By Breanna “Bre” Lembitz ’12 I WITNESS
No walk in the park
spring 2012
I
clark alumni magazine
68
MADE THE DECISION to go to Zuccotti Park in about six hours, which was crazy. I packed two sets of clothes, a yoga mat, a comforter, and some canned food and said, “Okay, I’ll go sleep in the park and see how it goes.” At Clark I’d started out majoring in political science because I wanted to make a difference and change the world, but I realized you can’t really make a difference in a political system without realizing where the money’s coming from. So I started studying economics with the goal of changing this country’s economic thinking and structure — and then the Occupy Wall Street movement happened and it was perfect for me to be there. The first two weeks, the energy was incredible. It was like everybody there felt they’d spent their whole lives working on projects that were preparation for this occupation. But it started to fall apart a little bit because you can’t live that intensely and work that hard without burnout. Eventually, people with mental issues were living inside the park. Newly released ex-cons from Riker’s Island were being bused two blocks away and were told there was free food in the park. We became the most popular tourist destination in New York. A lot of people showed up to take advantage of the spectacle, though some found solidarity with the cause. I started on the medical team, and then I joined the finance team. Every section of the park had a donation bin, and after 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge we collected 10,000 dollars in cash a day for several days. We kept track of all of it. I had death threats from inside and outside the group, and the security team knew where I slept. Some people saw the Occupy movement as a protest of people who hated money, and here I was running the money in that protest. While it was terrifying at times, I never felt anyone would follow through on those threats; I just felt they were angry. I could have done media interviews all day, but I had to start turning them down. I was quoted in The Wall Street Journal and NBC; I was on ABC, NPR and CBC out of Canada. One of the problems we’d had was that some of the people who were interviewed didn’t know the issues. Their response was simply, “I’m angry, and I’m here!” and they offered no solutions. Our PR team had me on the interview list because I knew the economics behind the movement and could articulate solutions. I also speak Chinese and Spanish, and one interesting thing I learned is that apparently I’m the figurehead of the movement in China. At one point I had Japanese reporters find me in the park. They said they recognized me from Chinese TV and wanted to interview me. On Nov. 15, I was in my tent with my boyfriend when I heard people
yelling, “It’s happening! We’re being raided!” I left the tent, and it was chaos; people screaming and running; crazy people with sharpened sticks; people having schizophrenic breakdowns. Spotlights shined down on us. The police surrounded the park and had rows of paddy wagons down one side of the park and cruisers down the other side. Eventually the police moved from the perimeter into the middle of the kitchen, where a group of us were with our arms locked, and just stood
in a circle around us. There was commotion outside, but in that kitchen everything was still. Some of the cops — the community service police — were actually crying and wouldn’t make eye contact with us. Later, we were waiting against the wall to be processed, and this girl who had a medical issue kept saying, “I need to use the bathroom.” The guards wouldn’t let her. So we started singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” very loudly, and we got all the way to twenty-one, before they said, “OKAY, we’ll let you use the bathroom!” I started living in a Brooklyn apartment after my arrest, and stopped working with the occupation on Dec. 19 because I had to reinvolve myself in school. Has the movement been successful? We convinced a lot of people that what must be addressed in the next election are issues surrounding the rich and the poor, while terms like “Occupy” and “the 99 percent” have become branded in the American consciousness and are now part of the national discussion. In that way, I think it’s been completely successful. Excerpted from Bre Lembitz’s Feb. 3 interview with CLARK magazine.