Helen & Friends @ Zuccotti Park: Occupy Wall Street 5-year anniversary

“ASK ME WHAT I THINK OF CAPITALISM” That was the sign I made and carried with me to Occupy Wall Street Sunday. We finally made it to Zuccotti Park, after the fact from the standpoint of many who think the movement of the physical place is dead. But it was exhilarating for me and my companions nonetheless.

Besides me and my sign there was:

1 Igor GuideDog (Mr. Popularity)

2 Caroline (blind friend with cane)

3 David (filmmaker with old school Lomo Kino camera that took 30 seconds of footage and 10 minutes to reload

4 Liam (latecomer/hanger on)

 

I’d agonized over the signs – regarding both form and content:

1 How to incorporate Helen’s fun Vaudeville Q & A

2 How to incorporate my show (The Star of Happiness: Helen Keller on Vaudeville?!)

3 How to engage with an unseen public

4 How to engage with other blind people–actually I’m lying this was not a concern. I just wanted to say to people “hey you wanna feel my sign”! this proved to be fun.

5 How to get the words on the poster without busting out the old spray paints and upsetting domestic odor 6 How to make letters legible to sighted people when you can’t see

On the night before our outing, time was dwindling and I’d not made the stencils I had considered. I finally hit upon using Velcro tape to make letters but let me tell you this is not so easy as it sounds especially when you can’t see what you’re doing. At about midnight, after more than one tall boy, I began to despair that I was making a sign illegible to all. I almost stopped right there but then decided that a sign that no one could read also had its charm.

I did poop out after that first sign, but it turned out to be just the right thing and just enough of a burden. Not sure how I thought I’d carry six signs in one hand and Igor in the other even with a ride from Accessalimo on one end of the journey and help from friends on the other.

“ASK ME WHAT I THINK OF CAPITALISM” seems suggestive rather than provocative, but even so the lady at the Dunkin’ Do– –No you didn’t?! –We needed coffee and turned to The Man. Sorry. –nuts was indeed provoked she said to David (who was holding my sign for a moment, “who’s going to pay taxes if nobody has a job?” David answered diplomatically that indeed he does have a job and pointed me out as being the owner and author of the offending sign. I was only vaguely aware of this exchange and could not defend my sign since I was busy fending off passes on my German Shepherd by German tourists!

Basically, we did not even get coffee down our gullets when the games began and they did not stop till we left the park. Between the dog and the sign there was really not a moments rest – Igor gave out many Guide Dog FAQs (jesus I wish he had hands) and I talked about Helen and the sign and occasionally got to answer the question – with a big Star of Happiness smile – “I think it has outgrown its usefulness.”

People wanted pictures of me and my sign, people wanted interviews with me and my sign, people wanted words of wisdom from me (it’s that poet prophet thing, I tell yuh–my people have cornered the market!), and I happily got to say many times over, “you wanna feel my sign?!”

We were there to film some footage for a newsreel promo for The Star of Happiness, and we hopefully got some, but since David was using this little old school wind up camera, which may or may not have taken a single decent frame – we won’t know till the film is developed what we got, if anything. The irony is that I neglected to get him to take even a single pic with my iPhone though I grace the iPhones of many strangers and poor David spent much of his time figuring out how to use their cameras so that they could have their picture taken with us!

Ok, fine, so half the people wanting pictures with us were from some kind of disabled action committee (God I hope our footage turns out!) And most of the other half were just plain lame, but still I felt like some kind of crazy pied piper singing out Helen’s song of socialism!

It was fun talking to people about Helen’s politics because it allowed me to hide behind her strong convictions–at least partly. Admittedly many people asked me if I too were a socialist, and finally, by the twentieth time or so, I formulated an answer that did not get people riled up. I had been saying that I’m not really political, but they gave me shit for this and rightly so I suppose. I live in a society that is to a certain extent civilized, meaning, I think, that we are circumscribed by laws that inhibit and punish our selfish and insatiable parts, and so I cannot help being political. What I meant and finally managed to articulate, is that I’m not that interested in current events. I can’t help but take the long view – studied the classics as an undergrad, got my PhD in early modern lit, and just recently started reading books written in the twentieth century.

That said, I do feel a socialist at heart. I feel kindred with Helen’s politics though I myself am not an activist. I tried to tell someone who asked me about policy that I’m an idea woman not a policy woman, but he wouldn’t except that. Well, too bad because it’s true. I think in terms of historical and psychological trends and cannot wrap my brains around the details of changing today’s policy. Rather I found myself clutching at one large thread that runs through Helen’s critique of capitalism: greed. Greed and a culture, which not only allows for but encourages that greed to get totally out of hand. I’m not exactly talking about specific people here – I don’t believe that there are obvious distinctions between the selfish and the unselfish, the greedy and the not greedy. I think these things exist on a continuum, like most everything else I can think of. The fact is that humans will be greedy, shit I had a dog that could be greedy. We all want all we can have, right? Maybe not all the time–hopefully not all the time, but sometimes, right? Probably we have all felt that insatiability that leads to a loss of control, and an indifferent attitude regarding the suffering our bottomless gullets, pockets, loins, etc. might be creating in the lives of others.

What I hit upon in my interviews and discussions yesterday was the thought that the real change that OWS can have, and I think already has had, is to make greediness just a little more out of fashion, which, to those who are greedy for change, may sound trifling but to me, sounds like the kind of change that lays the groundwork for a paradigm shift!

So I guess my answer to the question “What do you think of capitalism?” is tamer than Helen’s, but of course I am not a card-carrying socialist and I have lived well past the dream of her Soviet Utopia, and so there is some irony in my answering with her “I think it has outgrown its usefulness. Rather I think if asked at this moment what I think of capitalism, I should answer the way I would about my own out of control tendencies, “Maybe a little more structure and restraint are in order?!”

 

[First published on November 11, 2011, when hopes were high and my dear Igor GuideDog was still among the living. To learn more about Igor GuideDog and the guide dog fund I set up in his honor, CLICK HERE]