Berkeley witnesses a police riot.
This is the most well documented — tweets and photos — protest event I’ve ever come across.
As Howard Beale reminds us: “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” Yet the police are the ones who cross the line into violence. By design? Is this another problem/reaction/solution used to ratchet down the police state?
If so, we need to be very aware. Let us walk that fine line between allowing ourselves to express our pent up rage at long-standing, systematic injustice without crossing the line into violence. WE are the ones who are awake. Let us show the police how. Perhaps some of them will wake up and join us.
For it is this line, between the oppressed, and the hired guardians of the oppressors (who are actually from the same class as the oppressed!) — that must be breached. And once we dissolve that enforced, mind-controlled separation between “them” and “us,” the police state dissolves.
Excerpt:
Berkeley police apparently totally freaked at the prospect of a moderate-sized protest; instead of facilitating the protest they catalyzed it, and everyone is simply fortunate that no life-threatening injuries or deaths occurred because of their in explicable crowd-antagonizing tactics.
P.S. Here’s how yahoo.news framed the event.
3 thoughts on “Berkeley 1968. Oops! Nope. 2014.”
A couple of stories to mind. First back in the mid-70s I was in the process of going back to school to get an MSW. I needed to both get my GPA up and some more lower level sociology classes under my belt. I was enrolled in a criminology class at Boise State. One of my classmates was a Boise cop. We became friends and he told me that one of the reasons he got into law enforcement was that he saw a simple water fight turn into a riot in San Francisco because the police over reacted. He acknowledged that there were certainly a number of “pigs” in his own department and it was a challenge to try and keep things at a higher level of being at times.
In my disaster management years.. and training as an EMT I got to know quite a few cops. It is a tough job and I’ve seen them respond at time heroically. As an activist I’ve been arrested a number of times. I knew full well that the issues I was protesting weren’t of the cops making.. so I always purposefully… tried to not amp up the energy by antagonizing whoever was putting on the cuffs. When ever I got in a one on one situation, I always tried to dialogue. I would often counsel other arrestees to mellow out.
These are certainly different times, we need to protest injustice and environmental rip and rape… we need to be smarter than the adversary. I think in this instance of a lesson I learned watching birds fly into the wind. They seem not to fight it, but to read it and then move. The struggle certainly is on. The system is collapsing and with that is going to come chaos… learn from the birds… read it and then move.. to merely throw one’s self against may be of little consequence in the long run. ..
Thanks, Bill, for your astute reading of our past and current atmosphere . . .
This reminded me of an interview I heard of Leuren Moret regarding the use of UC Berkeley’s president, Janet Napolitano as a mechanism for overthrow of the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZMvhm6dns8 … I find it difficult to listen to her, but it’s good contrast info for what we don’t want …. so we can reject the global fascist plan in favor of something much better.
I don’t always listen to Alfred’s broadcasts, but this one seemed important. We are watching it play out now. Didn’t you find it curious that the DHS head got a job as president of UC Berkeley?