There's a sorta counter-culture joke that if you remember the 60s, you probably weren't "there." I was, and I do.
And I gotta say, brutal aggressions inflicted on the peacefully assembled members of the OCCUPY movement, as municipal regimes of power endeavored to reclaim control of the streets and parks, curbs and campuses, seem to have been greeted with an outrage that, to me anyway, was unexpectedly both surprised and astonished. It had a tone that, it seems to me could only originate in youth or depraved indifference: Either the surprise is coming from someone too young to have experienced the counter-cultural revolution of the decade (@) 1964-74 with any meaningful cognitive acumen, or they are willfully, ignorantly in denial of it.
Cuz, of course, it's all happened before. I was there, though in my day, only the tear-gas was 'weapons'-grade,' not the pepper-spray, and the shackles were steel... From my own experience, I can attest that there is not much in the armory of justice like a steel-shod police horse urging you to move along, to disperse a dissident crowd, no matter how reluctant they might be...
I hate to actually refer to this again, cuz I feel like I'm doing the State's work by reminding you, but who remembers the killings of four innocent students at Kent State. You're spozed to. That's why they keep reminding us. A good photograph is easier to reproduce than a hung jury, on what now seems to have been an officer's premeditated order to open fire by the Ohio National Guard on an unarmed, non-threatening, DISTANT crowd.
A couple weeks later, it happened again at Jackson State U, in Mississippi, but in that case, of course, the victims were BLACK kids, so it got a LOT less attention, then as now. You could look it up...
Back then, they called out the Guard to do their dirty work.
These days, with the Guard at least partially still deployed in combat adventures overseas, that responsibility seems now to have devolved on the local and State cops. But that's okay, cuz with the apparently irresistible, probably irreversible infection of the civilian constabulary with the "Pentagon Syndrome," --that's the inter-penetration of the police systems with weapons, tactics, and ideologies all perfected in counter-insurgencies in wars of choice over the last 40 years, the mission of the civilian police departments in many--if not MOST--locales is either rapidly being, or already has been transformed:
From "Serve & Protect," to "Search & Destroy"!
There's nothing in the worst of us that isn't in the REST of us. Back in the '70s, a psychologist named Zimbardo, at Stanford iirc, conducted an infamous experiment which was instructive in this matter of power.
He created a faux-prison environment, and recruited subjects to perform either as guards or as prisoners. He informed the guards they were permitted to use ANY means necessary to enforce compliance from the prisoners. They SWIFTLY descended into savagery and sadism. The experiment was cancelled within DAYS, if not hours.
Thus proving, along with Milgram's study a decade earlier, at Yale, where he tested the limit of the willingness to inflict pain to achieve compliance, that our "inner fucking Pig-cop" is not far buried in any of us, and all we await is permission/reason/excuse to turn the fucker loose..
Put another way: Dress anyone at all in a cop-suit and their inner "fucking Pig" emerges almost instantaneously! Cops follow orders to commit mayhem in the name of order because it's their JOB.
I believe EVERYBODY, at some time in their live, and preferrably early enough to make a cognitive difference, should be seriously rousted by the cops, treated to the full script as a suspected "perp/skel." ("Okay, motherfucker, you know the drill: Assume the position and don't you fucking MOVE!")
By a "good" cop on a bad day or by a BAD cop ANY day.
TO also think there should be a draft for the police-force. Make EVERYBODY do it, like military service usta be. That way everybody gets tarred with the same brush. But that's speculation for another day.
Or when I see you at the beach, hippies.
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By the way, as you know, we're hip-deep in the "holiday season," and folks are thinking "gifts." If that's you, swing on by the WWH Company Store, and haul in a basket of WWH-tchotchkes to help assuage your incipient guilt.
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