guest post on pogblog:
The previously self-evident American precious-idea that All citizens are created Equal took a distressing hit in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Palo Alto CA on Saturday night, June 25, 2005. As a person who has protested for peace and for economic justice for 40 years – since John Kennedy was assassinated on my 19th birthday I suppose — I was desolate at the sudden slide towards totalityranny that I experienced in those Palo Alto streets where once liberty shone.
As a chubby ex-English teacher carrying a Teach Peace sign, I think I am not an inherently threatening figure. Around the edges of a full-time job, I have carried that now very-dog-eared sign around the Peninsula daily for nearly 1000 days since October 2002. There have been several adventures in free speech and the right to the public-square-equivalent protected in 1980’s Pruneyard (our own backyard in Campbell) Supreme Court decision.
But the police presence in downtown Palo Alto had to be experienced to be believed. I know and deplore that there was some minor mayhem in a May rally, but the law enforcement community who have always difficult and often dangerous jobs have changed materially from my experience over all these years. I was not treated as an equal citizen whose reasonable exercise of first amendment rights should be actively protected by law enforcement in America – even hated speech must be honored actively in fact.
It was clear that the officers were intensely edgy and fearful with no provocation. I was shouted at repeatedly not as a fellow citizen, but with derision, “Go home and smoke some more dope” (by a senior officer). I whose tag line to my students for a lifetime has been “My drug of choice is air.” There was no respect or presumption that I was a profoundly patriotic American citizen endowed with inalienable rights. I was treated as if I were possibly criminal and certainly stupid. That instead of being proud to be serving the public with benign strength in a country where the light in the torch of the Statue of Liberty itself is the light of free speech, many of the police were clearly contemptuous of the assembled citizens. I was personally battered by scorn.
If free speech, that endangered species, were not at stake, it might have been all-but-comically sursurreal (sic) to see hundreds of police persons in a riot gear that paled the overwrought imaginations of Vader’s Storm Troopers themselves to keep a few hundreds of folk in order. But the full black head-to-toe exoskeleton riot gear with three-foot long truncheons, huge black guns, and no names only numbers was chilling. The infamous black helicopter circled ominously and endlessly overhead saying, “By the order of [a long list of Law Agencies], this had been declared an unlawful assembly. Disperse or you will be subject to arrest.”
I heard one well-appointed man shout to a middle-aged protester, “Get a life,” as if free speech were for bums, not the highest expression of responsible, heart-wrenchingly concerned citizenship. This prosperous citizen went from froth to slaver, spewing invective with spit, at which point a perspicacious bystander, one of the putative ne’er-do-wells, said mildly, “Sir, sir, please take your meds.” Later, one well-groomed older women said haughtily, “Why are these [unwashed] people wasting our time? This is a terrible waste of police resources.” A gentle protester said back, “Protecting free speech seems a bargain, ma’am. One might better complain that we’re spending $14,000 a minute 24/7/365 on a fantasy Missile Defense system which I could sell to the same people who want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.”
The whole event on behalf of the police felt like an overdose of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, but treating your fellow citizens, whom I presume the police are sworn to guard, as if they are enemies and low-life agitators is a sad business in America. It was not just the lack of respect for the event and its participants who were slightly rowdy at worst, but the hostile presumption of some kind of inchoate guilt that misses the point of the first amendment which must not be abridged by scorn or intimidation.
=====
guest post .. Teach Throat
copyright assumed by http://pogblog.myblogsite.com 2005
all rights reserved
06-26-05
===
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/pogblog” rel=”tag”>http://pogblog.myblogsite.com</a>
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=1513
this is a link to a story about the rally. It's extraordinary. The newspaper report completely takes the point of view that the rally was an attempt to destroy property, takes pains to say that fewer people were involved in the rally than predicted, then essentially claims that the police succeeded because they made the marchers go away. Also there's a great line, some of the marchers weren't really “anarchists”. Yikes, what a threat to safety and order in Palo Alto, 200 people march through the middle of town to protest war. Got to make sure that they don't interfere with people trying to park to go to Starbucks. After all, one of these is the American way.
The story never mentions what law the marchers broke or were going to break by marching and speaking out. It even talks about sending a black helicopter. What we think of as the paranoid fringe may not be that paranoid.
I will never cease to be amazed that those who seek to provoke the public are upset when they provoke the public. Those people in the crowd have their first amendment rights also, and they get to shout whatever they want. Ditto for the officers.
As for the law being broken?
Palo Alto, Chapter 10.10, TEMPORARY STREET CLOSURES
my point was that the article never explained that there was an ordinance that the police were enforcing.
Of course the on-lookers disturbed in their Pursuit of Commerce and the preferably Untrammeled Leisure Time they Earned on the Backs of the Increasingly Poorer have the right to shout whatever rabid drivel they wish. I only wish them Rapture, sooner rather than later is good for me.
The police, however, in an exaggerated position of power and presumably in service of the public good, do not in uniform have the right to yell sarcastic remarks at the public they just threatened with arrest. Any more than I had the right as a teacher to say “X or Y or Z, your ideas are a veritable blizzard of drivel,” however tempted I might have been. Nor can you go into a Babble Meeting in a ChurchOGod in your Joint Chiefs uniform and say that this is a Christian Nation. What we all do in our civvies is up to our own judgment, or lack thereof.
As to civil disobedience, I predict it's going to increasingly disturb the well-oiled Engine of Commerce no matter what Ordinances and Black Garbledly-Shrieking Helicopters are clacketing overhead.
Giga-Greed is a dying Creed — it's in its “last throes.” I predict a 12-year run before its unflattering collapse in a sweaty heap of projectile ordure.