Look at this video of a student at a Kerry rally. This happened today. He's being a dick. He's asking an overly-long, dickish question. For the horrible "crime" of being a dick, he's then carried away by five cops, pushed to the ground, and tazered because he keeps asking why he's being arrested. Of course, he's not being arrested. He's being assaulted. His attackers just happen to be in uniform.
Nobody seems to be doing anything about these blatant examples of state repression of free speech. This guy has five cops (perhaps just University security, which is even scarier) pile on to him, tazer him, and then carry him away somewhere. Yes, he was acting like a bit of a prick, but that's not illegal. If any country in the world would defend your Right To Be A Prick, I'd think it would be America. What's truly frightening, though, is the room full of people who just stood there and watched. The ones who were taping were kinda sorta doing something, but everyone else was just sitting on their asses. I have lost all respect for Senator John Kerry as of today, because he just calmly carried on. He might have been answering the guy's question, which is a back-handed kind of respect, I suppose, but if he had any decency whatever, he would have told those cops to stand the fuck down. I'm horrified and disgusted.
But I'm too old to be surprised. I was too old to be surprised when I was 22 and the RCMP pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters at UBC, or turned the water canons on more peaceful protesters in Montreal. Or when the US government started 'disappearing' people, Americans, Canadians, and yes, Iranians and Iraqis. But this kind of horrendous shit has been going on forever. My country, America, Britain, everyone. Everyone. Everyone has been doing this forever. What rules of freedom and civilized discourse we have are written on pieces of paper that we hang on the wall, some are even etched in stone, but in the end, despite what I do for a living, those pieces of paper mean fuck all when five cops have you on the ground and are threatening to tazer you for asking why you're being arrested.
Posted by orion at September 18, 2007 11:18 AM