The other night, my beautiful wife was crossing a Greenwich Village street; a group of Occupy Wall Street marchers had just passed by, peacefully chanting and carrying signs en route to Union Square.
My wife crossed on the green—and came within an inch of losing her life: A NYC motorcycle cop—chasing after the protesters—ran the red light at high speed. A slight move the wrong way and…
We are supporters of #OWS, horrified by the gross inequality and corruption in our system—though we haven’t walked the walk and marched (yet). At the same time, we’ve always been fans of the NYPD and Commissioner Ray Kelly, who have helped transform our long-maligned city into one of the nation’s safest. I believe we have an excellent police force, and that the overwhelming percentage of our NYC cops does a fine, honorable job. I have never had a bad experience with a New York City police officer.
But here and elsewhere—Oakland, most egregiously—an overreaction to OWS has unleashed authoritarian demons reminiscent of the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the dogs and hoses of Bull Connor. Perhaps a few bad apple cops are getting paid off by Wall Street; perhaps it’s the post-9/11 mindset, in which “security” sometimes trumps civil rights.
Or perhaps it’s because the spirit of social protest has been awakened after decades of post-Vietnam slumber, decades during which, beginning with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, a passive populace allowed “trickle down economics” to crush the national spirit at home, true “class warfare” creating today’s historic income inequality while neoconservative ideologues embarked on devastating misadventures abroad. And those who should have known better—Democrats, in other words—looked the other way, fearful of being branded “liberal,” a word twisted and corrupted to denote permissive, drugged out, anti-American, tree-hugging, promiscuous, baby-killers—oh, and they’re soft on defense, too.
Maybe it’s been so long since we’ve seen anything like this that our authorities can’t cope. They don’t know how to respond. Most of our cops and many of our public officials know nothing but a post-Vietnam, indeed, post-Reagan America.
What of the Tea Party? Well, it was stoked—perhaps even invented—by powerful moneyed interests, the Kochs and the ALEC types, who played on fear (as the Right always does)—especially fear of an uppity you-know-what with an exotic name.
Add the validation of a complicit media, and the fact that some of the Teabaggers brought guns to presidential events or spit on Members of Congress—including civil rights icon John Lewis—well, that was just Democracy in Action. OWS, on the other hand? That’s dangerous unrest. Even though the former represented an overhyped fringe funded by Big Money, and the latter represents a huge majority—99 percent, in fact—of a nation that just can’t take getting crapped on anymore.
How this plays out depends largely on what happens in November 2012. I am a Barack Obama supporter still—yes, I have disappointments, yes, I understand that he’s been too tied to the banks, and I wonder why, of all the capable, progressive minds who have passed through his administration, he’s hanging onto Wall Street insider Timothy Geithner.
But there is no other choice. To throw up one’s hands and say “they’re all alike” is foolish and misguided. Imagine Mitt “Corporations are people” Romney in the White House. Imagine he has an entire Congress dominated by the cold-eyed likes of Paul Ryan, defenders of privilege, apostles of crackpot novelist Ayn Rand and her vision of a winners-take-all-no-matter-who-gets-screwed America, wherein compassion and altruism are weakness. Or the Herman Cains, who blame the poor for their poverty. A reversion to the 1880s-1920s, when plutocrats perpetuated themselves from generation to generation, and upward mobility—the American Dream—was a myth.
If you think what we’re seeing now is “social unrest”—you ain’t seen nothing yet. OWS has been overwhelmingly peaceful—on the part of the protesters, at least. But if Washington continues to move rightward, if the Kochs and Alec and the top 1 percent of the 1 percent get their way, if their attempts to crush unions and suppress youth, minority and other Democratic-leaning votes is successful, if the anger, fear—and, yes, hope—of the 99 percent are met with nothing but the heel of a boot.
Then, I am afraid, there will be blood.
Daily Damocles 