How is it that so many can cling to the illusion that cops and soldiers -- grownups, armed with deadly weaponry, and who have shown themselves willing to engage in acts of state-sanctioned violence and oppression -- are innocent victims of circumstance? Have we, in this nation, lost the concept of free will?
How did the perspective of a people become so upside down that heavily armed, body armor-enswathed men and women wearing uniforms of state power are viewed as blameless innocents while those they perpetrate brutality against are somehow regarded as the aggressors in the situation " deserving of the violence inflicted upon them?
Let's have a reckoning with reality regarding the nature of the forces coalescing against OWS and other global movements aligned against despotism: Authoritarian personality types detest the sight of freedom; its inherent uncertainties make them damn nervous. By reflex, they have a compulsion to lower a jackboot on its neck.
Or, in the words of one officer tasked with the duty of stifling the public's right to free assembly at a recent OWS protest staged at the Winter Garden atrium of Brookfield Properties, within the World Financial Center located in lower Manhattan, "Don't get in my face. I have a gun on me, okay? I don't want any people coming that close to me."
In acts of social and civic resistance, regardless of whether one evinces a Gandhi-like position of nonviolence or adopts a Malcolm X-influenced stance of "by any means necessary," the enforcers of a corrupt authoritarian order regard any and all displays of dissent as an invitation to force dissenters face down on the pavement, zip-cuffed and bleeding, then be remanded into custody -- or worse.
At this critical point, it is imperative we let die our illusions involving the present order. Yet we must do so without becoming so disillusioned that we lack the resolve to remake the world.
Often, we cling to fictions involving the benign nature of power because the act spares us angst. To the contrary, we must bear witness to the collisions of our illusions and the realities of the day, because it is from the debris created by these collisions that the world will be built anew.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard
living in New York City. He may be contacted at: Email address removed.
Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499
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