Sorry guys. Society need you to protect and defend their property against all of us ACLU lawyers, public school teachers, nurses, paramedics, and struggling housewives. Always remember - you are the "thin blue line' that prevents people like us from burning down our own neighborhoods.
When the fourteen of us arrived at the jail and were being processed, several cops gathered to ask us what we hoped to accomplish with all this foolishness, and by the way, couldn't we achieve the same objective without breaking the law? Did we have any idea how much money this was going to cost us? Did we realize how little difference any of this was going to make?
It was a bit like undergoing Psy ops conducted by a bunch of heavily armed junior high students with half a semester of behavioral psychology under their belts. But the most persistent question they kept asking us was "who are your leaders?"
"We have no leaders" we replied.
Their incredulity was palpable, even profound. "Do you seriously expect us to believe that you're operating over there without leaders? Who makes the decisions?"
"We vote on everything," was our answer.
At this point, I remembered something I had learned in the "60's, but had forgotten somewhere along the way. Cops, like career military, spend their whole working lives taking orders from their superiors and dishing them out to their subordinates. They really, truly, had no idea what we were talking about.
Later that morning, as I was being processes out, I had the pleasure of being subjected to the same sort of rudimentary "head games" by two overly officious and unnaturally sour-faced young police officers - one male, one female. They were like a couple of Imperial Storm troopers dabbling in Jedi Mind Control. Finally I could take it no longer. I asked them what THEY knew about the real issues at hand, and proceeded to launch into a 20-minute lecture on the history of civil disobedience in America, from the real Boston Tea Party, through Emerson, Thoreau, the Underground Railroad, and the Suffrage Movement, to the integration of lunch counters in the racially divided South of the 1960's.
I felt like a minor-league Jesus in a third-rate temple. The two cops I'd been talking to had, by now, grown into a group of five. They were all thoroughly gobsmacked. One blond guy looked like he was actually learning something.
The captain in charge just wanted me gone.
When the young man and woman in uniform drove me through the steel doors to release me 1/2 a block away from the jail (seriously) they told me how much they had enjoyed our conversation. I thanked them for being so accommodating, and walked off into the sunrise.
You should have been right there with me, O my brothers and sisters, throwing dangerous ideas around like roundhouse punches.
"It's a sad and beautiful world" - Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law.
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