Why We Occupy
November 14
Stefan
My name is Stefan. I’m twenty-two. I live half in the park, half in Brooklyn. I’ve been here since the beginning.
The first time I was involved with this was in August. I went to one of the first pre-General Assembly meetings, and then I had to take a big step back. I was here day one, and on and off for the first two weeks, but I was recording an album. Then I went on tour for three weeks, so I was kind of being involved, and then cutting out a chunk of the life here. Then I came back three and a half weeks ago or so, if my math serves me well, and have been on the ground, entrenched, pulling, like, twelve plus hours every day since, and that’s kind of an indefinite thing.
I do Facilitation and Structure. I help with the tents, as well as a few other side projects here and there, as needed. Generally, just existing here means that you’re doing a lot of other work in a lot of other places.
I don’t have a real set tent here. I’m just kind of floating around under the good will of others who might have space on the night, you know? It’s a tricky process, but I find it’s important to sleep here because then I can get to the nine a.m. coordinators’ meetings. I can be entrenched in the culture of the park, and I can help switch the culture to something that’s beneficial and healthy and sustainable, as opposed to just . . . like, it’s a little leery right now. Some of the people in the park don’t quite have a long-term vision. So I’m just trying to be here, to be an entity that is ready to work in the long haul.
Could you talk about some of the changes you’re seeing?
On a physical level, things are very different. It actually looked like a park once upon a time, and the General Assemblies were around one of these potted-plant things. There was, like, two hundred people. It was way tiny, and this whole west side of the park was almost completely empty. It felt weird. It felt like the park was really big at that moment. If you imagine nothing else is in this, this is kind of a large-size park. But now it’s completely filled to the brim, literally. We’re having police confiscating tents because they’re just spilling over into the sidewalk. They’re trying their hardest to be in the park, and they can’t be here.
When I went away to play music—when I went on tour—before then, there were no tents. And when I came back, all the tents were here. So that was the biggest change, the biggest shock for me. I’m trying to adjust myself to this world, where there are all these tents and the tents are really disorganized. So that’s a big one.
Culturally, I’ve seen a lot of shifts, too. Before I left—and maybe this has to do with the tents—the people who were here were, by and large, either the people who were in it for the long haul, or tourists who wanted to see what was going on. There was no middle ground. And now I see a lot of people on the west side of the park that are involved in their own microcosm of culture. They have their own ways of organizing or not organizing that don’t work in tandem with the larger Occupy Wall Street movement—the reason why we have actually come here in the first place.
That’s something I’ve noticed. It started occurring the past month, maybe, and it’s a little upsetting because it doesn’t help us clarify our vision of why we’re here. It doesn’t help us think about things in three-month, six-month, year patterns. I don’t think that maybe what they want is what we want here. I think what they want is very rooted in the spatial here. Not to create this divide, like us and them, but the people who are in working groups have affinities that are action-oriented, that are radical. We’re trying very hard to come together, and that’s a difficult process, too.
I have noticed a lot of splintering and fragmentation since I first started here. Before, it was like, “We need to do the things we need to do because they need to be done.” We didn’t come in with the intention of having a million working groups. They came out of necessity, and I understand that, but now they’ve all become these little cultures in and of themselves. I just see them rocketing off in their own directions without this consciousness of the whole, and that’s really dangerous in terms of collective liberation.
Town Planning can do the best they can to make tents available for everyone, but if we’re not—and I’m on Town Planning so that’s the reason I’m saying this—but if we’re not taking into consideration sexism, racism, homophobia, and real consent policies and things like that—if we’re not looking at all of these other things that should be interwoven to all that we do—then we’re just building another destructive culture like the one we’re fighting against. We’re just building a microcosm of the culture we’re fighting against, which is really hard for us to get our minds around.
But there’s good things happening, too; I don’t want to focus on the negative. On a positive end, our allies are coming in full force. We have a ton of people who are providing lots of support. We have people from Egypt coming in. There are trainers from all over the world, sitting down with us to try to tell us these things that are so vital, trainers for forty years that are sitting down and spending weeks on end here, just conferencing with us, trying to drill into our heads how to do this and how to do it well. So that’s awesome. We’re totally lucky.
It’s like going to college for free. Every day, you’re just learning from your peers, learning by your actions, learning from mentors and elders who’ve come in, who can provide resources to you, not to mention the physical resources we have that are almost endless. It feels almost endless, to some degree. I mean, everything has an end, but . . .
There’s a lot to offer, there’s a lot of potential, and there’s a lot of issues. A lot of bridges need to be built, and there are ways to do it, and we’ll find out which ones are effective.
I’ve been running around with my head cut off for a few weeks, and that’s an issue. In the past few days, I’m realizing that what we need to be focusing on isn’t so much the urgent, but the important. And while we can find things that are both urgent and important, we should be focusing on the important, but not urgent. And that’s our vision.
What’s the distinction?
An important, not urgent thing would be why we’re here in the first place, why we came to this park. Take ourselves out of our context of this park, and look down at what are we doing and what are we building and why we are building it. Those are the important things. What we build in six months isn’t urgent, but it’s important, and it needs to be talked about now.
The urgent and important are the things that are in this park that we need to address immediately because they directly link in with our views. So if we’re splintering as groups, that’s urgent and important.
But the urgent non-important are these things that happen day-to-day that we freak out about because we’re so entrenched in our own mindset in this park. We’re like, “Oh, my God! This person slept in this tent!” or, “This person said this thing!” or, “The police acted in this way today!” as opposed to saying, “How can we get into the mindset of police in relationship to here? How can we get into the mindset of this culture?” The urgent non-important are specific things, and we focus so much of our efforts and time on it that it’s exhausting. We’re so exhausted, we can’t focus on the abstract important things that need to happen, and that’s dangerous. But we can overcome these issues.
Last week people were starting to do Spokes Council. Has that been answering the issues at all?
It’s been addressing the issues; I don’t think it’s been answering them yet. Again, people are in this urgent state. As someone in Structure who helps organize the Spokes Council, I know that the Spokes Council is our strongest weapon. It’s the best information-sharing warehouse we have. Anyone from any of the operations groups that have been consented upon can share their information with each other. We can pool our abilities together. We can use that as a model to build things. That’s awesome. But what we keep seeing is less and less consent, more and more airing of issues that people have. I think that they are urgent issues. However, some of them are important and some aren’t.
We are trying to push forward the Spokes Council because we do think it’s a model that works. We’ve been told by many people in many contexts that it does work. We’ve seen it work in other Occupys. It works in a lot of anti-fracking movements in upstate New York. It worked to end the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. It worked to end building nuclear plants in the United States. It’s done a lot. It’s the best information clearinghouse that any radical, non-hierarchical organization could use. It’s great, and it’s time-honored. So we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re just trying to replace a bad wheel with a good wheel.
The Spokes Council, when and if it gets up, will be awesome, but right now, just having everyone in the same room together is volatile. We have to understand that, and it might take a while for us to air that out before we can sit and really work. A lot of people have issues with each other, and we need to feel out how we can overcome this urgent obstacle to get to the things that are really important in the macro.
Which just leads me to a really quick statement that a lot of people are taking this movement personally, and I think that’s very toxic. I think what we need to realize is that when we’re here, we’re building as parts of this movement, not as our personal selves. We need to take care of our personal bodies and our needs, but those can happen both in the park and outside of the park. People should feel welcome to take a step back for a night or two and just decompress, get their head straight, as opposed to throwing their needs out to the movement. That gets very heavy and very crazy. And personal arguments need not happen here. They can happen elsewhere. This needs to be a space for the movement to build and grow.
Do you think that’s the answer to defusing tension? People taking better care of themselves?
Yeah, I think that that’s a huge part of it. If we take care of our needs, then we impose a lot less on other people, and we have a better focus and sense of self. One of the skill sets that I’ve been learning here a lot is nonviolent communication, which just says that if we recognize our needs, and recognize that we’re the only people who can satisfy our needs, then we can be a lot less detrimental to other people and to ourselves. I think that it’s good to have Wellness, N.V.C., De-Escalation, lots of people on-site to help with that, but it’s also personal accountability and self-facilitation.
There is one day when I first came back here that I just wasn’t eating or drinking, and I was working a lot. And then I wound up snapping at someone. The second that I did that, I pulled back and said, “Wait a minute! Red flag! I’m not taking care of my body. I’m not taking care of myself, and because of that, I’m starting to be detrimental to other people. I’m going home tonight. I’m going to cook a big breakfast in the morning, and I’m going to pack a lunch, and I’m bringing water. I’m going to fix this right now, before I dig this hole,” you know? I think, if we all recognize where we are at physically and mentally and spiritually, then we can create this system that’s better.
I understand that not everyone can go back to an apartment, but we’re slowly building up an infrastructure of people who have spaces and can offer them. I’m trying to pass along the information that several people from upstate New York have offered log cabins for anyone to go up to for retreats.
That’s really nice.
There’s a whole network of support all over the world that’s willing to take care of us and get into a head-space where we can push and build, but we have to be accepting. We have to be accepting of the fact that we, as individuals, need space from this park sometimes.
But as a movement, we need to focus on what’s important.
Could you explain to me a little bit about how Structure works?
Well, what Structure does right now is mostly focused on the Spokes Council. We do some of the spatial stuff, like, we try to get the actual spaces for Spokes Council. We send out the emails to all the working groups, letting everyone know where the Spokes Councils are, what time they are, because the times fluctuate a little bit. They’re usually seven to ten or seven thirty to ten thirty, but that really depends on the space and their needs, so it fluctuates.
Also, it’s kind of a very intense brainstorming session for how we’re going to try to set the spokes. We had, like, an eight-hour conversation one day just about, “How are we going to get the spokes consented upon?” because that’s not the G.A. process. That’s not the traditional consent process. How can we do it in a way where everyone is validated, recognized, and there’s reducing the amount of back-and-forth for personal conversations and personal arguments to come in?
We want: “Is this group an operations group? Yes? Or does it need further discussion?” And if it’s, “Yes, they’re consented upon,” that’s it. We can flesh out personal grievances or tactical issues later, but we have to get these groups in now. There are other spaces and forums to handle these grievances. You can come to these working groups and say, “Hey, I think you’re having these major issues in these ways, and we need to talk about it.” I think that there should be other forums for this, and that’s maybe a piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been fleshed out as much but needs to happen more.
How many working groups are ideally involved in Spokes Council? All of them?
It’s operations working groups, and I can’t speak on how many because that’s not up for me to decide, but it’s any group that logistically or financially contributes to the operations of Liberty Park. That’s what we are building here.
Okay. So Comfort, Library . . .
Yeah. I’m trying to think of who’s already been in. Medic is in. Sanitation is in. Kitchen is in. I think N.V.C. is in. I think Comfort is in. Finance is in. Anyone who’s handling the tactical everydays—those people are the ones that we’re mostly talking about.
There are other groups that might get in, like Facilitation and Training—things that do provide services, but maybe it’s slightly more up for debate whether they’re operational or logistical. And then there’s groups that a lot of people want to discuss because we’re not sure. A lot of those might be movement groups.
Also, note that caucuses are welcome, caucuses being a body of people who have a common affinity, usually around marginalization. So there’s a women’s caucus, there’s a People of Color Caucus, there’s a Queering O.W.S. caucus . . . the women haven’t quite found their way in yet. Every time they’re ready to speak, something goes wrong in the Spokes Council, and the Spokes Council deflates.
Wow, that is so horrifyingly true-to-life.
I feel so bad. To take off the Structure hat for a second: We really, really need the women’s caucus in.
That really bums me out, I have to say.
Yeah, it bums me out, too. It’s really important that they’re there. I think that the caucuses are really healthy in these Spokes Councils. The caucuses are threading into these meetings that which is really important to all of us. So when a group acts in a sexist way, the women’s caucus can say, “I’m standing up and I’m going to directly address this.” It’s great to have a forum. Like, “This spoke will handle these issues. And while we all can feel empowered to deal with them, this spoke has a lot of knowledge about this, really understands the issues, and can speak concisely on it so that we’re not all going back and forth.”
The models that work the best are: Small groups with common affinities get most of the shit done. Then bring in larger groups, like a Spokes Council, to share information and to draw more people to those affinities. We’re here as autonomous collectives. Occupy Wall Street is a movement, but each group should be entitled to make its own decisions. I can’t tell the kitchen what kind of food to get or how to organize their structure or when their hours are. I accept the fact that they are based on what’s best for them because they have a much better knowledge, in the same way that I don’t complain to Medic about what kind of medicine they have or how they practice it. But if there’s a serious issue that could compromise the movement, then we can discuss it. There are working groups that might have these larger issues, but by and large, we need to respect autonomy of working groups. These larger movements, like the General Assembly and Spokes Councils and things like this, should really just be information-clearing and asking for things that are larger than themselves.
What is a General Assembly issue as opposed to a Spokes Council issue?
Once we have the Spokes Council in place, the Spokes Council will handle all financial things that are operational to the movement. General Assemblies, we are trying to have more of an open invitation for people to brainstorm and popcorn—which is a style of brainstorming session where anyone just calls out things—or breakout groups about ideas, theories. Like, “We want to talk today about our relationship with the neighborhood.” Or, “We want to talk about Occupy Wall Street in relation to the other Occupys.” Or, “What are we, as the Occupy movement, doing in this macro picture? Let’s just talk about it.” They could have breakout groups and small information, and then harvest it and bring it back to this wider community. That’s really healthy because that’s a way for us to be self-aware. So that’s what I think a General Assembly is good for. And that should be open to anyone and all people.
I do think a Spokes Council should be open, but the most important people in the Spokes Council are the spokes themselves, conferring with the other spokes. If all the spokes are there, legitimately speaking on behalf of their working groups, I think that that would be an acceptable Spokes Council to me. I do like having other people from working groups come in to back their spokes, so that they can confer with each other on issues that they might not have addressed in their internal working groups. I think it’s healthy. But it’s not an open meeting for tourists and for people . . . like, you can audit it if there’s space, and I’d love to find a large enough space for that, but we do have to accept the reality that we are in Lower Manhattan. There aren’t five-hundred, six-hundred-person meeting spaces that are friendly with Occupy Wall Street and available in two days at a price we can afford.
You guys have to rent space for it?
Yep.
What kind of spaces are you getting?
Well, we were in a high school cafeteria over by the Brooklyn Bridge for two days.
Oh, were you in Murry Bergtraum? I used to teach there.
I think it was. It’s right by the police precinct?
Yeah. I know that cafeteria well.
It was very hot.
It’s unpleasant.
Yep, didn’t create the best atmosphere.
But I think Murry Bergtraum, the guy whom it was named after, was some sort of old-school socialist.
Cool. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they were down for us.
Then we were at a really nice area, although it was a little bit too small. We were at a Trinity Church reception area that fit two-twenty people. We had about three hundred people in the space, and they were still letting people in and out. They weren’t harassing us about it. They were really actually really, really awesome and welcoming. But there was some controversy about Structure putting out this email to everyone, asking each working group to only bring, like, three or four people backing up the spoke. That isn’t super all-inclusive.
Isn’t the spoke rotating?
Yeah.
So I mean, they’ll be included eventually, right?
Yeah, and I think that’s fine. The spoke has to rotate every time. It keeps working groups of one—which do exist here—it keeps them from being able to be present at the meetings, because you’re not a working group of one. That’s not a working group. That’s not even a group. To take us out of Occupy Wall Street world and into the dictionary, that’s not a group. The dictionary will argue that this group has no validity in this space. It’s not a personal bias, it’s kind of an objective thing.
How many working groups of one are there?
I think two, maybe three.
I’m not going to ask what they are.
I’m not going to tell.
No, no. Keep moving.
So the Spokes Council is here for information-clearing, because no one has time to sit in on every group. I have no clue what goes on in the groups that I’m not involved with. It’s like blind spots in my vision, you know? I can see where Structure is. I can see the future of Facilitation. I can see where the tents are now, and where the tents will be in the future, hopefully. And I can also see some of the larger “where we as a movement are going,” just because I’m involved with a lot of the network here. But I have no idea what’s going to happen with a lot of these groups. Being able to sit in on the Spokes Council is awesome. It’s really empowering.
What would you say is the direction now?
I’m not completely sure, but what I see is us transcending this physical space. We need to, and we need to soon. And although we never know where we are, I’d like to see us really fleshing out what’s important to us, networking with other people who’ve already been doing it, and doing it a long time. Kind of going glacial, in many ways, although still maintaining this really strong vibe. Having really good campaigns, like, “We’re going to shut down this!” in a spirit of direct action, while also being an entity in our community, and taking this model and bringing it to other places. So it’s not about . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . . I think physical occupation is really good because it is a clearinghouse for information; it roots us in the spatial, it’s symbolic, it’s theatrical. But what I see is our ideas going forth.
As an occupier, I’d like to see a lot less government, a lot less corporatization. Mostly, I just want to see people feel empowered, and empowering themselves.
What we’re doing here isn’t a reactionary movement. That’s why we don’t have demands. We’re here because we’re a non-hierarchical community-building movement. We’re testing out how communities can get together, and if we can find a way that works, that’s going to go everywhere. That’s going to spread like wildfire, and it already is, to some degree. That’s why everyone is talking about consensus, and I couldn’t be happier. If we’re talking about consensus, then we should be talking about consent—personal consent—and if we can all take in personal consent, we’re going to be much healthier.
How are you distinguishing between consensus and consent?
Consent is a personal thing. I can consent to this interview. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t need to consent to me having this interview because it respects that I’m an autonomous individual with decisions. Consent is an individual saying yes to something. It always comes into it in terms of sexuality, but a good consent policy applies to everything that we do in our lives. It’s being held personally accountable to make decisions, and then empowering ourselves to vocalize those decisions so that we’re not put in situations that we don’t want to be in—we’re not put in these coercive combinations, as Utah Phillips would say.
Consensus is: As a movement, as a body of people, we all agree this is something that can happen. So consensus is a large-scale thing, a way of groups deciding things. Consensus is the idea that we don’t have to take votes. We don’t have to marginalize people and step over people in our way of progress.
Which is happening, and we do need to be aware of that as an issue. That’s part of the urgent and not important. We need to consent to things as a movement, and we need to feel empowered horizontally to speak up, to raise issues, to raise questions and concerns. And also, we need to know that just because someone has an idea that we may not agree with fully, we should be respecting it’s autonomy unless we really feel like it’s compromising us as a whole. Consensus is an individual speaking on behalf of a part of the movement, as an entity of the movement.
How do you empower people in the greater world toward an ability to consent?
The biggest way it seems to be happening is just by everyone being plugged into what’s going on here and watching. Watching us in the media and coming to the park and just seeing everything that we’ve built here. We’ve built a lot, and it’s very impressive. We should celebrate the victories that we’ve already accomplished.
I think that people want that world that we want. It’s a pretty common idea. We want that world, and we’re providing a model. Whether that model’s perfect or not . . . it’s certainly not, but I think it could be really good. And we’re still building it, so it’s a work in progress. But we’re providing a rubric for people to base their own community on, and that’s really cool.
Everyone comes to Facilitation meetings and says, “We’re from all these other Occupys. You need to help us.” We’re not, like, the parent occupation, but it feels like we are, and we do have to take that in the back of our minds. In all that we do, the whole world is watching us. Not just the media and all these people, but all the other occupations, all the other activist movements.
And we’re looking to Greece, looking to Spain, looking to Egypt in the same way that they’re looking back at us. We’re learning from each other. In this consensus model, we’re both saying yes to our movement-building, and we respect the autonomy of the other one. We can’t have the same tactics that Greece has; it doesn’t work here. But we can learn from the Greek model.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people from other Occupys who told me that they came here to learn what’s going on, and are taking it back home with them.
I hope that they’re sharing what they’ve learned, too, because that’s the other part of it. I just hope, because we’re looking to other Occupys for certain models ourselves.
What are you learning from the other Occupys?
Some already have effective Spokes Councils. Some know how to handle destructive, toxic people in ways that we don’t know.
What are some of the ways?
There are evictions in some parks. If someone is time after time disruptive and dangerous to themselves and to others around them, there are people who’ve been asked to leave and forced to leave. Years ago, I would have thought that was a horrible thing. Now, I don’t think it’s a horrible thing; I think it’s a necessary thing. I feel really bad saying that because it doesn’t create this air of all-inclusiveness, but if you’re a danger to yourself and to the others around you, there’s no justification that these people should be here, especially if other avenues have already been explored.
It’s a very dangerous route because it’s hard. People want everyone to be here, and I want everyone to be here, but we have to take care of our needs. If we’re not taking care of our needs, that’s really detrimental to everyone around us, including ourselves. That’s really dangerous. We need to build the safest space possible for ourselves and for the world. It’s hard.
It’s very exciting at the same time.
Yeah. I’m nervous and optimistic, working really hard, and trying to not just spin my wheels when I’m working, which takes perspective, too. That’s my personal challenge right now is: How can I be more efficient and doing less busy work? ❖