Rising Up

I’m making an exception to my “no links to HuffPo because they are a repository for woo and wackaloonery that should not be rewarded” because this is important:

Jesse Kornbluth: The Police Riot at Berkeley: If They’ll Beat a Poet Laureate, Will They Kill a Student?

Go read it in its entirety before coming back here. Yes, even if you despise HuffPo as much as I do.

Nicole sent me that link, saying it made her feel sick to her stomach, and all but begging me to blog it. I haven’t said much about the Occupy movement, because there’s not much I feel I can say. I watch the raids roll across my Twitter feed, and I read some posts, and all I can think is that it’s happened before. People who say this isn’t our country, this land of riot cops and pepper spray and brutality, are really saying they don’t want it to be.

This is why the 99% are rising up. And this is what the 1% do when the unwashed masses rebel. They try to crush the resistance.

The thing they never seem to realize is, they’re helping more than hurting.

Every veteran at the protests who ends up in the hospital because of police violence; every raid by riot cops and SWAT teams clearing protesters peacefully engaged in petitioning their government for a redress of grievances; every attempt to keep the media from witnessing these First Amendment violations and state violence; every time passers-by get swept up and attacked by cops for the crime of walking too close to the protests; every time the state responds to its citizens with tear gas and rubber bullets and batons, breaking bones and bruising ribs and brutalizing; every time they do these things, they are furthering the cause. They are demonstrating the truth of what the Occupy Wall Street movement is saying. They are making the apathetic and unaware finally care about what’s happening to this country. They are making us angry. They are making us determined. They are uniting us, lighting a fire under us, giving us power.

This has happened before. Remember what they did to the civil rights movement, and the kids protesting Vietnam. This is nothing new.

But state violence didn’t work then. It won’t work now.

If they’d taken the bread-and-circuses route, treated the OWS folks with at least superficial respect, made some empty promises and some cosmetic changes, they could have murdered the movement at birth. But they chose to dismiss the people’s concerns, ridicule and then attack them. They chose to enrage rather than engage.

They’ll have to live with the consequences.

People can only be pushed so far. They can’t be milked for absolutely everything they’re worth without kicking over the can and taking over the farm. The oligarchs and their lackeys think they can raise tuition 81% to pay for lavish bonuses and other inane crap, and then attack the protesting students and teachers, without consequence, but they are wrong.

They can expect people to stay quiet when pushed so far, when physical injury is added to financial injury, but this is because they live in a fantasy world they created. The real world is coming for them. And it doesn’t care about water cannons and sound cannons and other tools of the police state trade. Not anymore. There’s not enough down, and too much up. The oligarchs made the mistake of creating a huge mass of people with nothing left to lose, and showing the rest of us that they’re coming for us next.

This Is What Revolution Looks Like.

And it is brutal, and ugly, but it leads to a finer world.

Because this land of oligarchs and raids and brutality, corruption and despair, isn’t the country we want. And we will take it in a new direction.

The more they try to stop us, the easier it becomes.

We are rising up. We will not be put down.

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Rising Up
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One thought on “Rising Up

  1. 1

    If they’d taken the bread-and-circuses route, treated the OWS folks with at least superficial respect, made some empty promises and some cosmetic changes, they could have murdered the movement at birth.

    If cosmetic changes would have gotten it done, we’d be there already. That’s been the Obama Administration’s modus operandi, when they don’t just outright screw us.

    Still, they could have gotten away a lot more cheaply than they will when this thing reaches its end. They could have gone back to the way things were in the 1970s economically. They could have accepted useful regulations on finance, non-profit insurance, and less hostility to unions. It would have meant some losses, but they all would have been fine.

    Now, I don’t think that’s going to be enough. What this turns out to be is anyone’s guess, but I doubt that people who are going through what the Occupy movements are going through will accept a state of affairs that could land us right back where we are now in a couple of decades.

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