Protesters are vowing to stage a return match with the Oakland Police.
Oakland protesters vow to return to streets a day after clash with police
Oakland demonstrators vowed on Wednesday to return to their protest site just hours after police cleared hundreds of people from the streets with tear gas and bean bag rounds.
A Twitter feed used by Oakland’s Occupy Wall Street movement called on protesters to return to downtown at 6 p.m. for another round, and some demonstrators vowed to return as soon as possible.
I first came to California in May 1969 and have lived here ever since. I have vivid memories of walking down the streets of Berkeley as they were lined by national guard troops and helicopters were dropping tear gas from the heavens above. The present events in Oakland don't come as such a shocking surprise to me as they seem to for a lot of other people.
The US has not seen protest on the present scale since the 60s. There have been occasional uprisings in minority communities over court verdicts such as Rodney King and Oscar Grant. Hurricane Katrina was after all an act of God according to the insurance companies. None of those events touched the American middle class. We had a few months of generally orderly demonstrations leading up to the invasion of Iraq, but that soon petered out.
I think that people need to grasp the reality that the general thrust of the Occupy Movement poses a very fundamental challenge to the existing political and financial elite. We are not talking about voting out one bunch of pols and voting in another bunch with a slightly different flavor. We are talking about a major overhaul. That is a major threat.
That is the sort of threat that was posed in the 60s by the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Over and over the various establishments that were being opposed reacted with violent repression. That is what happens when the boat gets rocked. It happens in the Middle East and it happens in the United States.
It has been 41 years since the shootings at Kent State. That means that an entire generation has reached middle age without seeing this on the evening news unless it was happening in an entirely different part of the world. It is understandable that people are quite unprepared for this.
I have no way of knowing what will be the ultimate course of the Occupy Movement, but I have a strong sense that it is not something that will just blow over in a few weeks. The problems that are poisoning American society have been accumulating over that 41 year time span. That seems to be slowly dawning on the public consciousness and they are reacting with anger and fear. There really aren't any trinkets that can be thrown out to the crowds to placate them. I don't see any way that all of this can be resolved in a fashion that is redolent of a well mannered PTA meeting.