This letter is addressed to the various police forces around the United States, the ones who are, or will be, enforcing the orders to evict and/or arrest the Occupy Wall Street protestors.
I have only one question for you: Why?
Why are you so determined to arrest these people, or to disrupt their (mostly) peaceful protests?
Don't you realize that these people are on your side?
They are trying to call attention to the plight of the middle class everywhere. The middle class which, with a median income of $45,000 a year, is struggling to make ends meet. This is a middle class, by the way, which most of you are probably members of. This middle class--including you and every other government worker who works alongside you--shoulders most of the tax burden that pays your own salaries, along with the salary of every other government worker. You are, in effect, helping to pay your own salary. Meanwhile, the big corporations being protested by the Occupy Wall Street folks pay next to nothing--or even nothing--or even less than nothing--in taxes. Why are you striving to protect people who contribute nothing to help you?
I'm sure by now that many of you have seen that video of the Wall Street traders watching a peaceful #OWS protest march as it went by their building. They stood on the balcony and drank champagne and joked with each other while they chuckled and looked down their upturned noses at the rabble marching past them in the streets. Some of you may even have been there keeping the march in order while it was happening. Meanwhile, while you and your fellow government workers are helping to pay your own salary, while at the same time the rest of the tax dollars you have paid in the past went to bail out those same Wall Street traders 2 years ago, these people are looking down at you and laughing.
You have surely by now received orders to treat the protestors as criminals. And surely you've watched as the media singles out the stories of the people who died of drug overdoses, who committed outright criminal acts, or who simply got tired of constant abuse by law enforcement and decided to express their displeasure violently.
All I ask is that before you decide to follow the orders of your superiors--no doubt which were dictated to them by politicians who were following the dictates of the big money interests who control them--to remove and/or arrest the OWS protestors, please take a few moments to consider the people they are fighting for.
Here's a hint: that group includes you.