Vindicated after 10 years.... Thom and I were among the 1800 people illegally arrested and detained at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. And, what was our great transgression? We were walking down the street looking like people that might oppose the megalomania of George Bush and Dick Cheney and we were scooped up, arrested and held in the New York City tombs for 24 hours + for parading without a permit. The carefully coordinated purpose of the arrests was, of course, to hide us away from the public eye and to remove any hint of opposition. A vast majority of Americans never even knew that 1 million + people had cared enough about what was happening to our country that we had collectively gathered to stand against the massive misinformation being fed the American public. Dont misunderstand -- as political activists, weve chosen in other situations to risk arrest and jail to call attention to injustices and abuses of power, but this was a totally different scenario. Those were carefully calculated choices. Here we had honestly done nothing but show up with a million + other people to voice our objection to the abuse of power of the Bush/Cheney administration. We had broken no law for which we could legally be arrested. Recall that the whole protest was over the Republican National Convention where George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were renominated for a second term. They needed the American public to think that there was little or no opposition to what they were doing. They needed the American public to stop thinking for themselves and just fall into lock-step behind policies that were designed to do nothing but line the pockets of the powers-that-be. And following repressive actions such as this one in NYC (and as a fellow activist wrote) the Bush/Cheney ticket then sailed through the fall 2004 campaign, without a discouraging word uttered about Abu Ghraib, torture, and the missing billions in shrink-rapped US currency reconstruction funds that magically vanished within hours of being off loaded at the airport in Baghdad. This is sweet vindication for one of the worst days in the history of what we were taught to believe was a democracy where freedom of speech was to be held sacrosanct. But is it enough to turn back the tide of repression against freedom of speech that is sweeping the US? Probably not, but its sweet symbolic vindication.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 03:11:40 +0000
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