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.

Competing to Love

Why does helping people have to be competitive?  Why is it that I want to get a job helping people so badly, but can't?  I want to work on alleviating poverty, I want to work on breaking down ethnic, racial, and gender barriers, I want to work on providing sustainable ways for the nearly 1 billion undernourished people in the world to be able to have food.  I want to work towards every individual in the world being able to achieve  human security, dignity.  I want to work on real, true democracy, so that the masses of the world can have real say in their lives.  And I want to work on this 80-90 hours a week.  But I can't.  I mean not for real.  I can do things on the side, I can Occupy, I can volunteer, I can apply for jobs, I can try to network or meander my way into these industries, and hopefully one day get a job.  One day.  But then if I get that job, who doesn't get it?  It's just like all the other jobs I've applied for and haven't gotten.  One job, hundreds of applicants who all want to work in an industry or on a project that matters to them and the world that they believe in.  But only one gets it.  Only one person gets to legitimately help the world in that way on that day.  The rest of us are left trying to find ways to do things in our spare time, unprofessionally, until the next application goes unsuccessfully fulfilled between waitress shifts, nanny gigs, and temp jobs to pay rent.

Obviously, this is the job market.  It is the same job market for anything and any industry.  Whether it be finance, advertising, non-profit, academia, whatever, there is a competitive market centered around making money to support one's self.  But hey, I've done things to strengthen my chances.  I have skills, I have experience, I am intelligent; just like everyone else.  Yet, I don't seem to be able to win these job competitions.  (To bad we couldn't just have a race to see who gets a job, I'd be all set then!).  But they're not. They're based on a fine tooth comb of your life, but without the life.  More on what some person sitting behind a desk thinks about your life on one piece of paper, about their company's interests, and all of that filtered through the lens of their's and society's prejudices and presumptions.  Because I moved around a lot in my 20's does it mean I will now?  Gaps in employment must mean I was just slacking off rather than couldn't find work right?  And what is to say that those "non-traditional" life moments don't add to a person?  Or that I packed a bag and went to Sierra Leone to fill that time?  Oh, wait, that looks flippant, unstable.  Being able to do anything anywhere isn't as desirable as being able to sit and role over on demand.

But it is not just me, there are also of course issues about the organizations' funding, their priorities, and whether they've been able to dredge up enough capital from the netherworld to be able get shit done.  It doesn't matter whether I can do the job or not.  It doesn't even matter that we all can do the job, or that there are too many candidates and not enough jobs out there.  What matters is that we are competing against each other to be nice to each other.  People are trying to help people, trying to put in hard work, and they can't - not on a real level.  Not in a way that allows them to sustain their own lives.  Our society has taken being nice - an inherently cooperative emotion and action, perhaps the quintessentially positive human trait - and turned it into something aggressive, commodified, and surrounded by competitive negativity.     

This is frankly just a horrible way to structure society.  Skilled compassionate people with no real and sustainable outlet for that desire.  I have skills damn it!  We all have skills!  But they are not skills that somehow mesh with or fit into this system that requires things to be big money makers.  I don't want to compete to help you.  Why don't we do it together, or divide up our efforts and help more?  No.... let's make it competitive!  Here's a vision for you: what could be worse than sitting back and watching an old lady trying to cross the street and needing help.  Two people come up to offer help to her, yet rather than working together, they turn on each other and start fighting over who gets to help her.  They don't both to take one arm and work together, or have one stop traffic and the other take her arm, instead they compete against each other and end up fighting amongst themselves.  This is where our society is today in terms of humanitarianism; we're brawling in the street over who can help the old lady across while we ourselves become a spectacle, rolling around on the ground in a fit of flailing arms and legs.  Of course the elderly woman continues to cross on her own because she's got stuff to do, until:  Smack!!  A truck comes along (whose driver is working a double to make rent and hasn't taken a break).  The two people keep fighting of course, as if the train wreck next to them isn't happening.  So sad.  We shouldn't have to compete to help people.  Organizations shouldn't have to compete for money to help people.  Nor should people have to compete for jobs for it either.  Utopian yes, but we should just be able to to be nice to each other and sustain some semblance of a life around it. 


      

Options

So the world is out there right? And despite not really having anything going on that seems remotely like "gainful employment", it doesn't matter, cause there are plenty of other things in the works.  I have the following opportunities right now:

• Two months in Tanzania building an educational program
• My work in Sierra Leone
• A possible job doing food justice education in the Bronx for a Children's organization
• The sustainable Occupy project
• I have work on the private military and security companies with the UN Watchdog
• I've got applications in at the UN
• Other job apps in
• I've got the application in at the World Bank
• And maybe substitute teaching come October

Tough times and tough decisions to get into, but all the same excitement and stress at the same time!! :)

Fuckin A!!

So yeah, I've been piecing things together and starting to feel quite comfortable in the directions things are going.  I was going to have maybe 10 hours of nannying a week and 8 hours on Sundays at a farmers market to supplement it all.  These gave me a little something to sustain life with while working to find more work and make other things work out.  The farmers market was in this incredible workers cooperative and had soooo much potential to become something more, something that I might even be able to bring into my other projects and incorporate it all together.  But the they just had money stolen, like thousands of dollars that is needed to prepay for produce.  So it has to close as it can't buy veggies for this week.  It may not be permanent.  But a days worth of work for good pay and produce.  Gone.  The hiking store doesn't pay, the political party is compromised and ethically devoid, nannying..... Well that's good.  But its over tomorrow.  A few hours a week still maybe.  Before I had a couple things, now I have to really get after it again.  Why do all these things keep falling apart?  What is it that make businesses so hard to maintain here?  So many people trying to make ends meet, so few managing to do it.  If you have any ethical bone in you, you have to compromise it jsut to make ends meet.  So sad.

Burning Both Ends

Wow!! What a long day... Its midnight in half an hour, I'm on a subway platform at 59th street. I just had a great meeting with a guy who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone in 1961-62. Yes, the first two years it existed. He really likes what we're talking about and was impressed with it all. I think it will open many doors for us/me. Time will tell. We have a lot to prove and to make happen, but even if in failure this will be a huge success.

The day itself though, wow!  I got 5 hours of sleep on a few drinks while discussing the sustainable occupy stuff last night. Then I was up at 6, chi gung, shower and get out to Brooklyn for work.  We went back into Manhattan and walked around the whole of the Museum of Natural History, then back to Brooklyn and worked late. I mannied for a total of 11 hours today, jumped on the subway and Africa meetinged it for 2.5 hours and now hope to get home and to bed before getting back up at 6 and doing it all again. Long nannying day and then occupy meeting after...

But this is the way it is right now. I am working hard. Occupy, Africa, Mannying, these are the keys to my future. They will succeed. #36

Farming for More Markets

So I started a new job yesterday... Yes another one.  Another look into another part of the world that lives around us.  This time I am working at a farmers market.  Not a typical one, but one that more or less acts as a Sunday organic market.  It has a pretty unsound business model, but the absolute best of intentions.  It is part of a workers cooperative, or at least will be some day.  The building is designed as such for the long term, but not wholly there yet.  Anyway, it is very interesting to see the world that exists there.

The business itself is a bit of a mess.  It is retail sales of a mostly perishable food supply, that only opens once a week, thus making the p in perishable capital.  They are losing money hand over foot in an endeavor designed to make money for the workers co-op. They are working on tweaking it into a collective kitchen project. There are some remnants of occupy style endeavors. People with the warmest of hearts and best of intentions, trying to do something that they only partially know how to.  Like occupiers trying to organize people or labor without talking to labor organizers or having experience at it, trying to run a retail produce business with knowledge of produce but no experience with retail business is tough, ambitious, comendable... but lacking in efficiency and know how.

All the same I think they are evolving and working to really do good things. The co-op set up is great, and if they add a kitchen that serves food daily they could end up with an outlet for food bought for a Sunday that won't last till the next one.  There also is a very strong personality coming with it that on first glimpse seems to be maybe too strong and independent. Not that there is not tremendous need to respect both this person and the project as they are doing it.  They've done good things, but there is always more to it all than that. We shall see, but another job, another day, another way.  Cooperative worker owned structures are great, I am excited to be a part of the beginning stages of something like this, and to have more work...