Some of us are old enough to remember the ‘60s and early ‘70s, however those younger are probably listening to under-educated and under-experienced journalists explaining what protest is all about, how legal, and how these current protests are ground-breaking. It is going to be a long-hot summer, so let’s get some history straight:
In 1968, the Chicago Democratic Convention protests in Grant Park were quickly re-classified as riots after the police deliberately charged protestors, flailing batons, beating and swearing at “peaceniks” and “pinko commies” as they did so. Thousands arrested, hundreds injured.
In 1970, Kent State University had demonstrations against the war in Vietnam for more than a week. The National Guard was called in and, completely untrained to deal with anti-war protestors, panicked, and started shooting. Four United States citizens, kids, were shot dead.
The Watts Riots were a disaster precipitated by a heavy-handed police action. The Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles escalated quickly into violence and destruction, unleashing more police with water-canons, guns, “rubber bullets”, and more. Result? Thirty-four dead, over 1,000 injured, nearly 4,000 arrests, and over $40 million in property damage.
And more than 3,000 protests back then involved civil disobedience, marches, rallies, and sit-ins, all directed against those associated with the furtherance of war and injustice. And every single one of these protests involved the police using weapons of their choice: batons, horses, vehicles, shields, arrests, violence, and, above all, incarceration often without any evidence of innocence except for what the media happened to catch. Of course, dead bodies on the ground at Kent State, and in Watts were proof someone had been shooting, but at the time the police and the National Guard always blamed the protestors.
How and why did these protests finally sway public opinion? The “malicious damage” done to shops and businesses initially spurred the forces of the authorities and egged them on to more violence. On TV the American public saw and learned of the carnage and did not buy the “pinko” story, ever.
Internal war in America is expensive. It costs the taxpayer money to support the overwhelming militarization of the police, costs insurance companies raising everyone’s premiums, causes the loss of profits for all of America’s leading commercial companies, and, never least, snarls up the courts and prosecutors with protestors’ cases instead of actually dealing with real violent crime. And, now with video being everywhere on every phone, recent cases of police and government masked Gestapo-like tactics against protestors will snarl up the courts even more.
We’re seeing police refuse to call ambulances for a woman shot in the head with a plastic police bullet, horses being used as battering and stomping weapons against protestors already on the ground, and more…
American industry will begin to see the cost soon, the economy will begin to tank, and hopefully sense can prevail to oppose these deliberate, and mostly, false raids against hard-working immigrants. Americans protesting, resisting, is not criminal.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
