At
mid-evening, on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the
occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD ~ because the
department suffered no ill consequences from their search and destroy mission
launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty Square of liberty ~
initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS activists from the premises,
and to discourage, in general, those who might venture attempts to exercise
their right to free assembly and free expression across the whole of the city
of New York as winter proceeds into spring.
In
a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the
behest of privileged bullies in power, act by caprice and will escalate their
level of brutality by the degree that the public at large reacts with support
and indifference to the state’s assaults on civil liberties and common decency.
Bear
in mind, police agencies, devoid of oversight, comprise a legal form of gang
activity; therefore, when one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as
outraged protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of “shame,
shame, shame” ~ rather than experiencing feelings of remorse, brutish
individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.
Why?
Because
they view OWS as a rival gang ~ not a force of democratic passion and outrage.
The
defining creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own
survival by the modus operandi
of violently crushing perceived rivals.
If
rank and file police officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this
event will have come to pass because the institutions of power that direct
their actions (and that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse.
Anything
you can do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of
exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international superstate will,
in turn, prove helpful in achieving the goal of ceasing the brutality inherent
to the U.S. police state.
But,
and I hope I’m wrong in positing this dismal augury, there will be much blood
lacquering the pavements of the city of New York, and scores of other
municipalities, worldwide, before that day arrives.
At
our best, as a species, we human beings use our minds and imaginations to bring
less suffering to the world; at our worst, we use said attributes to rationalize
causing so much of it.
Although
not widely acknowledged by mainstream opinion shapers, the struggle to retake
the public commons by activists facing hostile local municipalities and their
police enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind’s destruction of the
ecological balance of the earth are related issues, of which the implications
extend far beyond the political realm.
The
unfolding of these matters determines how you spend your days…from when you
rise in the morning, to what you eat, to which locations you proceed during the
day, to when and how you sleep at night…right down to the state of your health
and the condition of your soul.
To
those who proffer the excuse, “in my heart, I know you’re right, but I have to
be a realist about this”: you’re letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely
frame the matter. Given that the heart is more than a pump ~ it is the alpha
and omega point of the soul of the world; i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are confused regarding
the nature of reality.
Moreover,
you sound like George F. Babbitt…giving a book report on Hannah Arrent’s
conception of the banality of evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and you have
missed the point. Apropos: Evil is maintained by mundane means, by people who
see themselves as normal and who live ordinary lives
And
it seems to be what you’re actually trying to express is closer to the
following: I feel overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it
makes me feel uncomfortable, so I’ll just accept the matter, maybe grouse about
it a bit, but I’ll continue to accept the small comforts the system proffers and
I’ll hope that will serve as balm to my empty, troubled soul.
The
Cartesian fallacy that one’s joy and suffering are almost exclusively a private
matter ~ the idea that the process all takes place in one’s own mind and body
and has no connection to any larger order ~ has diminished perception and has
stressed the environment to the tipping point.
This
is the dismal litany of Industrial/Commercial Age false consciousness: the
paramount function of the intellect is to reduce the vast and proliferate
criteria of life down to the “bottom line.”
But
anyone who posits the concept that life can, and should, be reduced to only
self-serving, mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th
century death camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present day analogs
of Auschwitz: the so-called industrial “farming industry”; the practices of
deep sea “fishing” by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world’s oceans); deep
water oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds
an analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police
forces.
Yet
the agenda of the corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve
and expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace
alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals
hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction.
Withal,
the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement
from the very acts that maintain one’s culture necessitates the construction of
an imprisoning wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality.
To
awaken to reality is to suffer ~ allowing oneself to experience feelings of
despair, powerlessness, and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because
emotion engenders motion.
If
witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs
(a device that by its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and
transported to jail on trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then
your absent soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party
with Adolf Eichmann.
To
express indifference or to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time
is reprehensible.
Like
the “good Germans” of the 1930′s, you might believe your codified hatreds and commoditized
longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the state, will
deliver and preserve freedom…but these beliefs, maintained by systems of
mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold dear.
How
can an individual gain a modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and
for those brutalized by the operatives of state oppression when he refuses to
gaze upon his own degraded condition?
At
this point, the awakening of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative.
Even if you don’t quite know where you’re going at first, by moving in the
direction of what your heart yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who
you are. Thus, you wander off the banal path of empty obligation and
self-serving rationalization ~ then, even in moments of doubt and confusion,
you can make a home in being lost.
“Show
your wounds,” exhorted artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets
tell us.
Pain
and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order to
give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.
You
can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal
farce that assigns you the dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed.
The
earth’s song, at this juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred
vehemence.
This
song needs you to lend your voice.
And
I submit this lyric as the song’s refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the
less than inspired acts of our men and woman uniformed in blue: “Our rights do
not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins.”
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