Tags: real life
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2011 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
America 2011
Tags: real life
I know the guys in that video and I walk along that quad every day from my building to the bus stop.
Holy shit, Tim. I’m really sorry.
Serious question: why should I look at this and be outraged? Is the short answer that the students were peacefully protesting and the police used a really strong weapon? But I don’t even know what happened seconds or minutes before the video, and in fact I don’t know what they were protesting about.
Maybe rephrase it another way: if I show this to a non-American (who doesn’t have the world of politics, and the same automatic assumption of rights that we might have), and their reaction is to shrug, how would I express what a big deal this is? Is it a big deal??
Part of me resents that everyone who posts this assumes that I have an emotional reaction to it. When I look at videos like this, I sympathize with or think about how to communicate with skeptics of the conclusion that’s assumed by many people (liberals? OWS sympathizers? Democrats? Where do Republicans stand on this)
Just asking for bullet points, I basically want to agree with you probably…
You should look at it and be outraged because it’s a person hurting other people for no reason. It’s really as simple as that. You should be outraged when someone inflicts pain on another person. Suffering, deliberately inflicted, is an outrage. It’s amazing how far astray we go when we lose sight of that fact.
So there you have it. Don’t overthink it.
That said, there are a lot of things being demonstrated here about policing that are outrageous as well. Responding to a non-violent non-threat with violence, specifically by firing a corrosive chemical at point-blank range in someone’s face as easily as you’d spray your baseboards with Raid, is incredibly fucked up. I don’t feel bad about assuming that this is self-evident, on both an American constitutional/legal basis and a moral/human rights basis. But underneath it all is that we need to re-learn that inflicting pain on other people is an outrage.
Thanks for the quick answer.
Okay alright I won’t overthink it. It’s wrong to hurt people. But… I mean if I tell this to someone, they’re gonna say “sometimes you HAVE to hurt someone. That’s how society works. What is really going on in this video?” I personally think that’s a reasonable response! The main problem I have is perhaps that this video is often posted with little to no commentary. I don’t think the meaning is self-evident.
I’m not trying to pick an internet fight and I know you’re a man with convictions and I don’t hold you responsible for every commenter.
I mean hey, they should have just walked away instead of pepper spraying them. I’m just not mad at the police so much as I am the police system/relationship with the university/what is it? that demands strong action to accomplish the goal of moving students. Why put that burden on police officers? Who cares that the students were sitting there, enough to pepper spray them?
Insane world that this thing happens, where we have to intensely hold individuals (policemen) to do intense things, but I blame the world more than the police or the police force. Individuals are pushed away from making personal moral decisions and the RIGHTEOUS STANDARD (“students must not sit here,”?) is elevated.
And in the end, the police left, right? That’s good, right?
I really appreciate the way you’re probing at these things, Anon, for real. And I have a very long post coming up that addresses many of these issues. But to answer your final question, absolutely. The end of the video is as inspiring as the beginning is awful.