(Note: the above photo was taken by a colleague of mine at the Wake student magazine.)
The Republican National Convention kicked off this school year with a bang, and the first weeks of the semester were saturated with talk of police brutality, journalists being arrested, anarchists throwing benches through bank windows, and so on. I only participated in a small way: I wasn't tear gassed or arrested and I didn't see any of that happen, because my friend Kris and I went to St. Paul on the first day of the convention, when things were still relatively calm. We saw people wearing black and bandannas over their faces marching and yelling "Whose streets? Our streets!" but we mostly just wandered around, people-watching. We did carry signs supporting Obama and universal health care--and got the finger or belligerent comments from a few passersby--but we were pretty separate from the main protests, which were mostly anti-war and far-left-leaning.
I know people, mostly student reporters who are my classmates in the journalism school, who were tear gassed or detained by police. But until I saw Unconvention, a "mixtape" that pieces together various independent news sources' footage from that week, it didn't really hit home just how scary and intense it was, and how close Kris and I came to getting in trouble. We were completely peaceful and tried to avoid angry clusters of people, but the film showed people getting pushed around and/or arrested just for sitting in a park, or "crossing police lines" by stepping off a curb. A woman told a story of how her fellow journalist was shoved to the ground, injured, and arrested simply for videotaping other people getting arrested. Just before we left St. Paul that day, we were walking near a large group of young anarchists marching with a yellow "Don't tread on me" flag. Footage in the film from that day showed what looked like that same group running in terror as police threw tear gas canisters and marched along in their riot gear. If we hadn't peeled off from the group and gone to catch the bus back to campus--it was hot and we had been there for several hours--we probably would have been in that group. We could easily have been caught up in one of the mass arrests of huge groups of people, just because we happened to be there.
Though I'm sure there were arrests of people who were being legitimately violent, the police brutality shown on film seemed almost completely uncalled for. I don't know how police are trained or what the riot cops were specifically told for the RNC, but it seems to me that tear gas and pepper spray should be used only if necessary, not on peaceful protestors or helpless individuals like the girl in this video. It sickened me to think of how the entire debacle has more or less been forgotten. At least the Republicans didn't win, but that doesn't change the horrible conduct of police and local officials who denied that such things were going on.
The screening of this film (at the film fest) really got interesting after it ended and the director stood up for a Q&A. Legitimate questions about his filmmaking process quickly deteriorated into a shouting match between him and three or four extremely loud and belligerent older men, all of whom seemed to be extreme leftists still furious about the RNC. Which is understandable, but they attacked the director and his attempts to be balanced and find "assholes" on both sides of the issue, seeing that as disrespectful to the protestors and too kind to the cops. The director admitted that he did not take part in the protests at all, explaining that he wanted to be as unbiased as possible in making the movie. But that wasn't a good enough explanation for the angry audience members (who did seem to be a vocal minority, judging by the eye-rolls and amazed laughter of the people sitting near me and the attempts to shush the shouters). They saw his film as trying to interpret and sterilize a hugely significant event that to them remains very personal and painful. I'm sure the horror of being shoved around by police, tear gassed and pepper sprayed, arrested and (in some cases) charged with felonies doesn't go away overnight. Despite that, though, I can't help wishing I'd been more involved in the RNC. I wish I'd been marching proudly with some of those protestors, that I'd learned firsthand what it's like to be tear gassed. I'm almost never in the thick of things, just as I wasn't actually at the riots last night. I have my own stories of the RNC and I recognize its importance, but it could have been a major event of my college years and my life. Instead, all I have are other people's memories.
No comments:
Post a Comment