Oakland Raiders

As I am writing this, I am listening to a live stream of the police raid of Occupy Oakland’s camp.  This raid is now in its 14th hour.  My stomach is turning.  I can taste adrenaline in my mouth, and I am just outside of Philadelphia, more than 2,800 miles away.  Police are now making a notification of pending arrests; choppers are overhead and a sonic cannon is being set-up.

When I woke up this morning, I heard about the raid and contacted Mayor Jean Quan’s office to plead she call it off.  Apparently, my plea and those of countless others, I’m sure, fell on deaf ears.  Whatever Mayor Quan’s career aspirations are, they clearly do not require winning over the people of Oakland.

The fight is intensifying with every moment that I write.  The knot in my stomach grows tighter and more acidic.

I am not sure why a city as close to economic disaster as Oakland is would use its resources and spend its money to break up a peaceful assembly.  I am even more perplexed by the thinking of the Mayor and her administrators in regards to addressing said assembly.  The brutality of this eviction, the lack of communication with Occupy members, and the blatant disrespect for the constitutional rights of all American citizens is only the surface of the poor judgment that lies at the heart of this attack.  The deeper failing lies in the very idea that this single attack, a vile waste of dwindling resources in the collapsing city of Oakland, will put an end to a local branch of a movement that has reached all six inhabited continents and that gains power and visibility every day.  The decision to mount this attack against a peaceful, constitutional assembly which is ultimately backed by millions of people worldwide is short-sighted and plainly moronic.  It is cutting a head off of Hydra.

By now, the park has been gassed and cleared in Oakland, but where did they go?  They went into the streets, and they did so in greater number.  Tomorrow, the camp will be back, the march will be bigger, and the message will be louder.  This movement isn’t going away, and attacking it will only make is stronger.  Arrestees become heroes.  Cuff marks become war wounds.  Tear gas becomes the wind of change.

My writing has been repeatedly interrupted by visual checks on the streaming video and surfing to find new feeds.  I am updating Twitter every few minutes.  The news grows more and more shocking.  An aerial feed of Oakland’s remaining occupants who took to the streets and reassembled at another location was cut off moments before police launched pepperballs at that crowd.  In a desperate search to find more information, I refresh my Twitter again to learn that two more cities have come under attack.  I am sick.

With no more video to follow, I turn to the television.  Unable to get localized coverage of the events, which undoubtedly will be only momentary snips of video and unassertive comments on the attacks, I find nothing; and I mean nothing.  The national news coverage struggles to find things to cover in their attempts to ignore the growing Occupy movement: a series of political candidates shaking hands with the people they will knife in the back the moment they are in office; the exhausted, tabloid-esque coverage of Michael Jackson’s doctor who – SURPRISE! – was really just a pharmaceutical drug dealer; the financial double-talk of an investing advisor masking the truth of our economic ruin with literal bells and whistles.  Not a peep about the brutal attacks taking place on an increasing number of cities.

As the feed dies, my ability to watch comes to a close, but it doesn’t matter.  I know how this night ends.  Some are arrested, some are treated for wounds, and some seek shelter.  All reassemble.  It won’t be long – a day at most – before the tents are up, the people are back, and the marching begins again.  Even as I write this, I hear a voice breaks through.  Clicking over to my internet browser, I discover a feed that had been cut off streaming again.  The pixelated image reveals a line of officers with riot shields and a line of “movers” (I refuse to call them “protesters” – see Protest Is For Pansies) standing before them, still fighting in what is now hour 17.  Believe me when I say this, Mayor Quan – and all those who attempt to crush this movement under the boots of oppression, they will still be there tomorrow and the day after and the day after that and all the days it takes to make this right.

 

Note: While all this was transpiring, my father – a brilliant man who is both sympathetic to the movement and a retiree of the NYPD – sent me an article about the Albany Police Department in upstate New York.  The officers of the department refused to follow the commands of local officials to evict the Occupy campers in their city.  I have not read the article yet, but will and promise to write about it soon.  This is notable, commendable, and wise.  During the Nuremburg Trails, obeying orders was not a reasonable excuse for carrying out acts against citizens that were morally divergent or even questionable… something the officers of forces around the globe might want to keep in mind.

Protest Is For Pansies

There is a lot of talk, conjecture – really, about what is happening on the streets of cities all over the world.  The critics, mostly those who stand to lose and their media marionettes, spout a lot of misinformation, half-truths, and whole lies in an effort to discredit you, your intelligence, your efforts, and your mission.  We know that this is simply weak propaganda.  It is an attempt to convince those who do not understand what is happening that nothing is happening.  It aims to sway those who may be on the fence about where they stand or what they believe in their favor, to affirm for them that there is no future other than the one that they have written.  They say a lot of insulting and inflammatory things in their insolent postulations, but none are as insulting as their repeated use of the “protest.”

This is not a “protest.”  Allow me to explain.

By definition, a protest is “an expression or declaration of objection, disapproval, or dissent, often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid.”  We are not engaging in a “protest” because this is not simply an expression of our disapproval; nor are we “powerless to prevent or avoid” the fate that would be ours if we were merely protesting.

We are, by definition, a “movement.”  We are “a group of people working together to achieve a political goal.”  For us, however, the definition of our movement is even deeper than this.  This is not just about achieving a political goal.  This is about survival, reform, and dare I say, revolution.

Our United States government has been hijacked by a corruptive, corrosive force that aims to use financial means to enslave the population.  The advance is fierce, and what’s more, it is blatant.  The corporate agenda for political manipulation and societal control has been underway for more than a century.  Before Carter lectured us on materialistic values; before Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex; before Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts; Abraham Lincoln warned us about corporations having been “enthroned and an era of corruption in high places” to follow.  He told us “the money power of the country would endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

While we may not have heeded the warnings of countless individuals over the course of our history, we see now that we have reached the tipping point.  We have come to a time when these corporations are so brazen, their future so secure, they do little to even veil their unscrupulous manipulations of politicians and citizens alike.  Big business lobbies for legal change, spending billions of dollars to fund bills that will change the construct of our political, legal, and economic systems to favor their business interests.  They use campaign contributions, which without term limits translates to purchasing long-term positions in Congress, to support candidates that will best serve their corporate agenda through regulation, deregulation, voting for or against bills, and the awarding of contracts.  They forge conglomerates, taking over media networks, to create a means of societal control, feeding the public everything from tainted information about political, environmental, and financial conditions to hyping the latest craze for the purpose of increasing their revenue and distracting us with material needs and celebrity drama.

If we do not succeed in our mission to awaken the world to the injustices committed against humanity by these zombie-like, non-human entities and to stop them in their relentless pursuit of consumption, we will all be crushed under their impending system of control.

We cannot and will not allow our lives to be determined by the fluctuations of numbers scrolling across a ticker board.  We will not permit a handful of insatiable parasites to feed on the blood, sweat, and tears of those forced by economic and political manipulations into any version of indentured servitude.  We will not tolerate any practice by business or government that attempts to promote a neo-feudalistic society in which a person’s future is determined at birth by his lineage or economic status.  We will not forsake the liberties, freedoms, and rights bequeathed to us by our forefathers in contracts written in earnest and paid for with the blood of generations of Americans soldiers.  We will not turn a blind eye to the decimation of basic human rights or the exploitation of the human will to work for survival.  We will not set aside our hopes and dreams to work for the fortunes of others.  We will not forgo our needs so that others can live out their every whim.  And, for the love of mankind and all that is good in the world, WE WILL NOT PROTEST.

We are more than protesters.  We are revolutionaries.  We are the future of this nation, the future of the world.  And if we think we are going to have any future other than to buzz around in circles, worker bees taking only their allotted share and functioning under the stern law of the few who rule, we must be ready to rise against any and all challenges.  We must do more than protest.  We must push, advance, agitate, march, propel, shift, shove, and force.

We are a movement… a group of people working together to change the world, to bring the power back to the people, to shape a future in which we can be truly free.  We are not protesting.  We are moving.