by Angela Welch Stucker on January 28, 2012

College, a mostly wonderful experience punctuated with some not-so-great ones. For most people it’s the first time away from home, on your own in a semi-controlled environment, new people, new experiences, new pressures. As an almost only child (a much younger brother grew up in another state), the best part of college for me was feeling like I had a ton of siblings. I loved it and my apartment became command central – “keys in the lamp, let yourself in;” everyone knew that mantra.

As my last year was starting to wind down, I felt pretty lost. The plan was to move to Boston to live with my boyfriend, but in the back of my mind was the nagging feeling that he wasn’t completely on board with the idea of me moving 3,000 miles across country to be with him. Of course there was also the question of what I would do when I got there. Liberal Arts college, BA in International Relations, two years of Russian language five days a week, but I wasn’t going to be a translator or foreign service officer. Good thing I didn’t know then that it would take me another twenty five years to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

But the hardest thing was leaving my friends.

That Christmas, only six months before we all said goodbye and our lives diverged, I was fully immersed in a funk. I didn’t want to do Christmas; too much effort. Didn’t care about a tree (a big deal for me), especially didn’t want to do the Christmas gift exchange several of us had done every year. How could that be a bad thing? Easy if you’re the only one who didn’t buy any presents. I tried to get out of it, this was going to be uncomfortable to say the least – I only prayed that everyone else had left me off their shopping list.

I sat and watched as gifts were exchanged – none to me or from me – and wanted nothing more than to slink out of there. Hard to do when the party is in your own apartment. Thank God, I thought, when the party finally started winding down. I felt like such a jerk, but at least no one had handed me a gift. There was a moment or two of silence until somebody said something like, “hey, there’s one more,” and two of my friends walked out of the living room and down the hall to one of the bedrooms. When they came back in the room, they brought with them a very large red bow attached to a rocking chair.

I’d always wanted a rocking chair. I must have mentioned it at one point or another. But looking at that chair, and at each of them, I knew I didn’t deserve it, and I didn’t deserve them. They didn’t seem to notice as they regaled me with every detail of the procuring of the chair. I felt smaller and smaller. I looked around the room at these people I had known for more than four years. I had lived with some of them, laughed with all of them, fought with a few of them, slept with one of them, and loved all of them in varying degrees. They had been my family and soon we would all be going our separate ways. And as difficult and unpleasant as I had been, they nevertheless gave me this amazing gift. They loved me too. I walked around for awhile not thinking too much about that gift; it made me revisit what a bitch I had been. When I did think about it, I figured the lesson in it was – gee I have amazingly nice friends. It wasn’t until sometime later that I figured out the bigger, truer lesson.

I was correct about the boyfriend in Boston and we split up shortly after I got there. Fortunately a very good friend (who became my best friend) had moved to Boston the year before and let me bunk with her while I got my bearings. That all worked out just fine, I survived those post college, what the hell do I do now years, and stayed in Boston for five years. That friend and I became very active in a church that we attended pretty much every week. Always a bit leery about churches, for some reason I threw myself into this one, taking classes, and tackling some lingering theological questions from my childhood days in Sunday school. You know from that previous sentence that those past Sunday school teachers did not know what to do with me. But back to the chair. Grown-up Sunday school and I was still struggling with the concept of grace – defined differently by different religions, but mostly boils down to this – you are loved, whether you like it or not. As a person who had equated love with good behavior, this was a tough one for me. Then I remembered that Christmas and that rocking chair (which I had then and still do have, in case you were wondering). Love is there for us no matter what. The only things that keep us from accepting it with open arms, are our inability to let go of our need to be perfect, to be willing to embrace who we are, and to share that imperfect self with the people we love, the people who love us, and especially the divine creator who loves us unconditionally.

Whether we want it or not.

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Love, That’s America

by Angela Welch Stucker on November 14, 2011

As I watched hour after hour of footage from Occupy Wall Street (OWS) sites across the country looking for visually and emotionally compelling shots, I started getting a little testy – do something interesting! Watching people talking, debating, explaining what consensus means, how General Assemblies work, may be greatly motivating when you’re there, but it’s not all that thrilling when you’re putting together a video with a soundtrack. There are now over 2,500 OWS communities around the world, so that was a lot video to look through.

After awhile though, my thoughts shifted, and I started finding the beauty in these small groups, and the courage. It’s one thing to head over to Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, with the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other people. It’s another to stand on a sidewalk with ten or twenty or a hundred people and brave the initial curiosity and maybe scorn from passersby. “For every I’m with you honk I get from a passing car I get a get a job thrown at me” said one woman. A friend put it eloquently when he said “It’s hard being the first one on the dance floor.”

So, with that said here is the video Franklyn Strachan and I produced with the help of thousands of people around the country, and around the world. Melvin Van Peebles song, “Love That’s America” is the soundtrack, written forty years ago during the time of another great upheaval in our country.

I hope you enjoy it!

Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Together, Melvin Van Peebles.

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Occupy Wall Street

by Angela Welch Stucker on October 24, 2011

I want to tell you about Occupy Wall Street. I’ve started this piece about OWS, I don’t know, four or five times at least and I just haven’t been about to finish it. Surprising, because this is just the kind of thing that for me should pretty much write itself – you’ve got your drama, your bad guys, your uplifting moments, your social commentary, your fighting back against the system, and all the other social justice things I so love to go on and on about. But even with all of that laying right there in my lap, I haven’t been able to write about OWS. And it’s not that I didn’t have enough to say about it, it was the opposite – there was too much, where could I possibly start? Now there’s even more to write about because it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Occupy Wall Street officially began on September 17, 2011 when a small group of protestors moved into the Wall Street area of lower Manhattan in New York City, eventually parking themselves in Zuccotti Square, one of those urban parks with cement benches and tables, about a block from Wall Street and the big bull statue, and right across the way from the footprint of the Twin Towers. Renamed Liberty Park, the number of people on site has grown tremendously, now in the thousands, not to mention the sites that have started across the country and across the globe. Why did they do it? I can’t speak for everyone involved, but it’s pretty safe to say that they did it because they wanted to bring attention to the growing power and apparently unlimited greed of banks and corporations, taken at the expense of the individuals in the United States.

Here are some numbers: The unemployment rate is currently over nine percent (14 million people), and that number doesn’t include the underemployed, those working well below their prior income level, sometimes holding two or three jobs just to get that much. The unemployment/underemployment rate in the U.S. is actually closer to 20% when you count the unemployed that are now off the rolls because they are not currently receiving unemployment benefits. That translates to well over 20 million people who can’t find a job. Over 50 million people in this country have no health care coverage. Over one million people have lost their homes through the foreclosure process since 2008. The poverty rate has increased every year since 2007 from 12.5 to 15.1 in 2010. Nearly 15 million children (21%) live in families with income below the federal poverty level -$22,050 for a family of four, with 42% living in low-income families, those with income of roughly twice the federal poverty level. This is criminal and an outrage and none of us should sleep at night knowing this is true. Real wages of the American worker has been relatively flat for the past twenty years. All of this is bad enough, but let’s add insult to injury by forcing us to pay for the bailouts of the very companies who caused this mess in the first place.

There comes a time where the people must stand up and say ENOUGH. Apparently, that time has come.

I think I’ll get out of the way now and let you take a look. My colleague and partner on Working for Your Life, the Documentary, Franklyn Strachan and I have been to Liberty Park several times, as well other OWS marches and sites. We’re putting together videos of what we see.

Take a look:  This is What Democracy Looks Like.

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