covering how the Occupy movement has effectively mobilized to help New Yorkers suffering from Hurricane Sandy:
Maligned for months for its purported ineffectiveness, Occupy Wall
Street has managed through its storm-related efforts not only to renew
the impromptu passions of Zuccotti, but also to tap into an unfulfilled
desire among the residents of the city to assist in the recovery. This
altruistic urge was
initially unmet
by larger, more established charity groups, which seemed slow to
deliver aid and turned away potential volunteers in droves during the
early days of the disaster.
In the past two weeks, Occupy Sandy has set up distribution sites at a
pair of Brooklyn churches where hundreds of New Yorkers muster daily to
cook hot meals for the afflicted and to sort through a medieval
marketplace of donated blankets, clothes and food. There is an Occupy
motor pool of borrowed cars and pickup trucks that ferries volunteers to
ravaged areas. An Occupy weatherman sits at his computer and issues
regular forecasts. Occupy construction teams and medical committees have
been formed.
Managing it all is an ad hoc group of tech-savvy Occupy members who
spend their days with laptops on their knees, creating Google documents
with action points and flow charts, and posting notes on
Facebook
that range from the sober (“Adobo Medical Center in Red Hook needs an
8,000 watt generator AS SOON AS POSSIBLE”) to the endearingly hilarious
(“We will be treating anyone affected by Sandy, FREE of charge, with ear
acupuncture this Monday”). While the local tech team sleeps, a shadow
corps in London works off-hours to update the
Twitter feed and to maintain the intranet. Some enterprising Occupiers have even set up a
wedding registry
on Amazon.com, with a wish list of necessities for victims of the
storm; so far, items totaling more than $100,000 — water pumps and
Sawzall saw kits — have been ordered.
“It’s a laterally organized rapid-response team,” said Ethan Gould, a
freelance graphic artist and a first-time member of Occupy. Mr. Gould’s
experience illustrates the effort’s grass-roots ethos. He joined up on
Nov. 3 and by the following afternoon had already been appointed as a
co-coordinator at one of the “distro” (distribution) sites.
OCCUPY SANDY was initially the work of a half-dozen veterans of Zuccotti
Park who, on the Tuesday following the storm, made their way to public
housing projects in the Rockaways and Red Hook, Brooklyn, delivering
flashlights and trays of hot lasagna to residents neglected by the
government. They arranged for vans to help some people relocate into
shelters. When they returned to civilization, they spent the night with
their extra bags of stuff at
St. Jacobi Evangelical Lutheran Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
“They asked if they could crash here,” said Juan-Carlos Ruiz, a
community organizer there who knew the Occupiers from their previous
endeavors. “Those few bags became this enormous organic operation. It’s
evidence that when official channels fail, other parts of society
respond.”
When newcomers arrive at St. Jacobi — or at its sister site at the
Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew
in nearby Clinton Hill — they undergo an orientation course during
which the volunteering process is explained and people are quickly
introduced to the movement’s guiding spirit. There is sensitivity
training (“We’re here to listen and be human”) and door-to-door training
for those going into stricken communities.
All participants are asked to write their first names on a piece of
masking tape and to place it somewhere prominent on their bodies. The
informal atmosphere results in classic Occupy exchanges: “If you have a
car, you should cluster up and go see Alexis in the shearling hat.”
Occupy Wall Street is capable of summoning an army with the posting of a
tweet, and many of the volunteers last week were self-identifying
veterans of the movement, although many more were not. Given the numbers
passing through the churches, both fresh-faced amateurs and the Occupy
managerial class — a label it would reject — were in evidence.
The St. Luke’s kitchen sits in the basement of the church, beside a
well-stocked pantry of donations that on Tuesday morning was overflowing
with cans of kidney beans, bottles of chocolate syrup, gallon jugs of
corn oil and enormous quantities of organic Arborio rice. The
peanut-butter-and-jelly team was busy making sandwiches at a table. On
the crew that day, there were a Yale University student, a chef on
medical leave from an institutional kitchen, a tourist visiting from
Luxembourg, a budding fiction writer and an independent radio producer
with her 9-year-old son, Zachary.
“We’ve made everything so far,” Susie Lindenbaum, an actress, said.
“Rice and beans. Beef chili. Rosemary noodles. A big bread pudding and
vegan collard greens.”
Upstairs, contributions arrived around the clock, coming in by telephone
or received in person by runners who hauled the goods from cars parked
at the curb to a basement sorting space where everything was organized
according to handmade signs (“Shoes Here,” “Drinks & Water Here”).
Volunteer drivers shuttled these supplies to more than 20 “field sites”
in the hardest-hit locations: Red Hook, the Rockaways and Coney and
Staten Islands.
THE Occupiers sometimes say a disconnect exists between the highly
functioning distro sites and the more chaotic centers in the field. On
election night, for instance, the television network Comedy Central
donated 11,000 prepackaged pieces of apple pie, and volunteers who were
headed in the morning to Red Hook and beyond were ordered not to leave
without an armful. Most of the pies did not make it to their
destinations — not that Ms. Gallisa, the field coordinator working in
the Rockaways, would have wanted them. By Wednesday afternoon, with the
new storm rolling in, she and her outreach team were scurrying among
their various storage sites, trying to secure their own supplies.
Bridging the gap between the churches and the field is Andrew Smith, 27,
who early last week was holed up in the St. Luke’s organ loft working
on a list of crucial chores for the next big project: neighborhood
reconstruction. On a giant pad of newsprint, Mr. Smith had jotted down
two words: “Guts Logistics” — Occupy Sandy was getting into the
renovation business. Under this heading, there were three numbered
tasks: “1) Remove damaged materials. 2) Let buildings air out. 3) Mold
remediation.”
“The long-term needs are where the real problems are,” said Mr. Smith,
an experienced Occupier who two months ago helped to plan the protests
marking the first anniversary of the Zuccotti occupation. “Where we’re
headed now is into cleanup and rebuilding.” Volunteer brigades were
scheduled, he said, to deploy to damaged areas on Saturday and Sunday. A
budget for further reconstruction was already being planned.
Indeed, after he finished his to-do list and took the subway south to
St. Jacobi, a woman poked her head out from the Staten Island War Room
and called to him loudly as he went by, “Andy, we need more construction
workers!” Acknowledging her request, Mr. Smith went up to the
second-story communications room, where a six-person team was working on
the protocols for accepting contributions on the phone.
After listening for a moment, Mr. Smith tendered a suggestion and the
man in charge — the name on his masking tape was Peter — sighed in
exasperation. “Look,” Peter said, “the amount of self-organizing here,
it’s coming a bit too fast. I’m losing track, all right?” One of his
colleagues asked him if he had eaten yet that day; Peter replied that he
had not. Mr. Smith reached into his backpack and handed him a sandwich.
Then one of the hot-line operators rushed into the room. It seemed the
Red Cross was sending them — them! — a tractor-trailer full of fresh
wool blankets.
“A tractor-trailer?” Mr. Smith exclaimed.
Utterly exhausted, he laid his forehead on the shoulder of the Occupier beside him.
The mainstream media and the power brokers can laugh and mock and dismiss the Occupy movement all they want.
We now have Zuccotti in the Rockaways, Zuccotti in Red Hook, Zuccotti in Coney Island.
A people's recovery doing the work to make things better for those hurting the most - and without the disaster capitalism deal with the devil the neoliberals will bring.
