11/19/11

This Cannot Be the Way Occupy Ends

November 17, 2011 at 4:13PM by Charles P. Pierce | 18 comments

TWO MONTHS FOR THIS? /// At least 175 had been arrested when the post-march violence calmed down, but nothing is calm right now. And that's the problem. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)
Hard eyes along the A concourse at the Memphis International Airport today. America's business travelers are not liking what they're seeing on their teevee monitors at the gates. There's an interview with a guy on CNN, who is talking about how he saw a New York cop get hit with a battery this morning in lower Manhattan. The cop's head was bleeding. The guy on CNN is saying that he came to the Occupy demonstration because he was in sympathy with the movement's goals, and because of "the crimes on Wall Street and in Washington." He also says that the cops exercised "great restraint" this morning "considering what they've been subjected to." Everybody at Gate 29 nods, almost in unison.
There is no excuse for the militarized assaults on the various encampments around the country earlier in the week. Hell, there's not excuse for the kind of militarized police forces we have in this country, period. But this can't be the way this movement ends. It cannot end in reciprocal violence. If the general message of this movement becomes embattled cops preserving public safety, my god, that's the whole ballgame, and all the thieves go free.
Cops are dragging kids away by the hair. They're whacking people around and then preventing medical personnel from responding to treat their wounds. The whole world is, indeed, watching. And it's trying to make up its minds.
It's easy for all of us to say that. We didn't get our heads cracked. We didn't get our belongings trashed. We didn't have our free library tossed gleefully into dumpsters. (An action which, to call it philistine, is to insult the cause for which Goliath gave his life.) We don't have the anger rising in us, except by proxy. Nevertheless, it can't end in images of bleeding cops and tossed barricades, and a CNN spokesmodel named Alison Kosik telling all of here at Gate 29 about how the brave brokers of her acquaintence have accepted these inconveniences as "business as usual." CNN is posing the members of the financial-services industry as the last gunners at Fort Zinderneuf. This is not good.
What I know is that John Lewis nearly got killed at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and he never threw a punch back in anger. I empathize with the feelings of the people who have been subject to the ludicrous reaction of hyped-up cops with new military weaponry, and then subject to the contempt and condescension of a greasy little plutocrat like Michael Bloomberg. But this cannot be the way it ends. A few days of ghastly videos — and photos like those below — and out comes a new narrative that in a dozen different ways excuses the bloodletting and then minimizes it, while strangers wait for airplanes, silent applause in their eyes.