that come from?

I don’t remember the donor, but they came two days ago. We also got some donations of tents and things from this Alaskan guy. We get lots of donations. Yeah, it’s wonderful.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background beforehand?

I’m a hip-hop dancer. So I guess . . . I don’t know, I guess I’ll give you my most recent background. I went to college for about a semester, and after that, I was like, “Fuck this! I hate college!”

Fair enough.

I went to a community college. I know everyone has their different experience in college. My experience in college was that I was yelled at by adults all day, and I was like, “This is kind of stupid. I’m not learning anything, and I’m not here for the right reasons.” And so I left, and then I moved to New York.

Where were you located before that?

I grew up in Pennsylvania. Lehigh Valley, around Allentown area. It’s a suburb of Allentown. So then I moved to New York, and when I came to New York, I got a job as a go-go dancer to pay the rent.

Is that good money?

It depends.

It’s tips?

It’s tips. I’m not going to go into the logistics of go-go dancing.

Whatever you want to say or not say . . . I’ll just ask, you don’t have to answer.

The thing about go-go dancers is that it’s based on the idea of freshness. Fresh faces, fresh this, fresh that, and there’s an art to it in the sense that you will get lots of tips in the first two months, but then people will get bored of you. What I did in go-go dancing—and this is why I sustained my income—is that I would constantly be changing my look. I would have different outfits, different hair colors, different everything. The joke with other go-go dancers is that I had a different hair color every day, which I didn’t. But I went from brown to red to blond to red again to blond to everything. Yeah, lots of different outfits, lots of different sort of fetishy things, whatever. And I worked at a bunch of different clubs, which was interesting because that’s sort of what brought me into the dance world.

I didn’t come out of go-go dancing and say, “Oh, that was fun! I felt so hot! Yay, I’m a go-go dancer!” I came out of it and I was like, “Wow, I really like dancing. This is something that’s really important to me, and I really like the art of it.” So then I started pursuing dancing professionally. I met Marina and the Diamonds, and I started working through that. I did that for a little bit.

Dancing’s a very hard thing to pursue. Especially if . . . I’m quite a good dancer, but on a resumé saying, “Hey, I just starting dancing and I have no ballet training,” it’s kind of like, “Oh, I don’t think I want you.” But I was able to get work by going through the back routes. I didn’t go to auditions. I would go literally to the artist and be like, “Hey, give me a job.” And that worked out. But then after that . . .

I still want to pursue dancing, but I came here, and when I find something that’s interesting . . . I live my life in a sort of mercenary way. If I find something that’s interesting enough, I’ll put a lot of time and effort into it. I thought that this was important, so I came here, and now I’m doing this. I think a lot of people here, by the way, have similar stories. There’s a Canadian girl at the library, and she came to New York to get her yoga license, but then she found this and she was like, “Oh, well. This is kind of important. I’m going to do this.”

And you know, in terms of after occupation, the things that I’ve learned will be of benefit to me in every conceivable way. My skills in organization have become better. I built a library; that’s kind of crazy. The skills that I’ve learned here . . . I don’t want to say, “Now I’m going to put this on my resumé! Yippee!” That’s stupid. That’s not the reason I’m here. But I will say that I’ve amassed a tremendous wealth of knowledge by being here, and that’s really important, and it will definitely help me later in life regardless of what I’m doing.

Hopefully, the Revolution will come, and then . . .

That’d be fabulous.

The most interesting thing is: People can have their little projects here, and they can really get it out. Like, I’m working on this project called Occupy Runway. The idea behind it is that we are going to construct garments out of tarps and spare blankets and tents and things from the occupation—garments that are inspired by the æsthetic of it. In the end, it’s going to coincide with spring fashion week. We’re going to do a march down Fashion Avenue, and each model’s going to have a sign. So that’s what I’m working on right now. That’s my little side project, but I wouldn’t be able to do that outside the occupation. I can do a project like that specifically because I have the support of my brothers and sisters at the occupation. Yes, I’m only hoping I can pull it off. I can draw clothes, but in terms of making them not fall apart, I’ll probably need to recruit F.I.T.’s help or something.

I would imagine you’d be able to find people who’d be into working on something like that.

Yeah, regardless of anything, if they’re not into politics, it’s a huge P.R. thing. Any student would love to do that because they’d get their name out like that.

I mean, this is definitely a creative environment. Oh, we have so many creative people here! I think that everyone is creative; Picasso said that everyone is born an artist. I really do believe that, and I will say that being here brings out that creativity. That’s why we’re here: because we’re such creative entities. This space is conducive for having creative thoughts, and I’ve definitely been quite creative here—creative and innovative.

Innovation is important in a space like this where you have to be innovative to not die. Like this [person propping up the Media tent]: He’s being innovative with a broom. ❖

Cynthia

When you spend the day here, you really understand the workings of it. The biggest misconception is that there’s no organization, no leaders. Me and my friend Eric just came back from our coordinators’ meeting at nine, and we were saying that in our opinion, the organization is sort of centralized/decentralized. That means there’s tons of information, not that there’s no goal. The goal is, essentially, equality in this abundant world. It is centralized here in the park, but with so many different concerns to that goal.

It’s not just specific to New York or America; it’s the abundance of the world. It’s also a way back to the spirit and soul of humanity, meaning equality, human dignity, fairness, democracy, voices being heard. It’s those voices that may have been on the fringes, that were not about to be heard. And it’s not just race, because it’s white, Mexican, African American . . . it’s everything. Also, there’s a class that hasn’t been as educated that we’re trying to include and allow a voice to.

We have our General Assembly every day at seven. We also have our working group meetings and our occupiers’ meetings. Many people are intimidated by the word “meeting” because they don’t know how to voice themselves. They’re afraid they’re not going to learn properly how to be heard, or they get frustrated because they’re not being heard. So they hear “meetings” and they want to stay away. That’s what I mean: It’s decentralized because we want to include everybody’s voices. We are really working hard to do that.

Today I work at Info/Outreach. I’ve been here thirty-three days. I’m living here. I’ve worked in our Comfort, our kitchen, and our Sanitation. My thing is outreaching to communities—not just passer-bys and tourists, but also our communities here within the park.

Being here in Zuccotti Park is an important stance. It’s not a fight; it’s a stance. It says that we are here. We’re not leaving until we get some changes within our socio-political-economic system.

Our current systems, since before the economic meltdown in 2008, have been not working. So we voted with President Obama. His whole platform was changes, and we feel that we haven’t gotten the changes from his presidency. We gave that opportunity. He said, “Changes are coming. Changes are coming.” These changes have been an issue for many, many years in our socio-political-economic system. People put their hope in Obama’s changes. We thought it was a new era. I personally believe that he did try through struggles, but it hasn’t happened.

Since the changes haven’t arrived yet, I think, collectively, something happened with us as humanity, as a people, as all peoples. We’ve been waiting. We’ve been waiting. We’ve been waiting. They pushed it back to another agenda, pushed it back to the next agenda and the next agenda. And now, for some reason, you can just witness—what is it?—fifty countries all over the world now standing up for humanity, for dignity, for equality.

It’s a universal upwelling.

It is an upwelling. My point is: It’s been a long time coming, and the most beautiful thing that happened was that collectively, the peoples of the world are standing together. That’s not happened in our country since the civil rights movement, where they said, “This undignified behavior is not working for humanity.” So this is the special thing about it: collectively, everybody standing together.

This outreach that happens within the park—how does that work?

There are several of us who realize the importance of reaching out within our community. We are trying to reach out to people not just from working groups. We are all about compassionate, dignified equality for all peoples. Not all peoples who gather here know how to make the changes happen, but they want to be involved.

People are drawn here because they feel protected. They don’t really know how to fit in, but they’re drawn here. It may not seem like it. It may seem like they’re just here hanging out, but it’s because they’re not included yet. They’re intimidated to come to our meetings, our working groups. This was a big discussion today.

It’s not just about race; it’s not just about people of color, or Latin people, white, black, whatever. It’s a certain type of people who have been on the fringes of society. They’ve just been on the wrong side of our society. They have been, maybe, outcast because they’ve been institutionalized, either mentally or for addiction to drugs or alcohol. They’ve been let out of the prisons or mental institutions, and they’re thrown into these homeless shelters.

In essence, political leaders like our mayor and so forth of this city are saying, “You have somewhere to go. You have a homeless shelter. We provide you this.” Well, those are more dangerous than prisons. People don’t want to go there; that’s why we have homelessness.

But the one percent—for instance, our Mayor Bloomberg . . . what he said the other day, that we defeat our presence here because of all the homelessness, all the drugs? Those happen in the streets whether Occupy Wall Street’s here or not. That’s been ongoing. I mean, it’s silly. Does he think he’s the mayor of Walt Disney World? This is New York City, one of the toughest cities in the world. These things have gone on and will go on whether Occupy Wall Street’s here or not, but because we were getting these people here—homeless and runaway kids and drug addicts and alcoholics . . .

I take it upon myself to go into these areas within our camp. People are not aware of how facilitation works in our meetings, so we’re inviting them to come to a Facilitation Working Group meeting. You can facilitate in meetings, or just be a part—a voice. Or at least, just have an awareness of what you choose. You can actively be in our meeting. You are invited. You are welcome.

So there’s small pockets of us who are initiating that on our own, as individuals. We’re getting together and making a nice introduction and report with many people here within the camp, not just here where it’s nice and clean, at the library or in Info/Outreach—see, this is pretty—but all throughout the camp, wherever we can include people.

We say, “Hi, I’m Cynthia. I work in Info. Do you know about the meeting today? It’s going to be at four o’clock.” A lot of people here in our park, like in society, do not have access to computers or fancy iPods or cell phones or smart phones. You can’t just give them a flyer, or say, “Go to N-Y-C-G-A dot net.” Chances are, they won’t read it. They may not have the capacity to connect with it because they feel like, “Ugh, it’s just another paper thrown at me.”

So on a human level, that’s what I mean about coming back to the spirit and soul of humanity. Olivia, you know, we’re interacting as human beings—in the eye—and that’s what we do here.

That’s what we feel is very important. If we’re saying the ninety-nine percent . . . which I feel, personally, is a terrible tag. I feel like here in this park, we are one hundred percent. We are one hundred percent, so I don’t really like that victimized ninety-nine percent, myself. That’s my personal opinion. I don’t really like that. We’re saying we’re the ninety-nine percent? Well, ninety-nine percent is not just a certain educated class that’s doing the meetings. Ninety-nine percent is: Everyone should be included, if you really have that heart.

That’s what our coordinators’ meeting started to be about. It got a little too much on that subject, because the coordinators’ meeting every morning is just report-backs for every working group. It’s for any urgent or vital information that’s currently going on, but it started to get into that discussion. So it will be a breakout group, which they started discussing after that meeting.

A few of us decided to just go throughout the camp and talk: “Oh, this meeting is about this and that and the other,” or, “The way it works is like this,” or, “Direct Action is a group of people that works on protests and marches.” Telling people these kinds of things—really verbally communicating within our camp—so that we can grow this with the people who showed up here. The stance of the people here is so important, and as you know, the symbolic stance of being here . . . if this park goes away, we don’t have Occupy Wall Street, so we need to build this up thoroughly. We’re doing that. We are working on it.

How are people reacting to the outreach?

I’m saying outreach, but we do—

Inreach.

Right! Yes, exactly! People that I outreach to, and other people . . . it’s great! It’s sort of like, “Okay, thank you.” You know, some people are a little hardened, so they won’t say thank you, but you can see in the face and in the eyes how they start to soften. It’s a beautiful thing, because people don’t want to admit that they don’t know what’s going on. You can see in their face it’s one of those a-ha moments. You can see in their face when they’re like, “That feels so good!”

At our meeting, we also talked about the vernacular of speech. Everyone has a different vernacular. We have a group here who comes from the streets, and we have a group here who comes from a more educated class. So that’s also inreach/outreach that we’re doing, to try to connect those two vernaculars so that we can all relate. Some people who are more expressive or more passionate—they’re not yelling or being forceful. They’re not being angry; they’re just talking, and we have to allow that. We have to be open. It’s not for us to say, “No! Talk when we want you to talk! Have a meeting the way we want you to have a meeting! Compose yourself! Don’t do this, the way we don’t do this!” No, no, no, because some people who talk like that can be passive-aggressive, and it’s not a good thing. It’s actually a real wall.

This really is a beautiful challenge. It’s the most beautiful challenge because if we can make this work, we’re proving so much about the beauty of humanity.

How do you take what’s being learned here and bring it outwards into the bigger world?

We do have an Outreach group. In fact, they have a meeting today. What they do is they have, like, a luncheon, and they invite people from different boroughs to hold their own G.A.’s. They learn how we facilitate G.A.’s. They learn how to gather a stronger voice. And we’re spreading this, through the outreach program, to all the boroughs.

You should probably go. It would be interesting for you to see that. Everybody’s invited. That way you can actually talk to other people, and that would answer that question, “What would it be outside the occupation?” We all really do want to hear each other, help each other, spread the knowledge and education. We really do want to grow as a society of humanity. That is what’s happening. That’s what’s happening throughout the world now.

In the beginning, we had this wonderful world map, and we put pins on all the places that are being occupied. We have since lost it, although it might be in our S.I.S., because you know, we’ve had snowstorms, rainstorms, evictions and cleanups, and it’s gotten a bit lost. Smithsonian museum representatives have come down to acquire it when our movement is done. That and our map of Zuccotti Park. I love the Smithsonian, and this is really history.

That’s why we’re making a book, to set down the real history. The press has been pretty skewed—not accurate at all.

Of course, the Post and Fox. Bill O’Reilly—who’s a cotton-ass—said on his program the other day, “There’s going to be murder!” You know, there’s a murder on the streets of New York, in all the boroughs, probably more than once every day. But that is a city. That has nothing to do with us being here. We are actually providing a lot more safety to the streets that has never been in this area.

We just had a harm-reduction group coming in. They’re making us aware that the people who come here—you know, the addicts and the alcoholics—they need the help. There are areas here that have been able to help them, to assist them, to give them that compassion, and to at least make it safer for them, so they can hopefully get out of that addiction or that phase in their lives. We have our medics here to treat the homeless—our medics, our volunteers, our nurses, our doctors, our psychologists on staff. We have acupuncturists.

For the mayor to say something so ignorant . . . it shows him to be out of touch. He is a part of the one percent that we are actually making a stand against.

Someone described him as “the hammer of the one percent.”

So the harm-reduction people were trying to link you guys into the services they have in the area?

Yes. We have our guy Stephen, at the library, that works with Scales. He is an ex-addict, and he has had a wonderful doctor who helped him through it. Now he’s clean. He’s wonderful, he’s productive, and he’s great, so he’s trying to help other people. The doctor brought his colleagues and representatives—who were all over the boroughs, like up in the Bronx—to come down here to hand out pamphlets, and to have a meeting with us. They know we have this issue with people being safe: Do they feel safe as they come here?

That’s something that the press and media don’t like. They just like to say that people are gathering here causing trouble. No, they’re gathering here and feeling safe because we have Community Outreach, Community Watch, Nonviolent Communication, safety class, . . .

I’ve done many night watches from two to four in the morning. Around the coffee, partner up. We go around and we do this in such a way that we make a presence within our community, to prevent any kind of unsavory acts. I love that I just said “unsavory,” but you know what I mean. So our presence here, actually, is a very good thing. It’s an educating thing. It’s a knowledge-is-compassion thing.

The people that are against it—the Post, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, all the other news that are saying these negative things—it’s really embarrassing for them as a human. People are getting fed and clothed and a place to sleep. There are a lot of compassionate people here. That’s what I meant about the beauty of humanity: There’s so many beautiful, compassionate people. The Empathy table is for everyone.

It’s really an amazing thing, but you know, at the same time, please understand that this is incredibly, incredibly difficult work. It’s very, very hard work. I’ve been here thirty-three days, not only getting used to sleeping outside because of the noise and the weather and so on and so forth, but actively getting up and doing Community Watch, and thwarting fights and issues like that.

And then just our passions and our emotions. We sometimes fight or we argue, but they’re friendly arguments. We make up within our groups. Our passions, our emotions . . . we’re like, “Aagh!” because it’s very difficult work. Sometimes you feel like you’re making so much progress, and then some fool will come and rouse up people and get people to work against, and a lot of them are paid to do this.

Really.

I know that for a fact because someone from our group was sitting at a café, and there’s a gentleman here . . . everybody knows him. He’s a black guy. He has this beard. He comes almost every single day, mouths people off talking about, oh, he’s a one-percenter. He spreads these just terrible messages, and someone heard him say—in a café, talking with someone else—that he’s paid to be here, to do that.

I worked my first days here in Comfort, and I know for a fact that the guy I helped—he was so sweet—said he just got out of Rikers. He was holding up his pants because they didn’t give him his belt back. There’s apparently some new system where you have to sign something to get the rest of your things back. I don’t know what that was about, but we gave him a belt. Not only gave him a belt, but new jeans, new clothes. We kept him warm, gave him a place to sleep, and he marched with us. We told him as much as we could about what it was about. I can’t say I’ve seen him here again, but I know that these people are coming.

We hear that they’re let out of jail and told to come here because it’s safe. In Tribeca, there’s a homeless man who’s been there about twenty years. We know for a fact that the police woke him up, told him to come here. We know that for a fact because he told us that. He actually was a very intelligent man. It was his choice to be homeless, and he wasn’t just some crazy rabble rouser, or a harmful man.

So we know in those three instances that, yes, people are told to come here. It is safe here, and we do take care of them. We have the compassion. Can you imagine what a beautiful society this would be if everyone did that?

Every time I come here, I wonder why this can’t exist outside.

We’re hoping it can. That’s what the outreach is about: to get past these borders, to get the word out to the boroughs. And it is being spread out throughout the world now. It’s really good! Exciting!

Would you tell me about your background in activism?

I’m not an activist. I’ve never been an activist. I’ve never marched a day in my life for nothing. I’ve been in New York over fifteen years. I do hair and makeup for film and television. I came here—I was actually on my way to Chicago for about a month or so. Before I left, I came down here because I heard about the seven hundred arrests on Brooklyn Bridge. Then I heard about the Union Square pepper spray night. For some reason, something triggered in me. “I’ve really got to see what’s going on there.”

All my friends and my clients were like, “Don’t go down there. You’ll get arrested.” I didn’t have that fear. I just knew I needed to see what it was about because it was happening in my back yard.

So I came down here on a Friday night—I think it was the thirtieth of September—asked questions, went around . . . I can’t even say what happened. All I knew was I had to come back. I stayed in a hotel a couple of days because I gave up my apartment. I stayed for three days in a hotel to decide, “Do I really want to come back here, or do I want to head back home to figure out my own situation?” I decided, “You know what? Let me come back here on Monday and see how it is.” So I slept here Monday, and I’ve been here ever since.

I said to myself, “The day it feels like something that I don’t believe in—which is being a total anarchy/violence movement—I’m out. If I don’t see a good in it—I don’t see a potential in it, a hope in it—I’m going back.” And you know, I haven’t taken a project in a month, and I have three more months of work. I get into the union—the hair and makeup union—which is very important to me because it means I get my benefits, and I get to actually be working on films like the Batman film that’s here right now. Right now I work on indie films. So I have been putting that off. It’s a little bit stressful because I know I need to get back to work—I really need my own situation—but it’s so hard to leave because I see it grow every day.

When I give up hope, then all of a sudden a new group is coming up with something that I thought, “Oh, man! I was just thinking we need that!” So I just see it growing every day, and every day it’s harder to extricate myself. I feel like I want to be a part of it. I want to be here when we get that . . . well, what I’m hoping is we get a message to our leaders that we voted into office—who are making our laws for us and working for us—saying, “We want a public discourse with y’all, and we want to show you what changes we are now going to make.” That’s what I want to see. Will it happen? You know, will money be out of politics any time soon? No, but I want to see a big push towards that. I want to see an inkling of that before I leave.

We see that in the little ways. We have a lot of diligent people who are part of what they call the one percent. They don’t have to check the bank accounts; they have the money to offer. They have the donations, they have the heart, and they are believing in this. When I see that, it’s like, “Yeah, those are the people who have the contacts with the politicians and the lawmakers, who have the influence with them, who know them, who have dinner with them.” That they’re on our side is sort of an inkling towards opening up that public discourse.

Let’s make changes for our society. Let’s not say we have no money for keeping the mentally ill in institutions. Let’s say we do have the money. Let’s find a way to get them the help they need. Let’s find a way to keep Social Security and medical benefits. Let’s find a way to get better-paying jobs. People have these terribly low-wage incomes. They’re struggling to keep their heads above water, barely able to get work, barely able to pay for the MetroCards, you know, because they have a family. I’m single, I make good money, and I’m struggling. It’s a disgrace. Right now . . . I think it’s tomorrow, we have No Fares for the Unemployed. We have that going on. I want to see that!

Oh, I think that’s great!

Isn’t it, Olivia?

I think that’s great.

Thank you!

Those are the inklings of hope that I see. When I give up hope, and I see something like that, I’m like, “Okay, I can stay a little longer. I can help to keep the movement here, and keep pushing that along, and keep other people coming here, and encouraging other people.”

◆

A lot of my friends and family don’t even know that I’m here. Of course, my parents do, but . . . Clearly, everybody knows that the occupation is here. I mean, it’s been fifty-something . . . what? Fifty-two days about now? Everybody knows we’re here, so I don’t want to force it down anybody’s throat. My clients, who some are the one percent—not necessarily my family members—I want them to ask me what it’s about. I want them to come with an understanding before I present it to them.

For instance, I have a very, very good friend who’s husband is a banker. They’re not necessarily the one percent, but she had no idea that I’ve been down here all this time. She didn’t even know I gave up my apartment to be here, and she’s been a dear friend of mine for fifteen years. She’s very successful.

We had dinner and we talked about it, and it was interesting to see her viewpoint because she was initially very angry, not knowing about me being here. So that’s why I’m saying I don’t really talk to people until I know that they want to talk about it. It’s a bit of a delicate matter. Like, my friend . . . when she allowed me to talk about it, I engaged in a conversation, and I could say she left with more of an understanding of what it’s about. She just heard all these negative things like you and I are talking about in the media and the press. She just thought it was no system; just terrible, like, a bunch of homeless idealists and hippies.

And then she knew I was here, and she knows that that’s not me. She knows I have never done this kind of thing, but she does know me as this friend who—I’m not a traditional kind of girl, you know? Some educated people work in the corporate world, and some educated people have chosen not to work in a corporate world, and I guess that’s what I meant about my friends and myself. They know that I’m a little bit more of that kind of a free spirit type of person. I haven’t finished college and I don’t work in an office. I’m more of an artist.

It was nice to engage her, and it was nice to put that word out. Slowly, I’m getting to my friends, to my family. I guess my point in saying this is: We have still got a ways to go because even within my own self—my personal self—my friends and family still need some education on this, still need some dialogue on this, and still need some awareness. We still have a long way to go, but we do have Outreach, and it’s helping along the way.

Personal outreach as well as reaching out to strangers.

Absolutely. I just—for me personally, I just don’t want someone to engage negatively, because it’s such a sensitive issue right now. It’s very difficult mentally and physically to sleep out here. I’ll be honest, six days I slept in a hotel because my friend had a hotel room. One day I got really sick, and I slept at a friend’s house. But I feel more connected sleeping here because then I understand what it takes to make a stand here. Where to wash up, where to go to the bathroom, what we need in terms of winterizing, and being here in Comfort. When you disconnect with that, then you disconnect a little bit with the movement.

Is there anything else that you would like to add?

People are really putting their blood, sweat and tears into this. That’s what I would really like to tell people. There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears from a lot of beautiful people. It’s pretty great. It’s pretty amazing. It’s pretty amazing to be part of it, just to be part of it.

I feel very fortunate, even though some days you’ll see me losing my cool, like, “Aagh!” I lose my cool when people put us down. Like, “Oh, yeah? Well, you don’t have this? Nice going!” Okay, well, our legal team is not here because it’s one a.m. Our press are not here because it’s two a.m. We don’t have the information for you because it’s three a.m. and I just got off Community Watch. We haven’t cleared the pathways because we can’t account for people who come in and . . .

When people do that, you’ll see me losing my cool. You will see me losing my cool. ❖

Evan

I wasn’t here until the twenty-ninth of September. I had been moving out of my place in Brooklyn because I had lost my job a number of months before. I’d come back to New York from Berkeley. I lived in Brooklyn for eleven years, and then . . . it’s a very long story.

My background’s in construction management. I went to school for architecture, design/build carpentry, the whole bit. Got into, finally, green building—working as an owner’s rep for a developer here in New York. That was until Thanksgiving, 2008. I went to Brazil for seven months. Came back, tried to be a real estate agent because there were no other options. I thought I would be able to get closer to acquiring buildings and doing some development—like passive-house stuff, and brownstones in Brooklyn. Anyway, I just ended up doing rentals in Manhattan and was miserable.

Then I went back to Berkeley for a while. Applied to the ecological economics program at Berkeley in the Energy and Resources Group. I didn’t get in, but it started this process of examination of what’s really going on, and coming to be disappointed with the sort of green building effort and everything—how it’s been co-opted.

Read a lot of conspiracy stuff about the Federal Reserve, and about the Bush family, and the C.I.A., and J.F.K.

I came back to New York for this job that was just with a regular developer. Real sort of nasty people, but it was a good-paying job. At that point I was broke, so I took it. I moved back.

I got fired after two months, but I had already started this currency project. Before I even left—like, February—is when I first thought of it. And then I hooked up with a Slow Money showcase in Brooklyn for entrepreneurs looking for financing. I met someone who was also working on a currency project, and we started working together.

So me and him were working on this project, and fast forward again to a point where I couldn’t pay rent anymore in Brooklyn. I was moving out, and I went down to Philly; I have friends in Philly who I was going to stay with for a couple months. I stayed there for about a week, but then my project partner was coming back up here. Here is the place to start experimenting with alternate currencies and stuff like that.

So I came back up, started working on that, and got involved in everything from biodiesel generators to meeting-minute templates, tent distribution and planning, fund-raising mechanisms . . . all of it. I’m spread thin right now.

Yeah, you look like you’re carrying the weight of the occupation on your shoulders.

There’s a lot of people down here who have a lot of ideas but aren’t very accountable. A lot of that is actually being there when they say they’re going to be there. People are left hanging, but I guess it’s to be expected. It’s incredibly chaotic here.

What were you saying about alternate currency? You mean literally currency?

Yeah. I mean literally, currency can be anything. Currency is just information. It’s information about energy, resources, abilities and skills, whatever people have to give and whatever people want. It can be numerical. It can be qualitative. It can be quantitative. It can be any of these things.

What we’re working on is a Web site where there’s a gifting platform. People can build profiles, and describe their wish lists and their gift lists—you know, their ability, what they have to offer—and make that information searchable and available. So start to free up the information pathways. We have a lot of blockage. A lot of people want to help, but they don’t know how to get involved. And there’s a lot of people who need things down here that aren’t getting them.

So it’s not like barter, exactly, but . . .

No, a barter economy is a misnomer. Barter is very limited. Barter depends on the fact that it’s a two-party transaction, and society doesn’t exist with two-party transactions; it exists in a collective. So you need some kind of credit system, basically, that people can give to. The credit system can be based off of reputation. You know, recognizing that this person has given a lot. And also, people who receive things write thank-you notes. It’s rebuilding the commons: sharing, trust, all these things.

You’re planning to implement this within the park?

Well, there’s a lot of outside donors. That’s the first priority: Make what we’re doing down here more transparent by growing a project-building page, with project teams, direct donation and direct support, crowd-sourcing—all these things.

And then investigate the broader social implications.

Yeah. Right now the Federal Reserve, otherwise known as “dollars,” have a monopoly on our issuance of currency, something which Jefferson warned of way back in 1822, I think the year was. If we give monopoly to our currency, people will end up homeless in the streets. That’s what we have because it’s artificial manipulation of the supply.

What’s happening now—it’s happened many times before—is: Put a lot of money out on the street in the form of loans because that’s how money is actually created. It’s out of thin air. It’s loaned into existence, and when they stop loaning and continue to call in the loans that they’ve already issued, the supply of money goes down. If everything is commodified and only exchangeable through dollars, what will happen is that there will be scarcity. It’s a false scarcity, but it’s a false scarcity that’s used as the primary instrument of oppression.

My long-term thing is to take back control, to have communities be able to make and manage very robust currency systems: pooling resources, investing in local organic food, everything else that’s good for the Earth—restorative as opposed to destructive.

Seeing as this is something Web-based, what about communities who are not wired?

Well, ah, there are different systems that aren’t Web-based, but I think that in order to really overcome the obstacles, we do have to use the best tools of communication that we have.

[A passer-by hands Evan a flyer.]

Passer-by: Use social network to create jobs.

Evan: All right.

So I think that’s a hardware issue that can be solved. It’s not that hard to solve.

It’s interesting. It’s both practical, and has a utopian quality as well. How were you introduced to this as an idea?

Depression over conspiracy. Realizing how deep the controls go and how they’re sort of hidden. Understanding how money works—having that education—and just realizing that that’s why the government is on its knees now. People look at corporations, but corporations are just sort of the henchmen for banks. It gets down to old, ancient issues of usury, that somehow money has the right to make money just because it’s controlled by one person. Judaism dealt with it, Christianity dealt with it, Islam dealt with it. All throughout history, the idea that the owners control by extracting the bounty as they distribute the money . . . it’s inflation. So it’s an ancient issue.

How would money function if it didn’t . . . replicate itself?

Have you ever read Louis Hyde? The Gift? It describes it pretty well. There are a lot of other books, but that’s probably the best and most accessible. It has the idea of the increase of the gift. The gift must keep moving, and basically, what profit is is what people extract.

I guess one of the best metaphors is a bucket of barley. A bucket of barley is given to somebody, and then they plant the barley. The barley grows, and then you have, say, two buckets of barley that you harvest from that one planted barley. It’s a spiritual thing. When people give their good spirit, there’s a natural increase. It’s a feedback loop.

What interest does is that it takes out the material aspect. It takes it out, separates it from the spiritual and the social, and destroys social fabric. It’s like, “I’m going to protect myself now.” It’s fear-based.

The structure we’re working on is that these entrepreneurs—local organic food producers—need cash to increase, so you give them a zero-interest loan as a gift, right? But the idea is that you give the gift back. The expectation is that if you have a bounty, you return it to the community—to the collective—voluntarily. If you do it voluntarily and it’s not forced in the form of interest . . .

Interest takes it’s money whether or not you have a bounty, you know what I mean? It frames the situation as: “All right, I give the bank its piece and I keep my piece,” as opposed to, “I return what was given to me to the collective, plus more.” So it’s sort of a voluntary system. I don’t know if that explains it.

It would be individuals who would give the loan?

No, it’s a collective. It’s a pretty complex system, and it’s kind of hard to explain without diagrams, but everybody loans to everybody. Everybody owns everything. I guess unincorporated association would be the best legal framework for it. Everybody is a user. Everybody is an investor. Everybody is potentially an issuer of currency, and all currency is a promise to . . . I can be a carpenter, and I’ll say I can build four tables. I just put them out there. I will build four tables for everyone, and I get credit on the system.

It’s a lot of accounting, so that’s the quantitative aspect. It’s a spectrum between quantitative and qualitative. There’s gift circles, like couch-surfing, and then there’s the informational form of it in terms of WikiLeaks. People just collaborate. It’s the commons. But then there’s also time banks, where everybody’s hours are equal to everybody else’s, and they count the hours. There’s local exchange trading systems, where they’re more sort of job-based, or sort of discrete: “I will build a table—I don’t care how many hours—and this is how many units of alternate currencies.” And then there’s local currency, like BerkShares and stuff, which is basically cash proxies. They serve as a way to keep dollars from flowing out of a town, back to a centralized location. It’s to decentralize dollars, and you have to sort of work with all of the different realms that are already happening.

Is this something that has been tried anywhere?

Yeah, tons of times. There’s time banks everywhere. There’s local exchange currencies, LETS . . . a lot of this is happening in the Transition Movement in Britain— Transition Towns. But I don’t think anyone has ever tried to do a combination of all these things. That’s what we’re trying to do with Slow Money—local organic food investment and stuff like that. It’s a local organic-food-backed currency, essentially.

What is Slow Money? Is that like Slow Food?

Slow Money is this new movement. Woody Tasch wrote a book and came up with this concept. It’s still usurious. I mean, it’s just lower interest rates. It’s still, like, we want return on our investment. It’s money making money. I remember, going back, there’s two kinds of people in the world: people who work for money, and people who have money working for them. The idea is to discard the whole idea that money—capital, amassed capital—works for any individual or entity, you know what I mean? The increase of the gift is shared, otherwise you stripped the community of its collective spirit.

So no hoarding, basically.

No hoarding, yeah, and no usury. Go to Wikipedia. Search local currency, alternative currency.

How do you get people who have money to loan voluntarily? It seems like the people who might be more open to this don’t necessarily have the resources.

Everybody has the resources. Everybody has resources to give. It starts with people knowing themselves and discovering themselves. That’s what he’s trying to promote.

The monopoly currency system tries to value everything in dollars. In terms of people who have money, they just need to give it up. It’ll solve a lot of problems for them. Believe me, I’ve worked in high-end residential construction—high, high-end Manhattan residential construction—and I see how unhappy people are. So you know, just give it. It needs to be cleansed. Absolve the money of its sins because it will continue to infect people and make them greedy, more greedy. ❖

Gypsy

Could you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and how you came down here?

Uh, random leftover Deadhead, blah, blah, blah. I watched our country fall apart since Clinton left office. Well, there’s been a bunch of disgusting crap since they basically killed F.D.R. so they could drop the bomb, but yeah, that’s a bunch of conspiracy theory. Clinton had it almost fixed. Since the Georges Bush—King George and King George the Second, whose entire resumé is bankrupting six corporations, getting fired from the one before he could bankrupt it, and then being given the biggest corporation on the planet and bankrupting that. It is! I mean, this isn’t conspiracy; it’s the front page of the newspaper!

I feel bad for President Obama because whether or not he has good ideas or is a good person, he’s fighting against . . . what? Six hundred and eighty-seven assholes who just really want to ruin our country and make money. I’m here because I’ve had it, for years. You know, “If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention!” Earlier this year, I wrote a thirty-two-page paper that I thought was a hundred percent or close to it, and started sending it to politicians. It was on thirteen or fourteen things wrong with our country and how to fix them. I didn’t write and bitch; I wrote with answers, because if you point out a problem and don’t have a solution, you’re an asshole. Just shut up.

So I wrote thirty-two pages of solutions, as I see them, that could work. “Please use it as a framework to make something better.” Then I had to go see my mom, and I had to come through New York. I planned on staying here to see what it was, see how it worked, see where it was going, help if I could. I’m still helping.

Around here, they like to say, “Oh, anarchy! Let’s do everything backwards and wrong!” Every time something works, “Let’s dismantle it so somebody else gets a chance to try their hand at it!” The things that feed you, clothe you, keep you alive, keep you connected, keep the movement going should be in permanent structures—tents that are good; we don’t have permanent structures, of course. They’re getting all that backwards. So if I can get this camp pulled together and talking to each other—or if I can watch it happen—that’s when I’m going to go ahead and see my mom this weekend. So vicious rumors: By the end of this week, I might be leaving. The tents are here; it’s just logistics now. But for some reason, they want to give the tents to the transient people and leave our permanent facilities flapping in the breeze.

All right, that’s my bitch that has been going on for a couple of days. Now about the movement, I wrote this paper. I came here. My hundred-percent paper has turned into seventy-five percent of a damn good framework to start a conversation on how to fix it all. You got an email address, I’ll send it to you.

Okay.

Something needs to change. A lot of things need to change. It’s been built convoluted on purpose, so there’s no one problem, no one answer. There’s a dozen problems and three dozen answers. [Matt] Taibbi in Rolling Stone actually said it best. He said you can’t take a picture of a stock broker on a telephone, selling stock in a company that moves it’s money to China, exchanging it for Italian lire and buying a shipping company to ship something here, which puts an American company out of business, and that guy lost his job. There’s no way to take a photo of that, and that’s actually how it works.

I got a three-hour lecture the other day on the way banks work and the way trading works. I still don’t understand it. I’m lost on all the terminology and I just woke up, but your mortgage becomes a sellable option. As far as the market is concerned, there’s two mortgages, and they’re trading on both of them. The simple reality is: They’re trading on the options of twice as much money as what was actually invested or has collateral behind it. And then all of a sudden, somebody misses a payment. The insurance company pays the guy who lent the money, the civilian loses everything they have, and the banks go havoc.

With 401(k)’s, they got rid of any kind of pension. I think there should be a national pension fund. Five percent of everybody’s paycheck goes to it. No matter how many jobs you work in your life, you have a pension. But they put 401(k)’s as an option, a tax-free option for individual investment so you have a better retirement. And then the corporations saw that since you were paying money for your own damn retirement, they got rid of pensions.

Then the Walmart model: Never hire anybody full-time. You don’t have to give them benefits or anything else. Now every corporation in America is taking that model. If you need them an extra day, you can get that eight hours without paying them overtime. As far as business goes, that’s damn smart, you know? It makes a lot of money, but you’re screwing over the people below you.

My idea is five percent of everybody: from the Georges Bush, Warren Buffett, Jimmy Buffett, [laughs] . . . I want to meet Warren Buffett and say, “Man, I love your music!” and just see what he says. “That thing is really cool!”

Five percent goes to the local hospital. You break your leg, don’t go to the insurance company; the hospital’s already doing that paperwork. If you’ve got to send that paperwork to an insurance company, it triples the price of your hospital visit. They send it back to the hospital, and there’s all that duplication of effort, and no real reason except to make money for a corporation that shouldn’t exist to begin with.

Five percent goes to Social Security. Everybody, even the Georges Bush. Five percent of their income will go to Social Security every time they get paid. When you retire, if you’re worth more than a million dollars, you don’t get a check. George Senior is worth what? Six point three billion dollars? He gets a Social Security check every month, and he cashes it.

[Laughs.] How much Social Security does he get?

I actually used to know, but I read that, like, two years ago, and that many numbers start falling out, so . . .

Well, then take George Bush, who’s, “Oh, ho, ho! I’ll give myself minimum wage as my paycheck, and I’ll leave it all in the corporation.” Well, guess what? In the sixties it was, “Power to the people!” This should be, “Profit to the people!” You have your corporation or your company or whatever. When your profit sheet comes out, before your stockholders get anything, you will take thirty percent of the profit of your company and share it equally amongst your employees. It will be taxed again at the thirty percent, which is five for the hospital, five for Social Security, ten to the federal government.

There’s no more medical expenses for anybody. Your five percent paid everything you will ever need. Five percent goes to the state for highways and all that, five percent to the pension fund. That’s thirty percent of your check. Right now, if you make ten dollars an hour, you make four hundred a week, and you bring home three hundred and ten. This way, you’ll only bring two hundred and eighty, but all your medical’s paid. You will get a Social Security check that’s a hundred fifty percent of the national median, with food stamps. The feds get their money for highways and bombs and everything else. The state gets their money for highways and bombs and everything else. And you will have a pension when you retire.

Sounds good.

The corporations have to give you thirty percent to begin with, which gets taxed again. They’ve made their contribution. Thirty percent of their profit goes right to their employees and gets taxed again. Everybody contributing. That’s my way to fix taxes and make hospitals. There’s nine other points in this thing. Social Security, food stamps, banking and lending, make it illegal to advertise prescription drugs . . .

Oh, God. I wish.

One point three billion dollars for research and development, three point seven billion for advertisement. Eighty percent of the budget for making and selling pills is advertisement. Make it illegal, your pills will cost twenty percent of what they do now.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I’m a consultant—restaurant consultant and a business consultant. I build shit. I relax by organizing. I’m going to try to make this camp a functioning camp that feeds its little army, clothes its little army, takes care of it without a bunch of waste and bullshit. I have the bigger picture also, so I’m pretty busy.

Yeah, I’m hanging out, living in the park, doing eighteen hours a day with my evening security duty and everything else. Nine o’clock meeting, ten o’clock meeting, I’ve got to go play guitar on the sidewalk so I can buy my own cigarettes, so I’m not leeching off the movement. If I make that much money, I will buy my own food so there’s more food, you know? You got to feed the Revolution before you can feed the people. You got to take care of yourself, if you can. We’re not trying to create a welfare state, but I would love for Mayor Bloomberg and everybody in the country who’s looking at us and saying, “Oh, what a disreputable bunch of whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .”

Bloomberg is intentionally sending his homeless people and his recently released convicts here, and we’re feeding them, we’re clothing them, we’re housing them. We’re doing it, and he won’t! So we’ve actually beat their system. Send us more homeless people. We’ll feed them, we’ll clothe them, we’ll house them. We’ll prove that you can’t do shit and we’re good at this. And keep sending me busloads of people from Rikers Island. We come into a riot squad situation, I’m putting them on the front line. You fight with a motherfucker that’ll stab you. Send us more of them. Send us busloads of people from Rikers Island. I’ll put them right on that gate when you go to come in here. Send us killers! We’ll put them right on the gate. Come on in, dumb-ass!

“Oh, I know what we’ll do! We’ll send them people that will kill us!”

Send us a few more! Send us the gang members, send us everything! They will come in here, we’ll feed them, we’ll clothe them. Come in here now! The happy little hippies are taking care of the people that’ll shoot you. Send us more. And then send cops down here against, you know, whatever gangs and recently released convicts and ex-military. Send us all of them, then come on in.

Send us the hard motherfuckers. Send us the homeless. We will feed them. We will clothe them. That’s what we’re here for. We’re here to prove that we are decent people, and we’re doing better than the government will ever even try to.

Well, it’s definitely true from what I’ve seen.

But we have internal stupid shit. We are building semi-permanent housing for our transient population. If there’s a snowstorm, rainstorm, protest in another city, they might just get up and leave. Our kitchen is never going to get on a bus and go to Albany. Our information network that hooks up to the world is never going to get snowed out and go home, but it’s flapping in the tarp because—and I just got done with this argument—“Oh, we’re supposed to run ourselves on an anarchistic system!” this and that and the other. The people who keep preaching that don’t know what anarchy means. Anarchy means we don’t need a leader because we all think the same thing and we’re going to go do it. Try to find me three people in this crowd that agree to anything! And if someone does not agree, it is not anarchy.

We’re trying to set up the Medical tent right here. Everybody’s on board except these two girls, and they’re over there bitching, “Oh, anarchy this! Anarchy that!” I said, “You know what? This is anarchy!” If we’d had a little bit of hierarchy, chain of command, organization, this would have been done six weeks ago, and I wouldn’t have been standing here telling you we’re going to move your shit to put up a hospital. Total anarchy! You love anarchy? This is anarchy! Shut the fuck up, we need a hospital!

Max: Do you need help talking to people about moving?

Gypsy: No, actually. I got that all together. We just had the two that wanted to whine, but they’re good for the morning.

What are you trying to put up?

Gypsy: Our First Aid tent has been sitting there, and in between these two trees will be a sixteen-by-sixteen on the sidewalk, so if you need an ambulance, it pulls right up to First Aid; wheelchair access, this and that and the other. Everybody’s on board except two girls who want to whine, and they got, like, a one-man tent and a tarp pole. “We’re not moving anywhere!” Bet you do.

This is the ladies’ tent, right?

Gypsy: Yeah, and if it had come to a vote, I would’ve voted to go ahead and put up a ladies’ tent. But now we got these two new tents. One is for Direct Action, who doesn’t have any equipment or anything, but they got a tent.

Max: But they tend to live on-site.

Gypsy: Get a tent! You’re going to freeze to death!

They don’t have a tent at all?

Gypsy: >They have their tents. Now they got a big tent that they are not going to move into, bet. But the other one is for—and I’m not homophobic; I’m not prejudiced against anything but stupidity—but we have a tent that’s for the transgender population that we have here. As they’re walking around with signs saying treat transgender equally, they’re generating themselves as a special interest group that needs a tent. You’re equal! Buy your own goddamn tent and go to sleep! We need this for the kitchen!

Max: Are you press?

I’ll tell you who I am when I—

Gypsy: [The kitchen] is flapping in the breeze!

Max: We can get tents. We’re doing another order today.

Gypsy: Actually, there’s apparently four more down there now.

Max: There are four more.

Gypsy: Uh, to house homeless people . . .

Max: No. Money was given by specific people. So Medical paid for—

[A heated argument ensues.]

◆

After the argument died down, the interview moved across Rector Street to Steve’s Pizza, on the west side of Liberty Plaza, where Gypsy proceeded to vent the lid of his take-out coffee using a hunting knife.

There you go. We have a political movement that is now here trying to overthrow the fifty men that own the planet, along with the largest corporation and military on the planet—their goal is to fight against those entities—and they can’t even build their kitchen. A bunch of random, granola-smoking, acid-eating hippies go into a Dead tour, the kitchen is put up first and solid. So we got an environmental activist group who’s trying to overthrow the world, who aren’t smart enough to build a kitchen.

The hippies were better than that. They knew, when you got there, everybody had to eat, so the first thing they built was a kitchen, a comfort station, and a first aid, and it got built in the most permanent structure they could construct, and then everybody else could have their anarchy. These people have insisted that we’re going to have anarchy, and nothing’s going to actually be accomplished. But we’re going to take over the world this way. Shut up!

Tell me what your ideal winter plan would be.

The smallest tent you can get will keep you warmest. You want that air pocket. You don’t want to just be laying there wrapped up in tarps on the ground. If you’re working in a restaurant in the dish room, you’re in hot water and steam all day long. If you wear a baggy shirt, you will steam yourself to death. If you wear a shirt that fits all the way to your skin, the water leaches through, the wind blows it off of you, and it keeps you cool.

Reverse that: If you’re wrapped up in your sleeping bag, you don’t have an air pocket. If you have a little bit of an air pocket around you, your body heat warms that air and gives you a little better chance of survival. If your tent is too big, there’s no retention of the heat. It’s the difference between sleeping in a closet or sleeping in a warehouse.

Right. I used to live in a loft, and we were freezing. I mean, we never were warm.

Bedsheets. Make yourself, like, a four-poster room, and it holds the heat for your bed. You come out, and there’s a temperature change. Well, imagine that on a smaller scale. You got a two-man tent with one person and their backpack, and it keeps them warm. Or you can put them in a sixteen-by-sixteen warehouse, and you don’t have enough blankets to keep them alive.

You’re envisioning that the big tents should be used more for infrastructure, and then with little ones surrounding them.

They want to have anarchy and this and that and the other, but this is very simple. We have an encampment that’s planning to make it through the winter. You have to enclose your permanent facilities. That is a no-brainer. That’s something that doesn’t even get voted on. We need the kitchen, Info, LiveStream, Comfort and First Aid. You don’t vote on that crap! You build them a tent, and you work from there. But people here are like, “Oh, we don’t need any central whatever!” Break your leg and tell me that! Have a heart attack! We’re going to leave you laying here because we don’t have First Aid. Come up there to get some food and there isn’t any. So how you feel now about not having any infrastructure to this movement?

People don’t want to use the big tents for the infrastructure?

The special interest groups have decided who the tents go to. They’ve taken their own funds, and allocated funds from the movement, to buy tents for the most ridiculous reason. “We need to consolidate a little better, so we’ll get rid of the two-man tents, and we’ll put up these monstrosities that still only sleep nine people.” In an eleven-by-twelve, you can fit nine people. Actually, in a ten-by-twelve, you can only sleep five, and that’s if they want to snuggle.

How big did you say those were?

They’re eleven-by-sixteen, give or take. These two are different than that one, and I’m not sure what’s coming next, but the general statement is: It’s eleven-by-sixteens. So okay, eleven-by-sixteen, and then we’re going to go ahead and pretend we get to pick where the door is, just for the sake of doing this. A person is six feet long. So if you’ve got sixteen feet, you put them end-to-end, and it leaves a three-foot channel in between. A six-foot person, a three-foot channel, a six-foot person—that’s fifteen feet, with room to walk between them. You got the eleven feet sideways. A human body’s at least two and a half feet. So four people makes ten feet, and it only leaves you three inches between each cot. They are not going to sleep that way.

Oh, are they doing cots?

Oh, yeah. Now even if they weren’t, you still need two and a half feet for a human, so say they’re laid straight out. That fits . . . let’s say five because we’re all friends. Ten people in an eleven-by-sixteen. You can fit twelve people in four four-man tents in the same space, and they’ll stay warm. So their entire reason for doing this is not-thought-through and wrong. “Oh, let’s save space!” You’re actually taking up an extra foot in each direction to house less people.

Was there a meeting today? This is on everyone’s minds.

Yeah, this was their idea, because I go there and tell them they’re going to freeze to death, and they go, “Oh, but the tents are so nice! In the summertime, you can roll the flaps up.” I said, “Are we getting any kind of heat?” Basically, there’s some theory about a whole bunch of them hand warmers. Oh, that’s got to be environmentally friendly, yeah, which is something else they haven’t thought through. What are the chemicals in them hand warmers? And you’re putting out a thousand, two thousand of them a day, and then throwing them in the trash! Dumb-ass! But we can’t have any kind of heat source. If you could have a wood stove in them tents, yes. Move in. Put in bunk-bed cots and move in.

That would be kind of nice and comfortable.

Yeah, we can’t have any of that in the park. No generator. We don’t have enough electric to make electric heat, which is wasteful anyway. We can’t run propane, we can’t run pellets, we can’t run wood, we can’t run oil. What else is there for heat? We are not going to have any heat sources. So you put people in the two-man tent. If you could actually get them little slender one-man tents and talk people into moving into them . . . couple of fleece blankets over the top, and you still better have four or five sleeping bags, and a pallet to get you off the ground.

I live in the woods. I’ve lived in the woods for a large chunk of my adult life, and they’re going to freeze to death. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they won’t listen to me. “Oh, brother man, I read a magazine article. I know everything about this.” I just spent the last three winters living in the snow in a tent. I think I know a little more than you do.

Did you have a heat source?

No, not really. You turn the tongue of your shoe down because it will be frozen when you get up, and that’s the only way you get your shoe back on. They don’t get this. Just your breathing causes condensation. If it’s cold for more than a week, your tent is frozen. It’s crystallized on the inside. If you touch it, it might shatter or rip. Your zipper is going to give out. After it freezes up, you can’t zip your tent anymore. You have to lay some kind of blankets over the doorway so you can get in and out of your tent, and after about four days, it turns into a flap because it’s frozen. They don’t get this. They think, “Oh, we’ll move into the tent. Oh, we’ll sit there in our t-shirts. It’ll be a good winter.” You will freeze to death, and they don’t want to listen to me.

The only thing I would say, though, is that there is a difference between being out in the woods—where you don’t have recourse to go inside—and being in the city.

Yeah, so everybody files out and goes into the subway or McDonald’s or whatever. That’s going to be great!

I’m just saying.

Well, no. My other thing is: I was smart enough that I was down in a hollow. You always try to build halfway up a hill because heat rises, cold sinks. The sun hits the top of the hill first, and moves down to the coldest spot, so you don’t want to be at the bottom; it will be cold longest, all that. And I built it in the trees, so the wind never hit me. Out here, the wind never stops. If you have a five-mile-an-hour wind, you need two more sleeping bags. If you have twenty-mile-an-hour wind, you need five more sleeping bags. It took eleven loads of laundry to wash my bed, and I wasn’t warm this winter.

This was upstate?

I live in Maine. It wasn’t that bad a winter. About six, seven o’clock in the morning some days it was down to zero, five degrees, stuff like that. Most of the time, it was in the teens. You know, like, somewhere between five and twenty degrees was the nighttime temperature, and I had that much bedding.

Now they’re trying to put people on a cot with a sleeping bag “because we got you an army tent!” Retard! The people are already cold now. In their tents, with a couple of sleeping bags, they’re already cold sleeping here. But they want to move them into a warehouse that doesn’t have any protection or heat retention.

And this is the biggest problem with this park. The movement as a whole isn’t organized enough to have any of these problems. But in this park, that’s the biggest problem is: The people who don’t know anything are the ones trying to run everything. And the most ignorant amongst us are the ones that get on the T.V.

Well, that I’ve seen.

That’s Jeff Foxworthy. He said: “You have a hurricane or tornado or something in the South, they don’t find a doctor or a lawyer. They find Shirley, in the muumuu and the sponge curlers, worrying about her casserole dish.” Everybody thinks people from the South are stupid, you know? “The most ignorant amongst us gets on the news.” Well, we got the same thing here. The photo op comes down to that corner, where that ignorant crackhead was there yelling, “You’re the one! You’re the one! You’re the one!” That’s front page in tomorrow’s newspaper, and they don’t see the people up there taking care of things.

◆

I’m an innovator. I’m a child prodigy with poor parents and a public school system. I should’ve entered Harvard when I was about thirteen. My father’s the only man I ever met anywhere in life who tried everything he could to make sure his children did not succeed.

My sister was working at Gino’s, which is—you know what that is? It shows your age! [Laughs.]

I don’t care.

Trying to get through George Mason University, paying her own way. My father wouldn’t give her a cent, and announced at the dinner table he started a college fund for some little girl we baby-sit.

Oh, my God.

That’s my father. My brother played team sports from the time he was six until he got out of school and went in the military. My father ranted and raved, “You’re a dumb-ass! You can’t follow orders! You’ve never been able to follow orders! You’re going to suck in the military! Blah, blah, blah!” But he’d been in team sports his entire life. He knows how to follow orders; he just doesn’t listen to my father. [Laughs.]

You know some of my background. I am a contractor of everything except HVAC. I know everything they need. Plus, I’m an innovator. I can’t buy anything new because I’m going to cut a hole in it and duct-tape something to it. I’ll go to the hardware store for pulleys, go to the plumbing shop to get them to bend a piece of pipe, and I’ll build a T.V. stand that swings to both rooms. That’s what I do. I’m wearing a-hundred-and-eighty-dollar shoes. They were seven bucks at Goodwill. That’s how I do things.

I should be running this government. I should be running this. They’re spending thousands and thousands and thousands to accomplish very little, where I could’ve taken a tenth of that money and done twice as much. And they won’t give me finances. My ideas will work, but that doesn’t affect them. They don’t care if it works or not. They want the credit. “No, I did all this. I’m going to go on my blog and tell everybody I saved New York.”

That’s what we’re fighting against is people’s ego. I keep telling people, “I’m not even here. Just make it work, and I’m leaving. This is how it should work. Please put it together. You take all the credit you want to.” And then you got somebody else, “I’ve had a committee for four weeks discussing this.” Yeah, and you’ve accomplished nothing. We got to finish in two days. You won’t let it happen because you didn’t get the credit for it. Welcome to O.W.S. And you go to people—actually, the ones that rushed over to make me quit screaming are the ones that do get shit done. They are sick of that internal anarchy that gets a whole bunch of money to do nothing, and they can’t get money to do what’s right. The tech room—they’re over there with P.V.C. pipe and duct tape trying to save all of our electronics. At a thousand dollars a laptop, there’s fifty thousand dollars worth of electronics in that tent, and they’re trying to fix it with duct tape.

They should have a good tent.

Well, like I said, the transgender population, which I’m not prejudiced against them at all, but they’ve got the sign that says, “Treat us equally, but we get our own tent.” And that’s a large part of this movement, too, is, “Oh, no! We want equality, but I want a little bit extra, actually,” you know? “Don’t call me out of the crowd like I’m special, even though I got a tent, and I eat first, and this and that and the other. I made sure everybody knows I’m special; don’t treat me like I’m special.”

It’s so tricky. I mean . . .

[Laughs.] There is not an adjective to describe the trickiness of this!

Well, I think the other thing is, it is really stressful.

What’s going on right now with the tents and the park is a bunch of scared little suburbanites who’ve never been exposed to anything. I’ve spent a little over nine years in jails, prisons, and penitentiaries—along with the rest of my education—for being a bad driver, or tour-related injuries when I was following the Dead. If you’re on a Dead tour long enough, you’ll go to prison. [Laughs.] But you got these people who grew up a suburbanite, and they went to their little college, and they studied with their little soft-spoken little clique. And they come out here, and they’re living with the homeless and the junkies in the street, the people that drink every night. I grew up in the South. Everybody drinks. They get loud and obnoxious, and you go, “Shh, baby’s sleeping,” and they calm on down.

They’re like, “He’s getting loud!” and then they’re like, “We don’t want that! We need to get a tent and just move them out!” Shut up! Stay out of the area! You know, it’s like having a bad neighborhood. Do you wander through at two a.m. and complain that it shouldn’t be so bad? No! Get the hell out of the neighborhood! If you don’t like it, don’t go there.

They’re trying to pretend in this movement that that element isn’t actually part of America or the world. We are a very good snapshot of the cosmology of this country. The drunks and the junkies and the peaceniks and the rich people and the dumb-asses and the mentally impaired and the bad people . . . that’s America. But we got this little clique on the inside who’s decided that they’re going to create social change at the same time as the political change, and guess what? No junkie ever wants to quit; they want to quit getting arrested.

They don’t want to. They want their dope every day. And even after they’ve gone through drug rehab and this and that and the other, and they’re out there going, “Yeah, man. I’m clean,” you talk to them and they’re like, “I sure would like a slam. I just . . . I’m not going back to jail again,” is why they quit. Know what makes people decent? Fear. If you have nothing to fear, you act like an asshole. If you’re afraid of something, you learn manners really quick.

Send them down there to the Tombs on a bad Friday night when, like, the Irish bar got arrested. Let one of these little hippies sit in there. He isn’t going to spout his political shit because there’s a bunch of big, angry, drunk Irishmen who would stamp him up and hurt him. So he’ll sit in the corner, quiet. And then he’ll come back out here and think he knows everything about the world. He’ll start telling people what to do, because in this crowd they would nag him, but they won’t punch him in the mouth. ❖

1. The Vagina Monologues was written by Eve Ensler. ↑
2. Douglas A. Muzzio, in: Kate Taylor, “Demonstrators Test Mayor, a Backer of Wall St. and Free Speech” (New York Times, November 3, 2011). ↑
3. The Dark Knight Rises, directed by Christopher Nolan (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.\ Pictures, 2012). ↑
4. Louis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983). ↑
5. Woody Tasch, Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as If Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008). ↑