Hero #100: Pancho Stierle … (02/23/16)
Francisco ‘Pancho’ Ramos Stierle is a Mexican-born full-time community activist and humanitarian. Known for his easy smile and kind heart, Pancho’s mission is “to live in radical joyous shared servanthood to unify humanity.” He became a known figure of the Occupy movement after being arrested* while meditating during the dismantling of the Occupy Oakland Camp (pictured) … While a doctoral student of astrophysics at the University of California at Berkeley, after realizing that his work was serving one of the institution’s facades to create “safer nuclear weapons,” he resigned from the program and became involved in community organizing. An avid student of Gandhi, Pancho believes that “if we are working for liberation, we better stop paying for war,” and that his energy would be better used encouraging “matching the collective madness with a collective love” … His activism work has focused on issues of human rights, nonviolence, restorative justice, immigration, permaculture and the development of a gift economy. He has worked with youth and supported families affected by Arizona’s SB1070 law. He is involved in Free Farm, a San Francisco garden distributing vegetables to city-dwellers. He has participated in movements to democratize the University of California system, protect old growth trees, facilitate urban farming, and move past youth violence. Still actively involved in the Occupy movement, Pancho’s view is that 10 percent of the community’s energy ought to go toward protests, marches, boycotts and civil disobedience, while 90 percent of it should go toward the construction of viable alternatives to the currently rotten system.
“The more we concentrate on the constructive program, the more we’re going to have food sovereignty and water sovereignty. And we will be ready to make a bonfire of passports and visas and GMO seeds. But first we have to have our own food system, our own justice system, our own restorative system.” ~ Pancho Stierle
“If police are stepping up their violence, we need to go and step up our nonviolence … If you have the riot police coming with tear gas and pepper spray and all their weapons, we have a more powerful weapon, courage and stillness — It’s kindness, it’s compassion, it’s generosity. It’s the small things, but when you add them up it makes a pretty strong army.” ~ Pancho Stierle
*Considered a “high profile undocumented protester” by authorities, after his arrest he was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody rather than being released on bail. A campaign was launched for his release, including a Change.org petition that gathered 8,000 signatures … In a statement from jail, he declared “When the city of Oakland decided to raid Occupy Oakland, it spent around 2 million dollars to do it. On the same day, Oakland closed five public schools. This is the same thing happening across the country. We do not have an economic crisis, we have a crisis of priorities.”
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