Notes from an Occupation 16: Feb 16

Hey everyone! Sorry for the long interval between updates. I’m sort of juggling two different blog entries tonight, so I’m going to do some creative typing and try to unify them. I’m still dealing with a lot of stuff from January 28, or as I’m calling it, the Night of the Long Batons. I saw too many of those in use that night and I don’t ever want to see that again, although I’m not going to hold my breath on that one. I don’t want to be an armchair psychologist and self diagnose myself, but I’ve definitely got some issues I need sorted out big time. I need to act on it because it has overcome my ability to manage and has exhausted any and all self care attempts. I am not really one to give things like this any power, but sometimes you have to call in the cavalry.

And that’s another thing to get over: SHAME. I’m generally super self reliant and more of the rock in the eye of the storm type person. Not being able to get over this is driving me nuts. I’m wracked with shame: shame that my experiences that night were nothing like others, that I shouldn’t be so messed up; shame that I’m ‘not right’ anymore; guilt that I didn’t and couldn’t do anything to try to help people I saw getting hurt by the police; guilt and shame that I’m sitting here typing in my macbook in a goddamn coffee shop all sorts of fucked up from a comparative few incidents with the police, and yet People of Color who have been dealing with this for their entire lives shoulder on and suffer in silence because nobody ever listened. Well, we hear you loud and clear now and I’m sorry that I allowed the media and the inundation of meaningless and irrelevant things distract me. Never again.

I’m blogging this to help myself heal, but also to bring this to light from my perspective. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I’m not a stranger to the ‘idea’ of police brutality, but being subject to the reality of it is something else entirely. And it must end. Even when I’m gumplestiltskin, I consider myself a very loving, caring, empathic person. I cannot deal with this shit. It breaks my heart seeing this. People who honestly and earnestly want to make a better world for everyone getting gassed and getting their faces crunched into the pavement. The Police and the City blatantly lying to the so called “free press”, and many of the journalists accepting it without question. It’s a Pavlovian response on a cultural level: we’ve been indoctrinated from birth to accept authority; accept its purity and honestly and perfection. Bad politicians, no matter how indicative of greater roots of corruption, are just ‘bad apples’; bad protesters indicate a movement that must be annihilated with the utmost force, urgency and suspension of truth and justice. 

The state uses force and physical and structural violence to keep us cowed and compliant; to keep us disempowered and alone and huddled in our warrens, hugging our force fed paradigm and thanking and loving it. Those cherished constructs of the kind and benevolent police officers, while true in some cases, are largely evaporated in displays of ultraviolence like we have seen in Oakland, and like many communities have known for decades. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Nobody likes their world to stop spinning, and woe if that world stops spinning and the curtain parts and you see the Serpent in the Garden. 

Republicans and the Tea Party campaign with slogans of “taking back America” and “Rebuilding the American Dream”; they hold “Restoring Honor” rallies; they talk a good game through their forked tongues. The problem is that it isn’t a motherfucking game, it’s real life. The policies instituted by Republicans and complicit, craven Democrats, are responsible for the decrepit social and economic conditions we find ourselves in. Just like Iraq, they have a plan to rebuild a country they destroyed, a people they shell shocked and made destitute; a plan that costs a lot of money and makes a lot of old white men richer than their wildest dreams. They have to ‘Rebuild America’ and ‘Restore Honor’ because in some twist of fate out of Mercutio’s lips, when we destroyed our alleged enemy’s House, we found the pox on our house too. 

Occupy is but a symptom of a greater, deeper and more powerful dissent. It’s this ur-tsunami of rage, bubbling and churning and growing more indignant and radical and militant. Our leadership could have maintained their power, they could have come to us in the beginning before we started to get organized, before we started throwing our bodies on the gears. But it’s too late now. Where we could have been accommodated, negotiated with and placated with a few changes back in the autumn, we now have 3 months of rage and injustices, wounded friends, night terrors, that smell of teargas permanently burned into our noses - it’s too late to go back now. I can’t go back now. You can’t go back now. Maybe we can turn away from the movement, but we’ve forever been rewired by hardship, siege and street fighting; by community and empowerment and direct democracy. It’s bigger than Occupy now, it’s a movement, and it’s a meme and it’s alive and self aware and that feeling of rightness and wellness, wholeness and justice is sitting in our heartspaces waiting for the spring. 

And just what will spring bring, dear Government? I have no idea. What happens when March rolls around and people stop huddling and start rocking the boat again? What happens when people realize that despite all the amazing things that happened this fall, a bunch of people got gassed and beat, and our elected leaders gave us silence and unspoken platitudes? Implicitly shaming us, despite the fact that many of us still looked to you for help and simple reassurances, through our cynicism and profound disappointment. This isn’t Rome, we have the internet and we’re all angry everywhere, so you can fuck right off with your Bread and Circus bullshit. And while we’re at it, you can stop the Smoke and Mirrors bullshit too. Nobody believes the lies anymore: whether it’s Mayor Quan spitting out ‘don’t recall me i’m a good mayor’ and deceits from whatever side of her mouth her hand isn’t leaned against to prop up her bored ass head, or President Obama pretending that he’s going to care about us now that he’s probably going to be reelected to a second term. 

What happens in Chicago when tens of thousands of G8 and NATO protesters face off against Rahm Emmanuel’s beefed up and crackdown encouraged police force? It’s not a game or a picnic. Our government has made that abundantly clear to us of late. Rahm’s ass just left the Obama White House! I think there’s a big disconnect between us on the ground and the government in that i think they think we’re not that serious. A leftist revolt under a democratic administration? Impossible you say? Try me. You’re already preparing your strategies for massive counter insurgency operations despite the protests being declared as peaceful, non-violent assemblies. We’ve seen how the police have treated protests in the last few months, let alone during the major convergences like the G8, WTO, and other big groups. Once again, the state is bringing violence to a non-violent protest, except this time, we’ve got months of notice. It’s not going to be like in Oakland on #j28 where a few people brought shields. It’s different now. The state has destroyed any vestiges of goodwill we once had for it and they’ve exhausted whatever moral pretensions and justifications they had for remaining in power. This isn’t Seattle. It’s bigger than Seattle ever could be, and bigger than Chicago ever will be. There’s a collective consciousness now, a groupthink. An assault on one of us is an assault on all of us. We don’t need trite, hollow slogans “we are all Oakland” or “we are all Scott Olson” this time because we are all angry. The most peaceful, loving, non-violent members of our movement are still mad as hell and we aren’t going to take it anymore. 

To borrow a quote from my favorite author Jeanette Winterson, ‘Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls, that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.” Well, we heard your clarion call loud and clear. We heard it in the sirens echoing through our streets, we heard it in the sound of batons striking flesh and bone, and we heard it in your dispersal orders and in the sound of ripping tents. You’ve built yourself a mighty fortress around yourselves, with your green zones and your closed door summits deciding the fate of nations. Just as those walls protect you, they limit you too. You don’t hear the cries of the people, and you are blind to them. The human mind has a funny way of downplaying tragedy when it’s just numbers and statistics, and those walls you’ve built within and without, be it a wall of barbed wire or a wall of officious, indifferent bureaucrats and flunkies, will be your undoing. 

It’s a new year and it’s a year which finds people wanting and demanding change; true, lasting and meaningful change. We tried doing things the right way, and you met us with violence, intimidation and used many of the resources at your disposal that would have best been not used on peaceful, extremely well networked and motivated protesters. We’ve learned from this. All these attacks did was make us bolder, smarter and more radical. I guess all I’m saying from this is that while your moves against us have hurt and traumatized us, it has not stopped us. It’s 2012. It’s the year of the motherfucking dragon and we will have change. We will no longer tolerate debate whether a woman has access to abortions or can make her own reproductive decisions; we will no longer tolerate social and economic injustice; we will no longer tolerate police brutality and repression; we will no longer tolerate racism and classism and other -isms. We don’t subscribe to ideologies, we are full of idea-ologies. You can evict our tents and you can arrest our persons, but you cannot evict an idea that is rooted in the hearts and minds of the People. It’s 2012 and we stopped pressing snooze, we stopped being meek and broken and disempowered. It’s 2012, we’re here, we’re not going away and we’re going to win.