Forum Post: Something I found online about 11/17

21:52, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2011 Infra violence By Michael J. Smith on Friday November 18 09:52 PM

I've been pondering my mixed feelings about last night's OWS event at Foley Square. Might as well confess that I was a little disappointed that the crowd was so well-behaved. I'm deeply convinced that no real social change ever happens without some lawbreaking, and that stopping traffic is the very least you can do. But last night, a crowd of 30,000 people -- by some accounts -- allowed themselves to be squeezed onto the sidewalk, so louts in SUVs could continue to drive down Centre Street. Unfortunately, there seems to be a connection here to the union contingents. It's wonderful that the unions have come to the party, of course. But they really seemed to be in charge last night, and their recent history -- I mean in the last half-century or so -- and institutional culture are anything but insurrectionary. Full disclosure: It creeped me out to see all these SEIU types wearing T-shirts with the word 'MARSHALL' [sic] printed on them in big type. And at the narrowest point of the Centre Street sidewalk bottleneck, in front of the municipal building, one saw an extraordinary spectacle: a double line of these 'marshalls' lined up in front of the police cordon, and facing, like them, toward the crowd -- rather than toward the cops. Have I made the picture clear? It was like the 'marshalls' were the first line of defense against the crowd, and the cops were the second. I thought then, and still think, that there's something very wrong with this picture. During the tense ten minutes or so when barricades were getting kicked over and the cops were sweating big greasy smelly beads of coward sweat, there was a young chap -- not a union guy, I think; looked just like a regular mid-20s Occupier -- who did a 'people's mic' thing and tried to calm all us hotheads down. I can't reproduce his exact words, but what it came down to was that the right-wing media -- which is to say, all the media -- would have a field day if we got out of line. The kids are all right. But all of us, of course, are still dragging around various selections of mind-forg'd manacles. Among them, the fetish of law-abidingness, and the fear of backlash and bad press, are surely among the most burdensome…. http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/