I hope to edit down my footage from the Chicago NATO protests of May 17-22, 2012 over the next few days, releasing sections as a serialized documentary as I learn how to edit. So please, check back in every day or so until the story is told.
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Tags: Chicago, NATO, occupy, occupy boston, occupy chicago, occupy wall street, protest
This is good stuff. Thanks for posting it. It’s like i could sort of be there for a half an hour, and taste the flavor of the whole trip. I wish i could have gone, but i’m the type to stick around home if there’s work to be done, but i am grateful and proud of people who went. Now i am focused on urging us to not just get “free” of charges but to go on the offensive and sue the police, under Section 1983 — within one year of the wrongful arrests or violation of civil rights. I wish to fucking hell that someone told me about that after i was arrested in 2001. What the fuck? Like we had the NLG and the ACLU and a half dozen other pro bono lawyers, and NOBODY thinks of suing the cops for tampering with evidence and bald-faced lying on police reports, and judges setting bail at clearly punitive amounts? Seriously folks, wake the fuck up, i must yell to those people 10 years ago. So NOW, i get to be that person, and YELL to all the people around that we don’t rest once we get cleared of ridiculous charges. We sue, as a deterrent, and to gain money for the movement. We put all the money beyond clearly personal expenses and maybe a bit more if a person has suffered life situation damages, but the rest we put into the movement’s coffers and grow. They will learn that, like Godzilla, whenever they strike against us, we grow stronger. Or else, we prove the fucking lie of the “justice” system — either way, it’s forward movement. Thanks for the videos, post more.
By the way, seems like we keep talking about the same things over and over — the nonviolence versus violence, and “are all cops bastards?” We have dogmatists on either side of each question, but we need to ask, “What works?” We need something between Gandhi and Ward Churchill… because the truth really is between those poles. Pacifism is pathology as Ward Churchill polemicizes it, but the urge to destruction is also a pathology. Always be strategic, and always ask the perception from various standpoints, and really, you have to play it like chess. It’s not less complex.
I would like to add my two cents: the authorities are hell-bent on pushing this movement towards violent confrontation because they feel that, in an end-game scenario (to use your metaphor) it will benefit them.
I hope that it never, ever, comes to a real violent confrontation because this signifies the beginnings of a civil war.
With that said, the people have a right to self-defense.