OB Ragfreaks, uppity women & politicos
If the Occupy Movement is “as American as Apple Pie,” Why are Our Police Beating and Arresting Us?….and lobbing tear gas canisters and shooting rubber bullets at us?
“And so, demonstrating like this is as American as apple pie. We have been marching up and down and demonstrating throughout our history…” Former Secretary of State Collin Powell
Why is there the footprint of a jack boot in the America pie?
We’ve all seen by now the “the people’s” videos of non-violent women in NYC being surrounded with orange net and pepper sprayed by the police, the “the people’s” videos of a young Iraq War vet at Occupy Oakland lying gravely wounded from a police projectile and the “the people’s” videos of non-violent Berkeley students being brutally punched back with police batons. And we’ve seen all too many “people’s” videos of police in full riot gear advancing upon non-violent Occupy encampments all across the country. Add to that the accounts in the “alternative” media of occupiers held for hours in police vans and forced to urinate and defecate in those very vans.
If this strikes you as a gut wrenching, jaw dropping response to “American pie,” you are naively and seriously mistaken that the 1% and their loyal minions are going to right their wrongs against the American people without a helluva fight.
The fight is waged through their wholly owned corporate media and via their virtually wholly owned influence over the political sphere. It’s a sweet sweet deal for them that municipalities send out a paramilitary police force that is part of the 99%, funded with the tax dollars of the 99% to wage war against the 99%. The joke may be on us, but we are not laughing at this institutionalized sadism.
The corporate media is the iron hand in the faux velvet glove that exists to provide an Occupy movement narrative that frightens the citizenry enough for them to have their anxieties soothed by an excessive and aggressive police response. The initial response of simply ignoring the movement became impossible. There has therefore been a relentless attempt to paint the Occupy movement as “The Other”—dirty bongo playing hippies, smelly homeless, Marxists, anti-Semites, Nazis, exclusively white middle class people, the deranged, the dangerous, socialists, sexual libertines, the lazy, the drug addicted and poop smearers.
It doesn’t matter that the descriptions are contradictory. It does not matter that the descriptions are not reality based. The impetus is to throw everything up against the wall and see what sticks in the public consciousness.
The corporate elite are not capable—yet, of full control over the public consciousness. The people’s videos, the alternative media and social networks provide minute by minute real time reporting about what is happening. Those testimonies keep growing as the movement keeps growing. The repugnant and mendacious corporate media narrative that the Occupy movement does not represent the real America, and that the Occupiers are not real Americans dissolves with every video, alternative media report and Facebook post.
The question is not whether but rather for how long will the 99% accept calling in storm troopers against teachers, students, the unemployed, the homeless, the poor, those who have lost their homes, those who have lost their jobs, the old and the young, the union laborer, the retired librarian, the uninsured, and the races and ethnicities woven through all of those. We are not The Other. We are your neighbor. We are your family member.
We are you.
Tagged as: occupy
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