Occupy Poughkeepsie Comes Home

Well, a few of its members, who were evicted in the cold, rainy early morning hours when everyone was trying to sleep: 3:30 to be precise. The City had issued eviction notices last week, but when 200+ people showed up to support the Occupiers, the police stood down. They waited and planned patiently. Wednesday morning early, when only about seven Occupiers were onsite, sleeping, at the occupied park, the police came, announced that all of them had to leave and tore down their encampment. They also confiscated all their equipment: blankets, sleeping bags, tarps, anything the seven didn’t immediately grab and carry with them.

The Occupiers were in shock.

We got a call in the morning: could we pick up some of them, since we'd offered a place for them to rest and recuperate. When we went down to the library, where several were waiting, only one man decided to come with us.

It was interesting to get to know him a little. He's in his early 40's, has traveled all over the world, lived in intentional communities, graduated in Sociology, done academic work in Germany and had just been thrown out by his mother; he's also divorced. He doesn't have a job, and finds it difficult to look for one without a phone or a computer. He's obviously bright, thoughtful and very lost.

One of the other Occupiers was younger, hoarse from shouting, and apparently a bit off in the head. He stayed behind to hold signs at the site of the eviction, but had just been downloading something on a library computer about which his colleague remarked: "He claims he can make a billion dollars from it."

While Abe was older and needed a rest, the younger man was bursting with energy, and couldn't leave.

The Occupiers were anything but the stereotyped "dirty hippies," and their occupation had turned the park into a community meeting place, instead of a drug market, its previous incarnation. Crime rates in the area reportedly went down. Yet the police had to evict them, or rather, the City Manager decided that they had to go.

This isn't a meaningful sample of Occupiers. But still, it illustrates something that the Occupy movement exemplifies: the terrible waste of human talent and energy created by our economic and political system. I've seen this before, when I worked in prison. The men I got to know both in nonviolence workshops and in my college classes were bright, engaged, high energy, but barely literate. If they had gotten adequate schooling, what a resource they would have been! Instead, they were costing the State over $40,000 a year.

Maybe empires--Roman, British, Soviet, American--are lost because such people are squandered and thrown away. The OWS is in search of a different solution, where everyone is valued. I hope they/we can find it.