Why We Occupy

November 7

King

I don’t watch T.V. at all. I don’t watch T.V. I don’t listen to the news. I don’t listen to the media. I just go by my spirit forces. If it’s going to rain, I look at people around me; when I see them preparing for the rain, I just fall in line. I just put up my top or my umbrellas or whatever.

But back to the issue at hand. What led me to this movement was that I was in Harlem one day, and a friend of mine says they’re trying to give you a hundred fifty or two hundred dollars in panhandling or some junk. I didn’t know what was going on down there. They were saying it’s, like, a little political movement, things of that nature. That’s when I became involved, because I majored in political science and law. I went to Morgan State University, like, 1992, so I’ve been active in the movement—in any type of political-related issues dealing with oppression, anything pertaining to humanitarian.

So I came out to the park. I started getting flyers and leaflets—you know, finding out what’s going on here. I didn’t understand the science of the movement at first.

Then I created a table. I put up flyers and leaflets. Whoever was a protester, I put their information on the table. And then I came up with a concept called International Grassroot Media, because I started feeling everybody’s pain and struggle was from different ethnic backgrounds and different regions of the world. I want their message to get out to the general public, that we all are struggling. It’s not just a national issue, it’s an international issue.

My message is: Listen to the people who are struggling. It doesn’t matter where they come from, what origin or religious background. I feel that we all came here to voice our opinion on one landmass, you know? Let the people know. Let the world at large know.

How long have you been occupying?

I’ve been down here for about a month, and I seen myself develop over the month. There are people who have their little bizarre way of expressing themselves—a little hostile, a little bit of rage—and I’ve seen people who want to get physical with these guys. I’ve been blessed with the spiritual barometer to become the mediator of different issues. And I must say, I’m an expert on it. I have a little charisma to communicate with those who are hostile. I know how to calm them down, make them feel good, motivate them to be here on a movement, not out here on rage. I try to get people to understand and respect one another, no matter what background they come from, even if they’re hostile, or they have a little psychological disorder, whatever. We all are God’s children, and that’s why we all need to be protected.

So that’s the message I’m bringing to people out here. You have a point of view, even if you’ve got a little psychological issues that need to be addressed.

But we’re not here to really fully address it. We are not no psychologists or anything, but we do our best. We get people to understand the issues that they have in the park. Accept it, and don’t hurt them.

What are some of your ways of getting through to people?

I embrace them. I try to be, like, a little wall, or a human bridge to join people together. I don’t know . . . I had law enforcement come through with me to help me mediate issues. The law enforcement seen that I have a way of communication with people. And they say, “Well, you know, just walk with him. Make sure he’s all right.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s what I do.” I walk with them . . . walk with them out the park. Walk two, three blocks with them, calm them down. I don’t try to keep them away because we all have rights to this park.

One thing we all have in common in the park is that we are rebelling against a system of authority who exceed their rights. From the mayor on down, they exterminate movements from different political backgrounds. So I don’t believe in people from the park trying to police people in the park. This is what we are against: policing.

What do you mean, policing? Like, kicking people out?

Yeah. Not that they get physical, but they try to push you out a little bit. They try to surround you, you know? I’m for that if you’re, like, a rapist, and you’re a threat to people here. You know, there was a rapist here one night. A couple of times, they keep showing up to the park. But we join forces and push him out the park. I pull out my camera; I take pictures of him. I go, “Wasn’t he here two nights ago?” I say it to him in a sarcastic way so he understand, like, get the message: “Please leave.” And then he just left, and that’s it. And that’s it. They just run away, certain cats.

But not someone who’s just voicing their political opinion about the government or this or that, because everybody voices their opinion about the government. I’m not supporting with some of their opinions, but everybody’s got a voice. They’ve got to be heard.

Are you planning on being here for the winter?

Yes. I plan to be here, yes, until the last day.

How are you going to stay comfortable?

Just bundle up, and just maybe doubling sleeping bags. That’s it. It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. It’s all psychological. You’ve got military troops doing it all year every year, camping out, and nobody’s talking about them, so . . . ❖

Catherine

My name’s Catherine. I’m a singer/songwriter. I ordinarily live in Portland, Oregon. My husband and I came to the occupation about a month ago. We saw online that it was happening. About ten days into it is when we found out about it. And then we didn’t have the money to come, but some folks that we knew contacted us and said that they wanted to help us get there, without us asking or indicating that we wanted to go. Sebastian probably told you this story . . .

No, I don’t think so.

We do house concerts a lot. We played at these folks’ house in Idaho. It’s, like, sort of a fledgling intentional community, and they live part-time in Portland. They basically contacted us and said, “We think you should be there.” You know, “We think your music should be there.”

Out of the blue.

Yeah, we hadn’t indicated to anyone, like, we wish we could go but we can’t. They said, “We have a gold coin that we want to sell, and give you the money so you guys can go,” which they did, and so that paid for our airfare and part of our rent. Yeah, so that’s how we came to be here, and we’ve been here about a month.

It’s been a mixed experience, you know? Really inspiring sometimes, really difficult other times. The practicality of sort of camping on concrete is not ideal, but . . .

Do you have pallets now?

Yeah.

Is that helping?

Yeah. It hasn’t really rained since we put the pallets under there, but it’s nice to be off the ground a little bit, anyway.

Do you have a background in activism?

I was involved in a protest in Los Angeles against the Iraq war before it started, and I have been active online, you know, forwarding petitions and things like that. I was interested in MoveOn dot org at the beginning of their sort of thing. And I also have written a few political songs, being a singer/songwriter, but I haven’t been extremely active before now.

So what was the difference in this movement for you?

I think much of the activism or the issues that came to the fore previously—in my view, anyway—were more special-interest. Not that they weren’t important, but they were very specific, where this was sort of this cry that everything’s fucked up, and that’s how I felt.

I’ve been really opposed to fracking and other similar environmental choices, but haven’t particularly found specific forums in which I could be useful in resisting something like that. There hasn’t been any fracking where I live yet, thankfully. Hopefully there won’t be. So yeah, this just felt like something that was really important, really broad, and I don’t feel like that sort of protest has been seen for a long while in this country.

I find it interesting. The appeal of the occupation seems to be very broad, but then that’s what people criticize it for.

A lot of people I talk to say, “Yeah, but what are you protesting? What are your practical solutions?” The first couple of times, I answered that question, but now it’s kind of like . . . at this point, I’m tending more towards: “The corporate media is feeding you this line that we don’t know what we’re protesting.”

Of course we don’t have all the solutions; it’s just starting out. But there are certainly solutions being talked about. That’s where you start. You can’t fix a problem without understanding what it is and hearing a lot of voices, so that’s where we are right now.

What I have noticed is that the experience of occupying the park partly explains why for a lot of people.

Um . . . yeah, I think some people feel that the park is the answer and some people don’t. I think the park being the answer is both hopeful and also really scary, because things don’t always happen here in the most logical, well-thought-out, democratic way.

My experience is that we’ve built a small community in our little area of tents, and we’ve all realized the need to be protective of that little community and of those relationships. That has been the only way that we really could have stayed, and I think a lot of the problems in the park and in the larger society basically stem from a collapse of community, even of family, to a certain extent.

We don’t totally have it figured out here, but we’re trying. It’s difficult because we’ve all grown up in a dysfunctional society—one where oftentimes, community is not valued, is not fostered. So we’re having to learn how to do that, and it’s under not ideal circumstances. We’re really close together, we’re on a relatively unforgiving terrain . . . but we also have a lot of wonderful advantages. There’s no-cost food available to us, no-cost medical care and things like that, and constant conversation—an openness to conversation, which is important.

What’s going on with this tent?

I wasn’t here at the beginning, but Town Planning has been putting together a plan to make the camp operate more efficiently, and one of the things that was part of their plan, as far as I know, was to move Medical up to here, further up in the park so that it had street access and maybe was a little more central. There doesn’t seem to be a forum by which those sorts of plans are communicated, so they basically just came in this morning and said, “We need you to move your tents because we’re putting the Medical tent here.”

There wasn’t warning.

There wasn’t warning. While I was laying in my tent last night, I heard someone talking about this plan, but they weren’t talking to us. They were talking to someone else. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

So yeah, there was no consulting the people that would be affected. As I was saying to Joey, we’re choosing to live here—at least, most of us are not truly homeless. Most of us in the community where we live are not truly homeless, so we could go elsewhere if we needed to. I understand that Medical needs a space. It’s important to a lot of different people to have that service available, but yeah, lack of communication is an ongoing problem within the movement. So we moved our tents, but there were three different guys who all were saying, “I know what’s going on. Don’t listen to the other guy,” and all giving us different information about how big the tent was, where it was going to be placed, how it was going to be placed . . . so it just gets silly.

So this is your new spot for tonight?

I don’t know. I am not sure whether Medical is planning on being open at both ends. If they’re planning to have people come in through the back door, there is not room for that as the tents are now. And also, that would be, I think, pretty disruptive to be right on the path where people are coming and going constantly throughout the night. So I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

Anything else you’d like to put into the record?

I guess just that it’s easy to get caught up, as in life, with the minutiæ, or even just the practical problems and challenges of living in the park. It’s really necessary to maintain positivity, and a broader view of the significance that this is happening at all, and that we’ve come as far as we have come. One of the guys who’s here—his name is Shen—was at Tiananmen Square back in the day. He often facilitates the working group coordination meeting that happens at nine a.m. every day. At the end of every meeting, he says, “It’s another beautiful day in the occupation,” and it’s so important, because it’s often a meeting that has a lot of bitching, like, sort of inherent to the process. It’s a really good reminder at the end of it: “We’re still here.” That in itself is awesome, even though it’s hard and frustrating. ❖