Once You Really Know

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I love the smell of tear gas in the morning. Well, not LOVE exactly, but reading about attempts to curtail and confine the Occupy movement across the country — most particularly in Oakland — sure brings back memories. Of course, back in the day, the establishment had yet to figure out how to render protesters deaf, dumb and moot with “kettling,” a herding maneuver that produced the holding debacle known as ‘Guantanamo on the Hudson’ during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Protesters were corralled out of earshot and eyesight of the event itself, with more than a hundred detained in wet and miserable conditions on New York’s Pier 57. Millions in reparations were eventually paid by the state of New York. Many believe we saw a redux of that maneuver on the Brooklyn Bridge at the beginning of the month, with more than 700 purposely directed into an illegal area where they were sure to be arrested. A class action suit has been filed.

This kind of crowd control was developed by authorities to handle the random outbreaks that protesting citizens have so rarely participated in these last few decades. At the end of the last century, occasional outbursts seemed to startle the establishment, which had been lulled by a population gone listless and compliant. As the public mostly disapproved of group activities that mainstream media described as mob-like, cop shops and city governments felt free to make short work of dissent. Keeping a lid on dissenters was a primary goal of government even before Homeland Security became touchstone for all national threats and increased the public sector by hundreds of thousands of employees.

According to a Kindle offering by Will Bunch, entitled October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge:

The trend actually began after 1999, when chaotic street protests against a World Trade Organization confab in Seattle rocked the Establishment; police departments responded with widespread use of a tactic called “kettling,” in which a blue wall of law-enforcement officers will surround a large group of protesters and let them boil in an enclosed “kettle” for hours; sometimes the demonstrators are arrested, and sometimes they are merely deprived of their freedom to move about. Either way, the goal is through discomfort (i.e., lack of food or opportunity to use a bathroom) and frustration to not only quell a current protest but to make citizens think twice about taking to the streets in the future — regardless of what it says in the Bill of Rights.

It’s astounding to me that so many people seem shocked that the police, representing a hyper-sensitive establishment, are quick on the trigger to use extreme force against perceived threats to authority. During Bush’s tenure, for instance, we constantly heard about approved corridors, holding stations and a no-nonsense approach to protests. The Bushies were extremely vindictive, arresting people for t-shirts they disapproved at public meetings and going after employees for bumper stickers. Leftie voices raised in complaint were uniformly ignored.

So this level of aggression doesn’t surprise or even particularly upset me, given the unchanging nature of the beast and its historical predictability, although the critical wounding of an Iraq Vet in Oakland is dismaying. What does piss me off is that not only are we funding this abusive behavior with our tax dollars, but there wasn’t a hint of this kind of activity at the Tea Party protests, not even a whiff of disapproval as participants went around showing off their guns and waving placards only a white supremacist could love. That is another indicator of the imbalance — political, social, financial — that we endure today.

Van Jones writes of the Oakland crackdown:

The Occupy movement is powerful, not because it is fighting for the rights of a few hundred people to sleep outdoors, but because it is fighting for the right of millions of Americans to sleep indoors. These excessive responses from law enforcement, from Atlanta to Oakland, not only violate the law, but take our collective eye away from the economic violence occurring daily in this country.

As the Occupy movement continues to pick up steam and credibility, the Republican leadership and pundits are quick to cry “class war.” Who do those rough, dirty street people think they are, attacking the well-bred and wealthy? They must all be lefties, of course, because no self-respecting conservative would be out there, attacking the “job creators.”

The sheer hypocrisy of class war accusations from the right should have been put in perspective when Warren Buffet affirmed that there WAS a class war going on and that HIS class — the super rich — was winning it. But never ever EVER expect a Republican operative to tuck in its tail in shame or pull back from absurd rhetoric; it simply isn’t in them.

The hysteria caused by rumors of class war has been an effective tool to fall back on for years, although it now appears to be a tactic that’s lost its bite. Anyone with a brain knows we’re deeply in class war, with 1% looking down on 99%, looking in. And I don’t think the Pubs understand that it’s no longer easy to divide the political camps when so MANY of us are suffering.

Meanwhile, the 99% are being joined by all those who are waking to the hopelessness of allowing the moneyed their recklessness. Public service workers, teachers, firemen and even cops have joined the protests, aware that the system is broken, that the bullies in the playground are stealing everyone’s lunch money, and that if WE don’t make it stop, no one else will. Mayors and city governments identify with the 99%. All colors and creeds recognize themselves as victimized for the good of a powerful few. Faithful America, a liberal non-denominational group I follow, offered a free bumper sticker that said, “Jesus is with the 99%.” Can I get an amen?

Even Mitt Romney was with the 99% for about fifteen minutes, and, as an aside, that’s something to take a closer look at. John Kerry lost an entire election over accusations of “flip-flopping” while Mitt’s numbers have stayed steady in the mid-20 range for two election campaigns. This is because Republicans constantly flip-flop. When they’re out of power, they’re against all the things they were for when IN power. It can’t get much more obvious, can it? And the very transparency we’re talking about, new to the sleepy-heads but old business to those of us holding the banners? THAT’s the gift that will keep on giving. Who among us can miss the constant drip-drip-drip of corruption and collusion and power, bought and paid for. We’ve ALL sustained enough pain and instability to no longer comfortably doze through our troubles here on planet Terra. What is obvious must finally be dealt with.

Don’t try to convince your conservative friends that they are part of the 99%. If they’re FOX friends, they’re sure it’s those pesky Democrats, at it again, trying to kill capitalism, further socialism, and topple industry. They see no common interests with street rabble: hippies and unemployed loafers and hand-in-their-pocket welfare cases. Why, there are reports that [long disbanded] ACORN is involved in this! And safely ensconced high atop the canyons of lower Manhattan, the movers and shakers of finance comfort themselves that they are being deviled by scruffy know-nothings and anti-capitalist stooges who are no real threat without money or power.

To all but those locked in their ivory towers, it’s becoming more evident, moment by moment, that the 99% are protesting not business but corruption, plain and simple. Not corporations but corporations gone rogue. Not the rule of law but of laws gone biased and stilted, configured to enslave and impoverish the little guy for the benefit of the masters — and the farther up the food chain you travel, the more even the masters look like “little guys” to the overlords. Every time I see turtle-impersonator Mitch McConnell or mean-spirited Eric Cantor or cynical John Boehner on television, I wonder how they’ll fare when their influence dries up and their handlers are through with them. And where it stops, nobody knows — unless we, the people, stop them.

What is becoming obvious to all of us can’t continue to survive the scrutiny of light. The scoundrels will be identified by their arrogance and inability to hear the voices calling up to them. And in these days of cell phone cameras and YouTube there aren’t nearly as many dark crannies for them to hide in. The tweets and the videos that drove the Arab Spring forward are making the American Autumn an equally visceral phenomenon, witnessed by millions across the globe, should they care to join in virtually.

So far, city mayors are swinging wide on these protests. Not all are cracking down and in fact, some are making the process easier with their cooperation. In other areas, police are [resisting pressure] to make quick or frivolous arrests, but as the protesters “wear out their welcome,” as one pundit put it, we’ll see where this goes. Most local authorities don’t want to be caught in the glare of public scrutiny, like Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who has now backed away from the stun grenades, sound cannons and tear gas. Perhaps the threat of a general strike throughout the city gave her second thoughts, or maybe headlines profiling the police brutality visited upon a young veteran of Iraq was sobering enough to make her rethink her priorities.

We are at a turning point in this fledgling movement, and if it is to continue to grow, it will have to begin to see itself differently. Up until now, the organic flavor of the gathering to witness the American Dream gone dim has served to pull us together, from all our different corners. Now it must morph into something else, something more specific than the Tea Party with its complaints about taxes, or the Christocrats and their singular push to deny a woman’s right to choose. We must begin to see the inevitability of this moment: what we know is that we can no longer remain silent in the face of a corrupt system. It must, it will, change to meet the people’s needs, or it will not survive.

Neale Donald Walsch recently sent a message about “knowing.” This is one of my favorite

concepts, this mirror within a mirror within a mirror. Hang with it awhile, if it’s new to you, because getting past the judgments that accompany each level is incredibly freeing. Here is the crux of it:

A wonderful teacher once opened me to the awareness that there are those who…

…do not know, and do not know that they do not know.

…do not know, and know that they do not know.
…do not know, but think that they know.
…know, but do not know that they know.
…know, but pretend that they do not know.
…know, and know that they know.

All of us fall into one of these six categories. So it is one thing to know, and another thing to know that you know.

Like everything else on this amazing journey we’re all taking, politics is spiritual in nature. It reflects our ethics, our understanding, our authenticity. There are things we know about this faltering system, the twisted policies that drive it, the people we’ve trusted who have failed us. For awhile, we knew, but didn’t know we knew. It was easier to pretend everything was all right. But now we know, don’t we? Now we know we know?

We will continue to peel back these layers to get a good look at what we have created so that it can be remediated in the name of the new Age we’re bringing into awareness. In the calm eye of this storm — the I of this storm — all of our fractured parts will come together, our voices will raise as one to build a bold and brilliant future. That’s what true (r)evolution looks like. When you really know, there’s no going back.