CT Mirror: Occupy Hartford keeps fighting
Lillie Lavado featured in this article chronicling the 2011 Occupy movement in Hartford, CT.
Read this excerpt from the article:
Occupy Hartford has attracted a variety of faces, a mixed group of young and old, unemployed and employed and even some homeless.
Earlier this week, Lillie Lavado, 28, of West Hartford, sat in a lawn chair near the road with her 5-month-old daughter Mariam in her lap, waving at cars driving by and encouraging them to honk in support of the Occupy Hartford movement.
“I want to make other parents comfortable to be here,” she said. “This movement isn’t just hippy art students.”
Makeshift signs, deflated tents, lawn chairs and even activity tables with bubbles for children lay scattered across the plot of land.
“I want to support those who can’t be here,” Lavado said. “I know people who work around the corner, but they can’t be here every day.
Lavado lives in West Hartford and only occupies during the day. She said she is unemployed, as is Mariam’s father, her fiancé, a disabled veteran who completed two tours of duty in Iraq. The couple, both originally from Connecticut, returned from Fort Hood in Texas last February when her fiancé was medically discharged for torn ligaments in his hip and a back injury. Lavado said they’ve been collecting unemployment and looking for full-time jobs since they returned to Connecticut.
“We’re not starving, but we could be,” Lavado said. “We’re one accident away. What we’re trying to make people realize is that it’s not just us,” she said, referring to members of the Occupy movement. “It’s all of us. We’re all teetering on the edge.”
Lavado and others first noticed Occupy Hartford as it began organizing on the Internet and through social media earlier this month. The Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City, which started mid-September, encouraged other cities to start their own demonstrations. Connecticut cities now joining the movement include Hartford, New Haven, New London and Bridgeport.
The Wall Street protests have received criticism for projecting a message too broad and too diffuse for clear political action, but Hartford protestors said the main message centers on ending corporate greed and economic disparity in America. Lavado said the political system essentially created two sets of constituents by listening to corporate America and special interests with money, while marginalizing the rest of the country, or the “99 percent” of people who don’t constitute the country’s wealthiest 1 percent.
“Ninety-nine percent: that’s the message,” she said. “Everything else falls under that umbrella. We’re all on the brink of losing jobs or our insurance. Why is it that government can’t get anything accomplished? We don’t have the money to be heard, so we have to pool together to be heard.”
In addition to wars and joblessness, unmanageable debt makes the list of grievances falling under the Occupy umbrella. Lavado said she attended Capital Community College and completed an individualized degree program at Trinity College, leaving her with about $25,000 in debt. She said she hopes to start her graduate studies in communications at Quinnipiac University this January, although it would add another $100,000 to her rising debt. She said her fiancé started at Tunxis Community College in Farmington because he felt he had to go to school if he wanted to find a job.
“When you’re in a place like Fort Hood, you really see what’s wrong with this country,” she said. “There’s so much poverty within the army. Everybody’s in debt. These young guys want to go to school, but they can’t afford it, so they join the army.”