Government-approved and -directed marches will always end in some shameful pen.
Subject: Saul Alinsky told us there'd be days like this.
Mayor Bloomberg's statement that free speech is a "privilege" which we could
lose, is a sad indication of the state of our civics education, and a
sinister clue to his political intentions. It is sad that he probably
believes it, and that, in spite of his ignorance of our rights, he has come
so far in politics. And it is sinister that he would threaten us with curtailing our rights.
Resident Bush and his merry imperialists have never been renowned for
brilliance, and their stupidity has landed us all in a heap of military
misery which promises to drag us down for years, but for once we can say
that Bush&Co are way ahead of this guy. The Patriot Act - which blatantly
aims at stripping Americans of their had-won rights and freedoms - was not
the product of minds unaware of the Bill of Rights and its implications,
but of authoritarians bent on destroying them.
From our government's actions abroad, we can clearly gauge their contempt
for democracy - kidnapping and overthrowing elected heads of
state, killing reporters and bombing the buildings they work in, shutting
down newspapers and forbidding the display of pictures of certain former
leaders, and indulging in midnight raids and imprisonment without charge. They write memos carefully trying to separate permissable physical stress from torture, and approving the use of attack dogs and sleep deprivation in the course of "interrogations." They push persistently at the limits the Constitution so deliberately placed on government abroad and at home.
With this behavior to reason from, it shouldn't surprise us that so many of
them have a jaundiced view of freedom here, too. The neocons' favorite
philosopher, Leo Strauss, is straghtforward in his scorn for the "masses"
and recommends rule through deception and manipulation.
But the peace movement has to take some blame for this. In their desperation
to prove their own loyalty and lawfulness, dissident political groups have
been all too willing to negotiate away their freedoms - OUR freedoms - with
little dictators like Bloomberg, seeking state-approved routes for protest
marches, and official approval for the use of public spaces. Whatever laws
authoritarians have attempted to paper over the Bill of Rights with,
permission to demonstrate is not theirs to grant or withhold.
Once granted the privilege of deciding where we may march, who knows what
abandoned industrial park or out-of-the-way alley they will find for us to
parade in? The results of such mild-mannered docility were glaringly
apparent in Boston, where the "free speech zone" was a dismal razorwire
enclosure, under some derelict construction, where protestors could neither
hand out literature, nor avail themselves of loudspeakers, nor gather in
numbers of more than a thousand - a paltry number compared to the many who
sought recognition for grievances unaddressed by either political party in
this crucial election year.
Saul Alinsky* told us there'd be days like this.
In Boston, that birthplace of freedom, the right of the people to assemble
was openly mocked. Now it is being talked away, its legitimacy denigrated.
We have been far too governable; we have been ridiculed, and we have been
silenced through marginalization. But FIRST we agreed to abide by their
dictates, however unfair. The mechanics of power always tends toward tyranny
- that was the lesson of Paine and Jefferson and the rest. Be careful as you strive for legitimacy: government-approved and -directed marches will always end in some shameful pen.
Adrien Rain Burke
* see Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals"
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>"One more such victory and we are undone."
>>– Pyrrhus of Epirus
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