My heart beat rapidly and my stomach clenched as I watched the officer swing his baton. I was pushed backwards over a small wall next to the sidewalk as the other police rushed forwards and pinned the man's bloody head to the ground and strapped plastic zipties around his wrists. No, this wasn't the #OccupyWallStreet protests that are now sweeping the country in a exponential reaction, this was the protests after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the place was Hollywood, near the Academy Awards show on March 23. I wasn't there tonight at the #OccupyWallStreet protests, but the video of a cop swinging a nightstick catapulted me back to my own close encounters with police violence. And in the differences lie some hope for this movement to achieve real change. First, the video that took me back (and aback):
I'll tell you the story of the Academy Awards protest. I was eighteen years old when the US invaded Iraq. I had been to a few protests before the Iraq war lead-up- the largest after the Bush v. Gore decision, but the Iraq war protests were the first real movement I was part of. I was 18, I could make my own decisions, and I made full use of that. I had a head full of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,– the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.… Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
And so joined a group of priests, rabbis, and monks who were sitting in the middle of a
street in Los Angeles. They had discussed plans and had made their decision, I had a desire to make a clear unequivocal statement that I was opposed to the war and ran out to join them after going through a lot of fear. Unfortunately, I didn't get many pictures- I was too late. We managed to get a blurb in the news but that was it.
A few weeks later, the invasion was on, and I was back in the streets. There was a protest planned for the Academy Awards, and balancing the idea that we'd actually get media coverage against the knowledge that it would look silly protesting an awards ceremony, I headed down the freeway to Hollywood. We were cordoned off to a "free speech zone" about a mile away from the awards site (apologies for the link, it was the only source I could find. I'm the guy in the black t-shirt, back to camera, 2nd from left). Not surprisingly, the pro-war demonstration got to set up right in front of the awards (and the cameras). I was unhappy- we were flashing our signs to the road in front of us, but weren't being seen. A group of us broke away and headed for a main road. As we did, we were chased by police officers on bicycles. They cut us off, and I turned and headed for the main road as another group of police on motorcycles came in.
Most of the cops that cut us off seemed like reasonable folk. But one was angry- in his uniform and baton out, he seemed more ready for a football defensive rush than for us teenaged protesters. I saw him hit a guy with a baton to the chest and knock him back. But for all the anger, he kept the baton in two hands.
The handful of us who didn't get caught between the lines of cops rounded the corner and crossed the street. We crossed a line of limousines, yelling some slogans and flashing peace signs (original, right?). Then we got to the corner. At that point, we tried to cross the main street. There were already some protesters at the corner.
That's when it got ugly. I've been trying to find pictures of the actual event. What I remember was the crowd behind us, and a line of cops pushing us with batons back towards the "free speech zone". They got us across the street and to the corner, but I took some hard hits to the chest with the baton (held with two hands, still hurts). They wanted us to move more quickly, but we couldn't with the crowd behind us. Then suddenly one of the officers charged forward and swung his baton wide with one arm, hitting a guy next to me across the face. He went down. The rest of the cops surged forward, shoving the crowd backwards with their batons. I ended up half-draped over a small wall or fence, I don't remember which, until some other protesters helped pull me over. I watched as they cuffed the guy, his face down on the cement, bleeding and unconscious.
A year later, I was subpoenaed. The lawyers for the city and for the guy who got hit took a deposition from me. I told them what I'm telling you now. I didn't see him "attempt to kick the officer". What I saw was a guy not moving fast enough, and challenging the right of the officers to shove him backwards in the chest with a baton. So he got hit in the head. He was talking, arguing, telling them his rights. So the cop took a swing.
I'm not anti-cop. I don't like the role (e.g. Stanford Prison Experiment- role of authority creates abuse of authority), but I don't blame them for doing their jobs. I will say that there is a minority of officers who take pleasure from a position of authority, however, and who tend to act as violently as their job allows when that authority is challenged.
For me, the moral of the story was that protest didn't work, at least not for achieving change on a national policy level. Arrests, beatings, massive protests of millions- didn't stop the war. Hell, it didn't even swing the election in 2004. While my experiences standing up for my beliefs were very formative and powerful for me, they didn't do much. I walked out of jail within a few hours of walking in with the rabbis and ministers, got a misdemeanor. It seemed like a big game. It could have been demoralizing, but I love the empowerment that goes with participation in protest. It's not until you've been on the streets, dodging the police, that you truly realize what freedoms we have, what freedoms we don't have, and what freedoms we have to fight like hell to keep.
So...what does my nearly ten-year-old story have to do with today?
Cameras.
Sure, we had cameras. Video cameras, photo cameras. The pictures of the incident and a video or two got posted on some lefty backwaters of the internet- LA Indymedia, maybe a few others. As you saw from the link above, the best coverage came from a socialist newspaper- not the standard of objective mainstream journalism. No, we had cameras but not like now. That incident, as violent as it was, didn't suddenly draw media attention to the protests. Sure, the protests were covered in a "yawn, another protest" kind of way, but not like this, with outrage at every pepper spray or swing of the baton.
I watched the video of the cop swinging away with his nightstick tonight. I saw the other cop indiscriminately spraying young women with pepper spray. I've seen worse. I've been standing right there when worse happened. But we never got this kind of reaction.
The pepper spray drew mainstream media to the protest. This cop waving a baton around may make the story even bigger (if the media doesn't spin it into the "violent protesters provoking cops" meme). But only because there were more cameras than people, it seems, and each of those videos went straight to the internet within a few hours. Where the Arab spring was an example of the power of twitter to organize, #OccupyWallStreet is showing the power of viral video. We don't have to rely on the media to show us the right videos, and in their urgent need to stay relevant, the mainstream media is forced to show the general public those videos that do go viral.
I'd like to thank my much-maligned generation, the millenials. I said it years ago- we aren't lazy and apathetic, we're realistic. Give us the tools to change things and we can and will, and we will bring our friends. Viral video, flashmobs...these are turning the power of a fad or trend into a movement. Thanks to those who went before for showing us the way. Thanks for giving us the tools (RIP Steve Jobs). Here's a brand new tool- making protest relevant again by bypassing the corporate media. Hope you like it.
The revolution may not be televised, but it just might be tweeted, youtubed, and facebooked.
***Note: The diarist is hopeful, but not nearly as naive as this diary may lead others to believe. But these protests just might exert enough leftward pressure on the government to counteract that teabagging astroturf nonsense and give us some real progressive momentum. Let's hope.
And those of you in Utah (exile!), I'll see you at Occupy Salt Lake City this weekend.
9:52 AM PT: Occupy Salt Lake City has kicked off, with about 250 people braving the cold at 11 in the morning to get out there. Follow at OccupySLC.org