Occupy: Do Not Go Gentle Into That New Year

As we bid 2011 good riddance, let’s take a few moments to gird for the battles ahead in 2012:

* It’s an election year: the president, a third of the Senate, and the whole House, plus various state governors and legislators and others. Meantime, a vocal minority is still holding our national government hostage to its revolutionary cant and its pledges to everyone but the American people.

* The assclowns who wrecked our economy are still in their high towers, still looking down on the 99%, still snapping their fingers for their pet government officials.

* The militarization of our municipal police departments proceeds apace.

* The wars on drugs, terror, immigrants, gays, women, workers, and free speech continue unabated.

I hold increasingly little hope for the American experiment our forebears set in motion, but I tend toward pessimism. We are not, in fact, preparing for a civil war, and many of our problems are perennial or even cyclical. And as one of the great book editors of our era, Marco Palmieri, tells us, “Pessimism is a misuse of imagination.”

So let’s be imaginative as we look ahead.

John Lennon said, “As soon as you react with violence, they know exactly what to do with you. Using humor and creativity in protest are the only things the establishment are not prepared to deal with.”

The establishment has gotten pretty good about using pepper spray to deal with peaceful, creative people. But we can still out-think them and bring them to heel.

Norman Lear urges us to use our creativity and our patriotism and our sense of right and wrong to stand up for the Constitution and for human decency. The country we save may be our own.

Occupy: An Arrest in Los Angeles

Take good note of this first-person account of being arrested at an Occupy Movement event in Los Angeles. Note that the brave, dedicated men in blue did what they could to inflict violence and pain and humiliation on unarmed, peaceful people whose crime was sitting down and exercising their First Amendment rights.

Three points:

1) The men and women who nearly collapsed the global economy are still at it, still employed by organizations deemed too big to fail, still receiving enormous paychecks and bonuses.

2) Those who peacefully protest against the oligarchy are brutalized and given the maximum sentences possible for misdemeanors. The protestors are dangerous to the economic elites, and what the elites order the police to do is a direct measure of their fear.

3) That the police commit such acts of barbarity shows us that they are no longer members of the communities they are sworn to serve and protect; they are militarized in mind and body, and all they care about is taking down the enemy. By which they mean us.

Occupy: A New Purpose for Catsignal

You see the new category here at Catsignal: Occupy.

Since I first relaunched Catsignal as a place to share my writing, I have been almost relentlessly apolitical. By and large, I have restricted my occasional political or social observations to my stories because this is a writing blog, and that is a time-honored method of bringing concerns to people’s attention.

That has changed. The unconscionable attacks against peaceful protestors in the Occupy Movement, the use of riot police, pepper spray, batons, beanbag and rubber projectiles against American citizens who are exercising their First Amendment “right of the people peaceably to assemble, to petition their government for a redress of grievances” cannot be ignored.

Catsignal is not going to become the go-to source for all your Occupy Movement news; this remains, first and foremost, a writing blog. But I will repeat – for the sake of doing what I can from the hinterlands of a red state – word of the outrages so that you, too, may be outraged. That you, too, will speak out. That you, too, will do what you can where you are to make a difference.

“Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you. Fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.”
– Edward Yashinsky

Occupy: More Violence, Wall Street Scheming

More news from the burgeoning police state. (With thanks to the good people at BoingBoing for their coverage.)

The chancellor of the University of California at Davis called on police to remove peaceful protestors – students, faculty, a former poet laureate of the United States – from the campus. The police gleefully did their work with their batons and all the pepper spray they could muster.

Nathan Brown, an assistant professor in the Department of English at UC Davis, has written to the chancellor demanding that she resign. It’s a powerful letter that I’m sure will have no effect on the chancellor’s stunted conscience, but it may well prove to be be a springboard toward her removal. (Update: Here’s the chancellor’s response, to wit: I’m so sorry this terrible thing happened, but it’s their fault for breaking the rules.)

Meanwhile, back on Wall Street, a Washington, DC, lobbying firm sent a memo to one of its clients, the American Banking Association, outlining a plan to discredit the Occupy Movement. The memo clearly demonstrates that the 1% is terrified of Occupy’s political power, which is a pretty impressive admission since the movement is constantly pummeled for “not having a clear agenda.” Story and video here, PDF of the memo here.

And New York’s billionaire mayor, not content with evicting the protestors from the park where they had set up shop, had the OWS library destroyed in the process. I hardly need to add my own outrage here for my fellow word lovers.

The 1% is fighting back with egregious force, and they will continue to do so. Historically, this marks the beginning of the downfall of the dictators. Even those who disagree with the Occupy Movement cannot possibly (I hope) approve of the Nazi-style tactics being used on peaceful citizens. Of course, I could be wrong, and then the Constitution is just words on paper.

“Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.”
– Rod Serling, “The Obsolete Man,” The Twilight Zone