This was made for a “course” I’m in at UnderAcademy called “Entropy, Inertia, and other Anti-Kenetics: a Feminist Perspective,” and they asked me to make a “paper doll” for the course’s final project. It’s post-apocalyptic fiction.

http://oneoffmag.org/issue00.html

For the print version:

http://www.oneoffmag.org/issue00print.html

I recently published a story on the fix about drug use at Occupy Wall Street. http://www.thefix.com/content/does-occupy-wall-street-have-drug-problem8130

I’m not unhappy with how it turned out, but if I was writing it in a more completely open and free environment, the emphasis would have been different. It sparked a lot of emotions and thoughts for me, that I want to give voice to here:

My recent attempt to report on the presence (but not prevalence) of drugs at Zuccotti park in the space in which the Occupy Wall Street movement is based, was a lesson in the political subconscious of America, which is built on a flawed notion of individuality: I’ve got mine.

Drug culture preexisted Occupy Wall Street on Zuccotti park, as it exists in most of our public spaces. Everyone understands that in a public, open space such as this, subcultures will persevere. For me, the inspiring heart of the story—and for me, it is a feel-good story—is that there is free medical care and food for everyone in that space. To me, this is one of the most radical and utopian statements of the OWS moment, so radical that it has come under fire from within the movement itself. The nearly-middle class, moderate protesters who are on the square to protest—rather than to receive food, shelter, and medical care—out of necessity look down on the people who have come to live in the shared space for their own reasons (and, yes, there are some people who are there for their own reasons, to serve their own physical needs). The Occupy Wall Street security guard told me that he doesn’t want there to be food, comfort stations, and medical care on the park because it attracts just these people who are not there “to take down the banks.” Similarly, the food/kitchen has begun to curtail its meals, to offer less food less often, and less delicious food, so that they won’t be feeding “freeloaders.” They are not limiting access of food because they don’t have enough food, but because they think that some of the people who are eating the food are not deserving of it.

And again, even in the medical tent, where the medics heroically provide free medical care to everyone who needs it, when I asked about drug overdoses, their justification was that the people who are “coming to us with a needle dangling out of their arm needing treatment” aren’t “actual occupiers.” That they’re not “part of the movement.” Well, they are.

If they felt that they had easy access to nonjudgmental medical care elsewhere, they wouldn’t come to the ad-hoc medical tent at Zuccotti park. The fact that they come there for that reason illustrates the extent of a broken system.

To me, the presence of people on the park who come for food and medical care is the most powerful and radical statement that the system is broken, that it is unjust. An equitable society takes care of its sick and its hungry, it’s as simple as that. Even if those people are perceived as distasteful for some reason. A revolution is made of hungry people gathered at the gates of opulent wealth—let them eat cake—and that is what is happening at Zuccotti park. Let the media see the subculture that endemic poverty and the soul-crushing exclusivity of the capitalist system has created. If the members of that subculture don’t have the vocabulary to express their needs in a political context—if they say they’re on the park for the free food—then that is the fault of a broken education system and from growing up in a culture that preaches a radical, unsustainable notion of individualism. The raw fact of their existence speaks more loudly than a cardboard sign. Occupy Wall Street has pulled these people out of the shadows: while they hid in the shadows, they served to enable injustice. Let the hungry masses gather at the doorways of Wall Street greed.

Remember that the Black Panthers gained their base of power by feeding schoolchildren in their communities. They did not perceive this—as many white observers do—as incidental to their cause, or as a calculated ploy to get people over to their cause. Rather, they saw their social programs as absolutely core to what they were about. They were providing the services that the system denied their community. They were the women and men who had the courage to stand up and provide for their own children when their culture isolated them in ghettos and sought to imprison them. This was their most radical action, the core of Black Power—to empower their community. The success of their social programs made them threatening to the establishment, which was revealed to be inadequate to even the basic task of providing nutrition to children.

This is where the more moderate—even conservative—elements in Occupy Wall Street come to get in the way. They are too frightened to provide this kind of service. They don’t want to see poor people and drug addicts get medical care—they just want their little white-collar jobs back, not realizing that those jobs were bubble jobs, that they never really did anything.

When we address the problem of Wall Street greed and economic inequality, we are attacking an even more endemic problem (but a very related problem) than racial oppression. Economic oppression affects all of us. Because of this, we need to consider “our community” in the broadest possible way, and it must include people who have been so disenfranchised, so hopelessly excluded, that they have chosen a way of life in a subculture/subeconomy—even if that was their own choice. We must be willing to feed all who come, to provide medical care to all who come. This is a sacred duty: if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that feeding people (good food, the fruit of life on earth) is always the right thing to do. As soon as you’ve built yourself a philosophical construct that involves you depriving people of food and medical care, you’ve got to reevaluate your values.

I hope to have time to add to this blog post later.

I left that church sure that there was hope for resistance, if not hope for justice, in this country. The Attica brothers presented a substantial model for revolutionary resistance in this country, a radicalism that is called for by the extremity of the crimes committed by our government–particularly the dauntingly massive growth of incarceration since the Attica rebellion–but that is almost never practiced.

The Attica uprising was by no means nonviolent. But it is a recognition and a reminder that whenever violent resistance is employed, it will be answered with an overwhelming, abusive, murderous response from the state. There was no attempt to rescue the hostages or to capture the inmates; the resolution to Attica was a massacre. One of the Brothers told us at Riverside Church, “They wanted to use this as an opportunity to make an example–they didn’t care about the lives of us or the lives of the hostages–they just wanted to make sure that this was the last riot in NY State.” Governor Rockefeller, we found out today, called Nixon and described the massacre as “beautiful.” Forty three Americans died that day on Rockefeller’s orders.

But although the decision of the Attica inmates to rebel ended in bloodshed, their resistance was successful in exposing injustice and giving voice to repression. It was a response to the daily violence enacted on inmate’s bodies. One of the Brothers who had been in the rebellion who spoke at Riverside on Friday said, “If everybodty didn’t feel the pressure, it never woulda started right there.” The pressure was a daily racism, a daily dehumanization, idle time, abuse.

L.D. Barkley, who emerged as the leader of the rebellion and who was the victim of a targeted state assasination forty years ago today, spoke for all the inmates when he said, “The entire prison populace – that means each and everyone of us here – has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalisation and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed….We are Men, We are not Beasts, And We Will Be Treated As Such!”

But that day was just the beginning of the struggle of the Attica brothers. The Attica Legal Defense, led by Elizabeth Fink, turned the case into the longest lawsuit in NY State History; a legal struggle only resolved in 2000. Although the Brothers didn’t get justice, they didn’t capitulate; they stood firm in their demands, the demands that their fallen comrade L.D. had proclaimed through a bullhorn before he was shot down. What this means is that the Brothers didn’t give in to the shame that would allow the State to paint them as Beasts, to accept punishment and incarceration as their lifelong fate.

Elizabeth Fink, who has dedicated her career to the defense of the Attica brothers, told us on Friday: There is no justice in America. What empowers you is the fight for justice. There’s only one thing that sustains us, and that is to fight.”

Have we honored the memory of the Attica Brothers? Have we fought in their memory? How have we allowed the prison system to lock up two million of our citizens? Have we allowed the men who died at Attica to die in vain? Where is the resistance to this massive injustice; the largest ongoing human rights catastrophe in the democratic world?