Tag Archives: Protest

(Dis)order and Witness

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Since the Occupy protests began, I’ve been struggling with what is so objectionable to so many people about protest.  Perhaps I am as pinko as my former rector, Matt+ says I am, but I’ve never found protest in itself to be ugly.  Between my own limited experience and the research I’ve done, criticisms of protests of most sorts are entirely wrong.  Wrong in tone, if not substance.

In this age, we remember fondly the Civil Rights Movement and its champions; exalting the pain they endured while, even now, some thugs continue to spit in their faces.  The associations with violent protests are told as bogeymen, haunting safe, suburban America.  A dozen protestors threw rocks!  It was chaos!  The American way of life was under siege!  We had to respond with tear gas, rubber bullets, tazers, and batons!  We had no choice!

Even our 21st Century protests have been incredibly orderly and peaceful, turning ugly only after riot police get involved.

As I wrote the other day, I was moved, not by the thought of Bishop George Packard getting involved in Occupy Wall Street, or the image of his going over the fence or his being arrested.  I was moved by the image from Twitter of him in handcuffs surrounded by these really normal people.  On his face is an expression of listening and of knowing.  It really was the image of Christ in our midst, struggling to help us break free from the bonds of our culture.  This bishop, the quintessential image of churchly order was sitting in our image of civil disorder.   The profundity of Christ in our midst, in Advent, left me utterly speechless.

There is something really telling about the American condition, particularly the pernicious Protestant work ethic, so constant and domineering, that demands greater efficiency and respect for a person’s work (but not necessarily their character, gender, DNA, or existence).  We are perpetually worried about the impact of civil action on our personal lives in the form of inconveniences, but rarely give a thought to those that are real grievances.  When a person blocks the sidewalk, we are thrown in a tizzy at them for the small inconvenience they have made for us, but the condition that places them there: be it poverty, desperation, hope, or perhaps providence: well, that can’t possibly be our business.

The federal and state governments’ use of protest zones and most city government’s use of armed force to remove people from public property are signs, not of any liberty, but of a preference for order.  The clockwork movements of people getting to work and meetings is orchestrated to maximize our profit potential.  None of this allows for spontanaity or holy intervention.  There is no opportunity in these highly efficient pathways to power to allow for Christ to be among us, to surprise us unawares.  We would, no doubt, have our heads down, anyway, unable to see His face, even when three feet from our own.

The real tension the Occupy protests have revealed, and it is fitting that many have moved to housing occupation; giving voice to the issue of bank foreclosures.  This is particularly revealing, not simply the banking practices and our own indifference to the financial health of our neighbors, but to the very concept of people being removed from their homes.  The very image of people being relegated to the street.  And once there, the city can round them up and deport them from downtown, sweeping these Christs away like the dust we all are.

[Featured Photo: Bp. Packard (Andrew Burton - Reuters)]

The excuse of fear: “nonlethal” force and the powerful

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In the week between when the world discovered Sgt. Shamar Thomas, some dudes went crazy.

The viral video of an Iraqi veteran chastising the New York police department for arming up against their own civilians as if it were a war zone was a wake-up call to the sleeping public.  These public protesters aren’t impudent and dangerous people.  The #Occupy movement is no mob.  Since the massacre at Kent State, we’ve watched the tug-of-war between protests in the U.S., which by world standards are about as dangerous as mimes pillow-fighting, and police sent out to defend the public.  When protests have gotten ugly what is revealed is the fear on the part of city officials to handle disruption.  The wrench in the machine is the most frightening thing.  They argue that it is about public safety, when it is about eliminating disruptions.  Gotta keep the trains running on time!

Sgt. Thomas preaches understanding to cops who have just man-handled protesters and, as you can see in the background, new cops come out wearing riot gear, and were moving in again.  But these words of his are the most chilling:

“They don’t have guns!”

Stop and think about this.  Get rid of your own visions and the idea of big crowds of people and just remember this one thing: these people aren’t packing.  Nor are they planning an assault on an enemy compound.  They are just people.

He asks why the police insist on beating up the unarmed citizens of his neighborhood and declares

“There’s no honor in this!”

If you haven’t seen it, watch it now.

This became a further stunningly gruesome reality in our country on Wednesday morning in Oakland. The indelible vision of unarmed protesters, attacked with rubber bullets and chemical weapons.  After cops had driven people out of the park, they tried to go back in, only to be further bombarded by tear gas and flash bombs.  The scene escalated to this widely circulated video.

I don’t envy the cops, or even the police force itself.  A few bad actors have abused their power in these protests, but it is these mayors and chiefs of police that have planned these engagements.  They have employed “nonlethal” force as some excuse that seems to say “well, we didn’t actually kill anybody” when the anybodies in question are unarmed civilians.  We only physically abused them, cracked a skull, pepper-sprayed them, and harassed them incessantly!

We cannot escape the power differential: that one group is prepared for war and the other is calling for peace and equality.  The irony should be lost on no one.

I don’t care where you are politically, but the sight of the brutality in Oakland is gruesome.  There is no honor in this.  There is no defense for this.  This is where the powerful, but morally weak run to when they are afraid.  Violence upon the powerless and morally just.

If we ask but one question: Of what are they afraid?  These people have no weapons.  They are sleeping in tents and marching to banks to close their accounts.  They are singing and protesting.  Of what are they really afraid?

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© 2011 Drew Downs.  All rights reserved

Puritans: why Wall Street wasn’t occupied sooner

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The corner of Wall Street and Broadway, showin...

Image via Wikipedia

or #OccupyWallStreet and our fear of protests

A favorite line over the last two weeks has been:

I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.

Of course it did, but the media doesn’t really like protests.  It is surprising since the news is all about sensationalism and big displays of strangeness and upsetting the status quo.  It’s just they don’t like protests.

Protests get covered, sort of.  But not with any gravitas or with any respect for the subject matter.  The protestors are treated as political and intellectual lightweights. Which brings us back to my earlier statement: protests did happen sooner.

The 1999 protests against the WTO known as the Battle in Seattle became the first massive, highly public outcry against corporate excess in recent times.  Similar, larger protests were scurried as world leaders sought to shield themselves from public outrage.  Even when over a million gathered to protest the coming 2003 invasion ofIraq, the media continued to suggest that there was virtually no public opposition, a statement echoed years later despite continued, regular protests across the country.

The only logical conclusion that can be made is that we don’t want to envision the U.S. as a place that has protests.  Think about our view of protests in other parts of the world:

  1. We like protests in Lybia and Egypt because we want those places to be more like we are.
  2. We don’t like protests in France and Greece because we think they are spoiled and need to get off of their asses.
  3. We ignore our own protests because…

Well, there’s only one answer, right?  We think we’re above them.  We think protests are common, low.  We believe that those engaging in protest are somehow trying to use a shortcut to achieve undeserved ends.

It is our puritanical roots, really.  It is the Protestant work ethic run amok alongside the WASPy demand that everybody stay calm and not get too riled up.  Everybody chill!  Let’s all just calm down and we can talk about this reasonably.  Officers, escort these kindly young people to the “executive suite” where we will pinch their cheeks and say “Awww!  Aren’t you cute!  If only you understood economics!” Now, if we could only get the schools to properly prepare our children for the realities of corporate profiteering and disaster capitalism!

The media doesn’t think we want to hear or see protests of any kind because they are seen as unseemly and outside the regimented democratic process.  That’s fine for toppling dictatorships, but almost “too” democratic for our slightly-democratic republic. 

Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz, after speaking to the crowds on Sunday described the lunacy of having to have his remarks passed out verbally throughout the crowd like the game of telephone because he wasn’t allowed by the police to use a megaphone—the basic tool of communicating to a crowd of people.  The point he made was that we have incredible liberty when it comes to most of what we do, but incredible restrictions on our ability to protest.

The sooner we realize that protests like Occupy Wall Street are more an outgrowth of democracy, particularly with its egalitarian and network-driven grassroots leadership, than any attempt to bargain behind closed doors with corporate leaders, the sooner we might realize an embarrassing truth about our country:

Other places just might do democracy better.

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