Oh Look, It’s Spring. That Must Mean It’s Time To Start Pepper Spraying And Beating Protesters
on March 17, 2012 at 9:50 pmI’ve become convinced that police all around this country are the single biggest pack of wusses in the world. Here’s the justification for the beatings and pepper spray of a bunch of protesters in St. Louis:
But Eddie Roth, director of public safety for the city, said the protesters provoked officers, showing aggression toward them and acting chaotically as officers moved in.
“It wasn’t police chaos,” Roth said. “It was demonstrator chaos — running into streets, yelling at officers.”
I’ve worked retail for almost twenty years. I’ve been yelled at, cursed at and threatened with physical violence. I had one person threaten to come back to the store and stab me. I’ve had objects hurled at my face on many occasions. Not ONE of those incidents resulted in me beating a person into a bloody pulp even though it was within my legal right to do so (the object throwing, not the threats). How pathetic that the cops can’t show the same restraint.
If being yelled at is all it takes to provoke a violent response from our police, this is going to be a very violent Spring as the protesters come crawling out of the woodwork. If we make to November with no deaths it’ll be a damn miracle.
St. Louis is a rough city. I know, I’m from that area. I know they have bigger fish to fry than a few protesters calling attention to the economic equality that has devoured everyone since the start of Reaganomics.
For instance, they have that situation just blocks from SLU that is Dodge City on Saturday night just about every night of the week. North City has some pretty nasty areas too. And we won’t even mention East St. Louis which is so bad it has a wall between it and the interstate..now that’s a real zoo. LOL They have ambulances with bullet holes in them. A person who worked in the ER told me she stood outside taking a break, listening to the gunshots and sirens and knew exactly how long it would be before the helicopters and ambulances started arriving and it would be non-stop the rest of the night. I doubt if that’s any better with budget cuts.
St. Louis Metro cops used to have some grit…not sure what’s crawled up their butt and died…oh yes, I do. It’s money..it’s always about money, my friends. OCCUPY was pretty much ignored or laughed at until they organized the run on the banks…then it got mean. Or that’s the way I remember the sequence of events….and they’re about to try putting more charges on. Their bottom line is the only place they have any feeling so they get mean when you hit them there. The boycott was the most powerful tool unions had because of solidarity…they could bring any company to its knees for being abusive. It was a consumer boycott on big abusive banks and it worked.
But remember what Ghandi said, “First they ignore you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” I believe that’s the right wording but definitely the thought.
We will win in November, because women don’t forget when you call them a slut…EVER, but these people are patriots and heroes IMHO and I wish I could stand with them. They don’t have to camp out and be abused. We can stay connected through the internet and hit em with boycotts…one at a time…just like that freak Rush Limbaugh who will fade into obscurity along with Glenn Beck. All it takes is solidarity…for all the people to stand together on one issue at a time…one target at a time and shut them down economically until they quit.
I’m an old hippie from the 60s…back when we thought we could always do better and be better. Our values were American values. And because we believed it we made it come true. We believed in freedom so much we wanted to share it with the world and make sure people had it here and look how many democracies exist in the world today. We believed that we were our brother’s keeper…and the entire world was included in that. JFK said we’d go to the moon so we did inventing everything from aluminum foil to microwaves to miniature electronics along the way.
We said we would no longer allow open racism and we stopped it…or we thought we did…people died to try to make it stop. We started the Peace Corp and started a war on poverty and hunger here that people were happy about….nobody wanted a child to go hungry here or anywhere in the world and if they truly didn’t care they wouldn’t dare say so openly.
We wanted all women to have birth control to fight poverty, save the planet and to save women’s lives. Women, the working class and the middle class all had a say in government and it was the greatest time our country saw since the beginning. Unions were strong and everybody was doing better including the top 1%…just in proportion.
What has happened to us? If we’re going to turn back the clock I want to go back to the end of the Vietnam war when we had fought through some serious nastiness among us to come out whole but before we all went to sleep at the wheel and let big money rape and pillage for a few decades….and then let them talk us out of the American values that defined who we were because they lied to us about who was guilty and we believed the lie.