We Are the 100% by Quinoa / Chris Kirk

We Are the 100% by Quinoa / Chris Kirk

I left my home because houses are not an emotionally sustainable way of life for me. I called my friend Johan in Brisbane and he suggested we hitchhike down to Byron Bay. We were delighted to be together and to shake off our suburban perversion with a touch of chaos.

Before we began hitchhiking we fuelled ourselves with the finances he accrued by accosting guilty capitalists on the streets of Brisbane on behalf of Greenpeace; corn chips and a longneck of beer, “liquid bread”. We caught a ride to Byron with Lindsay, a young guy who has so many mutual friends that getting to know each other was a needless formality.

In the Byron streets we wandered around listening to the street music and looking at the drunk backpackers, before departing for quieter waters, Broken Head. Johan and I built a fire and lay our beds beside each other on a tarp on the beach. We weren’t asleep for long when it began to rain and we folded the tarp over us like a carelessly makeshift tent. We were forced to retreat to Lindsay’s van, from the beautiful chaos of the wild lonely beach, where we slept awkwardly in the front seats.

In the morning Lindsay dropped us off in town, we buried our bags in the bush and rubbed our hands together for an unknown day of youthful folly. The first step for Johan was buying alcohol. He got the cheapest red wine and the cheapest sugar-free cola and created a half-andhalf mix that we could openly drink in public.

We stumbled upon Occupy Byron Bay as the speakers were finishing and they were preparing to march. We marched through the streets, kindly roadblocked by police, in protest of corporate greed taking precedence over human need, or just for the fun of it. We marched to the beach where someone announced we were going to stay until things changed. So Johan and I gathered food from the busy stupormarket and brought it down to the beach, placing it all out on the table. People took what they wanted into private piles to take home, so we rescued the sausages, cooked them up on the free barbecue and offered them around exuberantly. We found some of Johan’s Brisbane Greenpeace friends to hang out with, but when the sky became thick with black clouds and frequent lightning they all decided to drive away together from the impending storm, claiming no room for us two homeless vagabonds.

I put up my tent in the bush and we retreated with our stuff into the intimate space. Johan played us some strange intense vibrations with his didgeridoo and djembe. I lay across Johan’s reclining body and sang “Visions of Johanna”. As I drifted to sleep Johan stared at his glowing phone and silently made plans. Ghosts of electricity howled in the bones of his face. The rain fell away and he announced he was heading back out into the urban night. I was half asleep and would have followed if he had encouraged me but instead he borrowed my shoes and jacket and departed without me, never returning.

The following day I felt a bit lonely without my friend, stumbled upon an anti-coal seam gas mining rally and half-heartedly marched through the streets again. I had no interest or patience to listen to hours of politically-minded speakers announce repetitively why it is wrong to rape the earth for the purpose of maintaining our hysterical denial of the darkness of night. I sat alone with my thoughts for a while before deciding to obtain a large bag of food to give away.

I approached individuals or groups and offered them food directly, bananas or blueberries for the children and gluten-free chocolate biscuits for the adults. Some people backed away from the alarming prospect of free food, others thankfully accepted and moved on, and some invited me to sit down and join them while we both enjoyed food, conversation and sunshine.

I watched a beautiful man across the sand who seemed to be watching me back and drawing me towards his group, four guys from Spain, Germany, Britain and Holland. I drank goon with them until they decided to retreat to their hostel to watch rugby, deciding not to invite me back with them.

I discovered the mutual delight of exchanging food for alcohol and companionship and moved from group to group all night, getting drunk, cooking sausages and swimming naked in the dark until it was time to go to bed, all my friends retreating to buildings in which the inhabitants are required to pay money to be there and in no case, despite hours of friendship, did they offer to bring me anywhere but the pub.

I lingered in Byron a day longer than necessary, wandering, futilely attempting to repeat what I had perfected the day before and finally realising that it was time to go.

It took three rides to get out of Byron. I finally got a ride with a sickly middle-aged man on his way to a family funeral. He commemorated his brother, who had also died recently, when we stopped at a rest stop by having a beer with me. We had a beer at another rest stop near where his father was buried. “It’s family tradition,” he told me. He spoke to his sister-in-law about how he has been minimising his alcohol intake over the three days he is driving from Gladstone to Sydney, only having had two beers before he picked me up and only having two more after the two we shared before dropping me in Newcastle. He smoked a lot of cigarettes, ate only candy and meat pies and was constantly scratching his eczema. He has six children he loves to visit, though the two in the Blue Mountains he never sees anymore because their mother turned them against him.

He was a kind man but his prospects were limited. He promised to pick up his sister-in-law in Sydney and help her move to Brisbane. The two of them found solace in each other. It seemed they loved each other, but respect for his dead brother prevented them from getting together. I told him that in some cultures a brother would take his dead brother’s wife as his own, but he would not hear of it. He told me his brother was like him and he knows what his brother would have wanted. He chose to manifest his instinct in practical ways, keeping love comfortably distant. He was sad his children in the Blue Mountains did not want to see him. Before he dropped me off he asked me to acknowledge them when I got to the Blue Mountains, because I’ll be near them. “I’ll have a drink for them,” I promised and I could see the love and thanks in his eyes.

There is a website, Couchsurfing.org, in which you can make contact with people from all over the world, many of whom offer their home or their time for weary lonely travellers to seek refuge. I broke up the hitch from Byron to Sydney by staying at a house in Newcastle, full of 22-year-old guys, housemates, students, extremely keen hosts, ready for their minds to be opened.

One of the guys showed a particular interest and I invited him to come join us at the tribal gathering, live in the forest for one month with a hundred other people, holding hands in a circle, eating together twice a day and being gentle and loving with one another. I could see the possibility ticking over in his mind, the compulsion to give up everything, even for a weekend, and go, and the certainty that he could not leave his comfort zone.

Arriving in the Sydney CBD I called Ashwyn, who had offered to accommodate me at his squat via Couchsurfing, and instead he gave me directions to Martin Place, in the centre of Sydney, between the twin towers of Westpac and Australia Reserve Bank. I was surprised to find a cosy little camp set up on the pavement beside the fountains with carpet and cushions and many people talking and enjoying themselves. I was invited to drop my bag in the pile and relax. I also noticed armed police standing around, bored.

The first person I met there was Alistair, a young man with a beautiful smile, bursting with joy and enthusiasm. He had quit his second job to spend more time at the occupation, but his second job had a 50% tax rate anyway. I never once heard him espouse any political ideology, he seemed rather to be delighted to be a part of something real, not a demand for change but a symptom of change, not a display of discontent, but a moment of coming together in the heart of Australian capitalism.

I was surprised to find James there, a man who I had spent a precious week living with a month earlier. In the morning we took signs down to the Channel 7 building to hold up outside the morning show studio. Being personally apolitical I was delighted to find a sign saying “SMASH THE CLOCK” and I took it down to hold up for the television cameras and the capitalists rushing to work.

For the backdrop of the Channel 7 morning show they film Martin Place, people rushing to work, people gawking in at the famous TV presenters through two layers of glass, and so we got a lot of stupid joy out of holding up our signs to the audience sitting at home, drinking coffee and eating toast. They had monitors in the window showing their own programme to the street and so we could see when we were live. One day I was given a sign saying: “Television is that demon on your left shoulder, telling you what to think, who to believe and how to behave.” I attempted to perfectly line up my sign between the talking heads and move it closer and closer until finally it was perfectly legible. My greatest moment was when I could be seen, between the heads of the male and female presenters, dancing and holding up my sign.

I got into the habit of skipping around the city and dancing with my sign. I don’t know how many people understood “SMASH THE CLOCK” but it was mostly school children in uniform who asked me about it, who seemed to make up one percent of the population of Martin Place but perhaps 99% of the curiosity and humour.

Girls dressed by administrators in identical short skirts laughed at my silliness and asked me if I wanted to buy some crap in support of breast cancer. “I’m against breast cancer,” I told them. “Why?” they are shocked. “It hurts people.” “No!” they laugh, “this is to support research to stop breast cancer.” “Ah!” I pretend to understand, “I still have no money.” “How do you live if you have no money?” “I don’t spend money.” “Where do you live then?” “I’m living up on Martin Place at the moment.” A smile of recognition. “We better get back, we’re not allowed to talk to you.” My position was apolitical and many of us shared similar perspectives. James claimed that his role was to maintain a positive energy in the camp. Some people had political agendas. The entire concept was borrowed from Occupy Wall Street. Occupations had been happening in Egypt, Israel, Spain and Iceland but when it hit America it became a brand. It is easy to be cynical about the manipulative power of such branding, especially in the hysterical media environment of USA, but the fact is, the brand “Occupy” inspired 1,600 occupations in eighty countries and this can only be seen as a means of celebration, that millions of people around the world are reclaiming their streets for the living, the human beings.

The gig is that “we are the 99%” who are being manipulated and controlled by “the one percent” in charge, the ultra-rich, the executives, the bankers who place profit above life. The idea is that we stop them from doing that to us by holding up signs, living in the streets and telling as many people as possible that they too are “the 99%”, they too are victims of corporate greed, and that there is something wrong when our governments seem to promote this behaviour with their policies and law-making.

The longer I sat in this bubble of openminded debate and pro-human living inAustralia’s anti-human pro-economic growth central hub, the more impatient I got with this idiotic ideology. It became increasingly clear to me that here, more than anywhere else on the entire continent, we were the 0.1% who paused long enough to notice what was going on around us and who chose to step outside of it. We had many people stopping to talk to us, desperate to sign something or give money before rushing back to their jobs, giving us more food than we could eat and give away, asking us if there was anything else we needed.

But then there were the thousands who poured out of the train stations like bursting dams every five minutes, who rushed past without a glance and without a thought for what we were doing or what they were doing themselves. They were going to work, they were doing their job, they were earning a living, like the people who paused to talk to us or donate to us, like the occupiers themselves, the self-proclaimed 99%, who left their temporary Martin Place home for nine hours, interrupting their life and their joy and their human connections, to earn a little money so they can pay for food and shelter, when every other species on this planet eats for free and shares a home, sleeping under the vast wonder of the starry night sky, as we were doing, upon the concrete, under the light pollution.

I had many interesting and variable conversations, but three stand out as significant. Two were cynical old socialists with too much experience as activists and one was a young Polish Christian, born under the Soviet Union. In all three cases I spoke to intelligent, patient, respectful individuals with whom I eventually reached a point where our most basic assumptions are fundamentally opposed.

They believed that human beings are inherently violent, selfish, divisive people and therefore require government, law and law enforcement. I believe that human beings are inherently loving, gentle, unified people, that we would resort to this behaviour given the opportunity, and that this was in fact what our occupation plainly proved. I told them that we all need and deserve freedom, respect and love, that no authority is legitimate unless it is respected, and no respected authority requires violent force to implement its decisions.

The movement comprised many different people and perspectives, so a dividing line between socialists and anarchists is arbitrary and simplistic.

The socialists quickly normalised their structural dominance over the organisation of the occupation with their sacred Democracy. They organised “general assemblies” where everyone could come together and make a statement and have a vote. To facilitate the general assemblies there were meetings about them and to facilitate the facilitation meetings, more meetings. The general assemblies facilitated many proposals and offered one of three responses, or “votes”; agree, stand aside, or block. A single person blocking prevents consensus and so must explain their position until everyone can agree. I refused to participate and resented the idea that I was expected to “block” and justify my position. I prefer my communication to be on a human level and I avoided the general assemblies after my initial exposure because they bored and frustrated me.

But I felt compelled to speak at the rally. There was an audience of around a thousand people and an impenetrable democratic speaking list. When I asked to be added I was told that it was full. Later, two people turned up that day, just happened to be union leaders, and were added to the list. My frustration grew as everybody who spoke, with one exception talking about indigenous rights and exploitative mining, were union leaders complaining about what “they” were doing to “us” and speaking for the cheers and boos of the audience rather than any enlightenment or understanding.

Because of the democratic process I was given an opportunity to speak, but my frustration and compulsion to fulfil my life’s purpose was so strong I did not think about the fact that I was only allowed to speak for two minutes about the current proposition. I began to recite a slow precise poem about human society and personal responsibility and the microphone was snatched off me. I was overcome with a public persona and began a manic rant against the inanity of the divide between “the 99%” and “the one percent”. I shouted that none of us are being controlled and that we are in fact responsible for our own life, our own society and our own destiny. The socialist facilitators tried to take the microphone off me while I shouted that already one regime has been replaced with another, that we’re all just creating systems of control, maintaining those systems and complaining that we’re being controlled. I was told that there would be an open mic later when unimportant people who don’t organise labour unions are allowed to speak.

It’s a strange experience to live under twenty four hour police surveillance. When I first arrived I was very confronted by their armed gaze but I soon learned to ignore it. Under their vague supervision I enjoyed some of the most loving and generous human interactions I have ever experienced in the centre of a major city. To enjoy this I made a point of not looking at them at all, thus rendering them insignificant. Unlike most urban experiences, most of the people around me were very responsive to eye contact and overall the people were unusually beautiful.

The closest toilet was beneath us, two floors down in the train station, on the other side of the ticket gate. It was very hot every day and the sun radiated off the pavement and off the glass buildings and I drank a lot of water, mostly donated bottled spring water, and urinated frequently. Multiple times per day I would skip down the steps, down the escalator, leap across the ticket gates and skip across to the toilet. The ticket guards soon accepted that this would be the case. I suppose it was against the rules, but they were not prepared to deny people a toilet. After days of this I was warned on my way down that police had just charged someone $200 for using the toilet without a train ticket and another $200 for taking the time to contest the extortionate “fine”. I was told that before I arrived police tore down our tents and stole all our gas bottles, so there was no shelter and no cooking facilities. When it started raining in the middle of the night and people took their stuff to seek shelter under the nearby buildings police physically prevented people from taking shelter, forcing them to remain in the rain.

We found milk crates everywhere and used them a lot, to define our living space and store our bedding, food and books. Despite using over a hundred milk crates for a whole week, two individuals were arrested and fined for stealing milk crates; in other words, they were arbitrarily singled out, forcibly apprehended and handed a letter of extortion. Subsequently, when someone arrived with a delivery of milk crates they had to dump them around the corner and ask people to carry them in by hand.

After the Saturday rally when we were all peacefully sleeping they gathered their troops and just before 05:00 they woke us to demand we remove ourselves and all our belongings immediately. They did not demand this time, as before, with some idiotic illusion of authority that we could choose to ignore, they demanded with real threat of immediate violence. We were one hundred, approached by two hundred people in police uniforms and a few large men in suits and gloves who enjoyed getting in on the action.

I blessedly slept away from the general mass for the first night in five and so had plenty of time to wake up and put my clothes on, watching in amazement as they infiltrated our camp. I was not sure what to do until I saw James with his backpack on, standing aside. Many people decided to link arms and defy the demands of police. They were violently separated and restrained, punched and dragged away screaming with their arms twisted behind their backs. James’s response was the only one I felt confident to emulate and so when I saw him I calmly rolled up my bed, packed my bag, gathered my stuff and stood aside to see what I could do.

Somehow I didn’t see much of the violence that was taking place, only navy blue gloved arms raised and slammed down in punch. Somehow I blocked out or simply forgot the incessant screams audible on all the videos. What I saw clearly was a gentle brother with curly hair, who had exchanged many beautiful smiles with me, being dragged away by police with his arm bent up behind his back, screaming with no way for me to help him.

Before I left the camp I drank an entire bottle of water and refilled it to the top. We stayed in a group as Police slowly pushed us away. We passed lines of police staunch amongst our brothers and sisters on their knees in handcuffs. At the front was the beautiful curly-haired man looking pained and I offered him some water. His arms were cuffed behind his back so I poured it for him, he drank and some spilled on his clothing. He thanked me and I saw a skinny teenage boy, who I also had feelings for, and attempted to give water to him too, but I had exercised my humanity enough and they implored me to continue walking.

They pushed our group around the corner and down the street until we got to Hyde Park and everyone seemed to stop. The police presence slowly fell away and the socialists began a general assembly like some sort of nervous tick. I was invited to be an anarchist and we went off and sat under a tree on the other side of the park. I didn’t want to leave James as I felt he was the only one I could trust and so I was pleased when he came to join us.

As we sat there we looked across the road at the spectacular cathedral. Mass was to begin in mere hours, and we discussed the exciting idea of occupying the cathedral. Just then an occupier turned up, a deeply unhappy man with a lot of misdirected anger, and accused James, who had been making phone calls with a hands-free kit, of being an undercover cop. He pushed him, spat in his face and told him to fuck off. James was merely shocked and upset by the sudden attack. I was the only one who defended him. “If anyone should fuck off it should be you,” I told the lunatic. He persisted in his allegations and James defended his innocence. No one else knew how to respond. I looked the accuser in the eyes, shook his hand and said, “You’re an idiot, my friend. You are wrong.” He had no violence for me, only James. I left with my friend and we caught a ride in the back of an unmarked white van, keeping low to avoid detection, feeling like we were in some movie, uncertain what comes next. James held his head in his hands and wept. He decided we should get out and walk to his friend’s place.

It was no later than 06:00 when we began the long walk with our backpacks on. We passed a couple on their balcony and they stopped us to ask for help. They were locked out of their apartment, had been trapped on the balcony all night, and James called their neighbour to alert him to the situation. I must have still been in shock because I had no idea what was going on, thinking these were the friends we were going to visit, and confused but accepting when we moved on.

James guided me through the familiar streets where he grew up, and told me some of the histories of the area. This suburb was populated by diverse immigrants, then hippies, then yuppies. The original Australians living in Sydney were at first marched off cliffs and then later rounded up and driven into the ghetto of Redfern, a slum in the centre of Sydney that white people require a permit to enter.

James’s friend didn’t want us in the house so we waited in the park. I practiced the guitar, soaked chia seeds and goji berries and offered James water and food. Eamon went out of his way to sit in the park with us for five minutes on his way home. He had been charged with resisting arrest.

James and I continued our walk to the Sunday morning market in Newtown, where relaxed happy people browsed the stalls of fresh simple foods. As we marched through with our backpacks on I marveled at these people who woke up that morning safe and secure in their homes with their families, with no idea what was happening in Martin Place.

We dumped our bags behind a produce stall and sat on the pavement. A man and a woman played gentle loving acoustic music for the slowly moving crowd. I listened to the woman’s beautiful voice, I watched the faces of the children passing; wide-eyed innocence, curiosity and acceptance. These soft-cheeked gentle people are precious and their perfection brought tears to my eyes.

James bought me some food and I was approached by a guy I met over a year ago, who I barely remembered. He gave me a hug and asked me how I’m doing. “Alright,” I replied, “considering I was woken up by riot police this morning and watched them drag my friends away screaming.” He took a few seconds to realise it’s not funny and therefore I’m not kidding.

We looked around at the market. “This is how our children will experience capitalism,” I told James.

“I hope you’re right,” James replied. I was thinking thoughts about economic collapse or speaking them out loud, and here I was, somewhere in Sydney, amongst those who were already practicing and enjoying the alternative to corporate capitalism.

“This is much more of a statement than what we were doing,” James remarked. We fell asleep on the soft grass, on the generous earth, under the shade of a wise tree.

“What are you going to do now?” my Occupy friends asked me after giving me a bed for the night. “I’m going to the Blue Mountains to rescue my friend who has been convinced that aliens are about to land and save us.”

I came across David under the influence of Brendan in the bush below Blackheath. They discussed some horrendously strange and intricate concepts that would be very easy to dismiss as delusional, but when I accepted their stories as myth they rang deeply true for me.

They told me that many world leaders have been possessed by malevolent reptilian extra-terrestrials but that the Galactic Alliance is coming and they are going to save us. They listened to messages from our saviours via wishy-washy new age podcasts. I practiced, at that moment more than any other time in my life, the principle of listening and understanding rather than arbitrarily judging true or false.

The result of listening carefully to these farfetched notions and comparing them to my own intuitions was not compliance with truth or delusion but communion with two loving brothers around a fire in the bush. What could make more sense in an insane culture of consumption and alienation; intellectual conflict or silent peace? We had all three of us escaped the shackles of employment and rent and were in the process of discovering a life purpose larger than culture, embedded in the rhythms of nature.

When it was time for me to go to the tribal gathering we all three decided to leave, in different directions, for different purposes, to meet again or not to meet again, a slave to nothing but the limitations of life on earth.