Overview...

What started as an awareness raising and ethnographic styled walk through Sierra Leone, this site now details the encounters of a not so academic academic who spends more time occupying Wall Street and squats than a university...

Friday, August 3, 2012

So what am I gonna do?


I came down to new york city to make a difference.  It has been almost a year now and that difference looked to be happening.  But I am afraid that that has been temporarily derailed.  Actually, sabotaged might be a better word.  Yes, that may sound a bit conspirecyesque, but yeah, if its sabotaged by people or sabotaged by the system, either way – or both – its still sabotage. And that is what I think has happened.  I have written about the media coverage and the collusion with the police in MetroOccupied ("In the News: Law and Disorder").  It is so obvious to those of us on the ground that there has been such a blatant attempt by the authorities to suppress the Occupy movement, and its been detailed in the report Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street by the NYU and Fordham Law Schools.  But the point of what I am trying to say is that we have been trying to address systemic issues and bring about broad change on large scale levels and have been completely stonewalled.  The media, the police, the governement, the courts.  Protest has been fully supresed in the US over the last year as I've seen it.  This is incredibly disheartening.  But so is life.

The point is though that this is a long term project. By that I mean forever. I will always be an Occupier, and I will take that to my grave. Talk of Occupy being dead is completely erronious. Occupy can't be dead as long as I'm here and I'm alive. For no mater what it is, it is me, it is all the people that came down and stayed in the park, that worked in the working groups, that marched on the streets, that wrote on the web, or even felt emotionally engaged for a few minutes - warm inside for a moment at the effort.

So what do I do between now and forever?  I have to find a way to move life forward and work on and embody the principles and issues of Occupy!  That brings me to today.  How do I do that?  I have to find a way to make a life, a career, and a way forward.  Things right now are tough though.  I have no income and I have no housing in one month.  I had a great set up just a week or two ago.  I had a prospective apartment, several jobs on line.  And now that has all changed.  Not to mention a relationship that was pretty special to me ending.  So for now, I've got little to work with, and I just spent three years doing the same crap.  Why can't it work out?  I just want to work on something that matters, that changes things.  But it isn't happening...  yet.

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