This Is About More than Occupy Wall Street

You can agree with Occupy Wall Street or not.  You can agree that the banking system is fucked and still think that Occupy is doing it wrong.  You can completely disagree with both message and execution.  All of those things are fine.  But as of last night, you are no longer allowed to disregard what the behavior of the NYPD says about this country and who is running it.

Last night - in the middle of the night - Occupy Wall Street was forcibly removed from Zuccotti Park by heavy machinery, police in riot gear, and LRAD sound cannons.  A public police force, at the behest of the Mayor of New York City, removed people exercising their First Amendment rights from a private park, and the President of the United States didn't say a goddamn thing.

There are a lot of things going on here.  There is a larger question of whether a public park is appropriate to the exercise of First Amendment rights.  One might argue no, and have a legitimate argument; private property is private for a reason and vice versa.  However, we have begun ceding our public spaces to private control, and while this is a nice way to keep the maintenance of public spaces off the ledgers of local governments, it also means that we are ceding physical space in which we can exercise our rights as citizens.   Public spaces are accepted as a public good, but we rarely explain why they are a public good.  The Boston Public Gardens are lovely, but their virtue is not in the beautiful plantings or the swan boats.  Their virtue is in the freedom of the space, the communal ownership of the land, and the chance to simply be a citizen in that space.  If this is the good provided by public spaces, then we must either demand that private interests taking over the provision of public spaces maintain these freedoms or else refuse their generosity for our own collective good.

If we do accept these private/public spaces as private in ownership and control, then it is inappropriate to have public police forces managing them.  Allowing private citizens into an office building does not give the building owner the right to use the police as security personnel, and neither should allowing public citizens into a private space.  If the management group that owns Zuccotti Park wanted to hire private security forces to evict the Occupiers, it should have done that, and while the violence would probably have been worse, it would not have been a damaging blow to this country's civil liberties.  Instead, a police force went in at the direction of a Mayor.  Let us be clear: a government agency went in to shut down a peaceful assembly.

Had it not been the NYPD, maybe I wouldn't be so fucking angry.  Had it not been at Mayor Bloomberg's request, maybe I wouldn't be so fucking scared.  Maybe if there had been any nod towards the First Amendment's protections, I wouldn't be so fucking sad.

Some will say that the Occupiers did not have First Amendment protections in a private park.  This would be a legitimate argument had the NYPD not gone in.  It was not a private interest suppressing the Occupiers' protest, it was the government.  With the involvement of a police force, it becomes a matter of First Amendment rights' suppression.  This is, of course, all before we mention that the press were kicked out of the park and kept separate.  It's all before we mention that this went down in the middle of the night.  That tells me that the NYPD knew exactly how much a transgression of rights this shit was, because if they thought otherwise they'd do it in the light of day, in the light of righteousness.

Can we take a moment, too, to note that the NYPD sent in counter terrorism officers, closed down airspace over Zuccotti Park, and generally demonstrated that they have a fucking military policing New York?

And the President of the United States, a man who raised his hand on January 20th, 2009 and swore to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, has said nothing.  He has had five hours in a 24/7 world.

Shame on you, President Obama.  Shame on you for allowing this to happen without condemnation.  Shame on you for allowing our security state to expand and to turn on our own brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans.  Shame on every public official who didn't run to New York to stand with these people and shame on every public official who didn't make a statement decrying these actions.  I've spent so much time defending so many of you and reassuring people that you do mean well.  I've fucking had it.  Voting for everyone who isn't an incumbent isn't going to work; you're all fucking complicit in this.  You mark my words, you will force this nation into a civil war, against the work of people like me, people like your staffs, people who have advised and fought and rebelled against the slow slide you thought either wouldn't matter or wouldn't be noticed.  Fuck all of you, fuck your cowardice.  Fuck your goddamned tunnel vision, fuck your willingness to get so deep into politicking that you can't even do the right thing.  I'm exhausted and I'm fucking 28.  And you know what the sad thing is? I'm not exhausted by physical fighting or anything like that...I'm exhausted by trying to defend a country I love from the people running it.  Your time is coming; the world is waking up and by the time this is over, you'll be the ones exhausted.

Your Kid Brother is Watching You

I have a lot of concerns about Big Brother watching us through our ever accelerating technology, into which we pour our entire lives.  Even those who eschew Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (?? I don't know) and other social media must take extreme measures to truly get off the grid and out from under the eyeballs of various watchers - phones bounce off cell towers, credit and debit cards provide a map of our purchases, toll transponders note when we pass through on our way to wherever, surveillance cameras abound, electric bills lead to your home.  This all makes it ever easier for the government - or whoever - to keep tabs on us. 
 
However, it has also made us more willing to rat each other out, which may be the worst aspect of this rise of technological surveillance.  The Harvard Business Review just posted an article about people in Vancouver gleefully reporting their fellow Vancouverians via social media during the riots that followed Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  The police, not being idiots, and recently having some trouble with not being douchebags up in the True North, seem to be concerned primarily with the volume of reports coming in.  It's a little tough, because on the one hand, you shouldn't get up to criminal mischief and set your city on fire.  That's pretty clear.  It's dangerous and it's jerky.  However, it doesn't sit well with me for the police to be able to go back to a mob scene and pick and choose the people they want to prosecute.  Even if they see criminal activity, it seems like a fishing expedition. 

I think the thing that I find upsetting is the tendency towards wanting to rat each other out, and that this surveillance eliminates our ability to resolve things without the force of law.  David Brin had a nice post the other day about the idiocy of police whining about being videotaped, in which he said he failed to understand why good cops would need privacy to do their public jobs.  I think he only gets half of the problem, because the surveillance knife cuts both ways.  On the one hand, surveillance via cell phone, etc., can protect citizens against what unfortunately is a massive law enforcement population which includes some bad cops and some bad, prejudicial operational policy.  On the other, it leads to the kind of finking that is visible in the Vancouver article, and it also - and this is more important - removes the possibility of good cops stepping in to mediate conflicts and resolve them without arrests, which is what ties police to the community and fosters cooperation and good relationships.  Bad cops remove this option by creating a paranoia within the public that prompts them to film every police interaction, because if a good cop is filmed trying to help someone without following the letter of the law, there's a chance that the good cop's job could wind up at risk because politicians and pearl-clutching citizens are jerkfaces.

We're all in this together.  No matter what, we won't be living in individual bubbles of self-sufficiency any time soon.  To live together well, we need to drop our willingness to rat each other out for every little thing, and work to resolve all we can without the blunt instrument of the law.  Don't worry so much about arresting rioters who are acting foolishly - focus on making sure those who were causing actual damage and injury are prosecuted and on getting the drunken idiot brigade home and off the streets...and then let it go.  Don't get vindictive, don't persecute people for acting the fool, just let it go.  Stop ratting out your neighbors, even if it's as easy as checking your Twitter feed.