I warned you.
Go to YouTube. Pump in "Police pepper spray peaceful UC Davis students." If that video doesn't make you vomit, I don't want you in my life. I don't want you on this planet.
Student protesters are sitting on the ground, arms linked. PEACEFULLY. A campus cop very calmly walks up and down the line and sprays these people directly in the face with pepper spray. This is immoral, it is brutal, it is an abuse of power for which these cops should be punished or fired. They'll probably get away with it.
The surrounding crowd could have responded by throwing rocks at the cops, rushing them and trying to beat the crap out of them. That would have been justified. I'm glad they didn't because they would have lost. It would have escalated and the students would have been painted as the bad guys. That's how it worked in the sixties. That's how the power brokers knew it would work in the sixties.
These students responded by chanting "Shame on you. Shame on you." And "Who do you serve? Who do you protect?" When the cops decided to leave, they formed a circle back to back, guns raised, as the protesters gathered around them. The cops edged backwards step by step. It was an ominous sight. One cop clearly had his finger on the trigger. I don't know what kind of gun it was but that vision disturbed me.
This is going to get worse. This movement is for real. People are going to die and it won't be cops, it won't be the financial elite, it won't be gutless republican politicians. It will be students, it will be a jobless protester, it will be an 84 year old woman.
On the surface of it, you might consider the students' response a weak one. But that image, that powerful image, has been broadcast around the world. Millions have seen it and millions know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the cops were wrong and brutal, the students were right and they handled the situation non-violently.
This is the difference between now and the sixties. This is why I am all in, and my "child of the sixties" juices are flowing through my veins faster and in more volume than whiskey usually does.
Social media. Instantaneous communication. The financial elite, the power brokers cannot hide in the dark anymore. The darkest place they can go is in their own minds. Their crimes are broadcast as they happen and the world recoils in horror. People respond. Unions and protest organizations are working hard to fight back. republican scum politicians are being booted out of office, regressive republican agenda are being voted down. Guerrilla projection. A small thing but a cool one. Images projected onto the side of the Verizon Building in New York as OWS supporters walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. They chanted along to the words that were projected. That type of thing has happened in many places.
The point is, there is a unity to this. Protests are happening in all shapes and forms but they are all somehow connected. The whole country and the whole world is involved. Protesters have the technology to broadcast their agenda, the means to communicate it immediately and the ability to expose the brutality and corruption of the power brokers as it happens.
This movement is more powerful than 45 years ago because of that. I am jacked up and ready to roll. I will find a way to get involved. My generation failed the first time around. This is a chance to get it right and there are millions more involved in the fight.
But that UC Davis image remains in my skull. Especially the cop with his finger on the trigger as he retreated from an angry crowd that he and his compadres had just provoked.
The power brokers killed, jailed, beat and harassed the spirit out of the protesters last time around. They will try this again because it is what they do best. I'm sure they also have more sophisticated methods of undermining the protesters in 2011 as well and that thought frightens me too.
We cannot afford to lose this time. This country has become infinitely more corrupt, more unjust, more unbalanced in the last 45 years. It's all out in the open because the financial elite and the power brokers have gotten cocky.
If they crush this movement, what hope can there be for this country? I heard a stat yesterday that said nearly one out of three people in this country live at or very near the poverty level. If that number is even close to being true there is hell in the future of the pampered elite.
Poor people, unemployed people, are pissed off people. Especially when they have to watch rich republican moron politicians wasting time trying to defeat President Barack Obama instead of cooperating in an effort to save this country.
Anger can be a tool. A motivator. Let's use it wisely this time.
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