Forum Post: Flashbangs, Cranial Injuries and the Symbols of Occupation

As diffuse demands, messages and images arise from the Occupy Movement(s), with media weighing in from pronouncing them as revolutionaries to deriding them as directionless hippies, I found, in this incident from Oakland no better symbolism.

For those that haven't seen the video (here) this seemed to me the best statement to capture the essence of Occupy.

It speaks to a chaotic scene, people left wandering through their environment as the dust settles from an economic crash. They look around in amazed curiosity to find themselves facing unemployment, being underwater and losing thier retirement due to economic problems that they did not cause. They have fallen behind, and have been for more than a decade, and those on the edge are facing foreclosure, unemployment and even homelessness.

It is an injury to their pride, to their sense of fairness, indeed to their very sense of reality, as their financial future and their children's future, is viewed through an eye stinging haze caused by outside forces that they can not control, nor can they easily identify. It is the realization that no matter the circumstances they are powerless over forces much greater than them, forces which they could not have fortold, forces which they do not see and are not easily understood.

And like many they ask for help, they turn to their government, their elected leaders for answers and a sense of understanding only to be told that now have to sacrifice because too much money has been spent. Their occupations as teachers, policemen or construction workers are no longer required, they face austerity, the many are sacrificing, their jobs, their scientific funding and their loss of social safety.

They are the many that are being sacrificed for the few.

And as their voices, muddled with the many, are not heard, a solitary voice states that, "we are more important, we must be saved" and the many learn that this solitary, unified voice is heard and that it is being rewarded with sums barely imaginable.

And just as this man, laying helpless, injured on the street is attended to, by what are likely strangers, those that recognize the injury. The strangers turn to police, the public servants, in desperation asking for help, to give attention to the injury, but are only met with faceless figures, standing in formation. As their cries for help go unanswered they are met, again by unforeseen forces, with a flashbang grenade and dispersant, but undetered they pull the man to safety as the faceless look

The symbolism is of course clear, faceless figures viewing chaotic crowds will not hear cries for help, for they do not understand the cries and instead interpret them as rage and within their judgements feel that they can only meet the rage with surprise and violence.