We – Kevin Ecker and I – were standing about fifty yards behind the police line with about eight other civilians, most of them with cameras. Most of the other civilians had obvious signs of non-GOP sympathy; T-shirts, buttons, whatever. I kept my own beliefs pretty quiet all afternoon while wandering among them; I certainly kept my AM1280 ID badge in my pocket. I figured discretion is the better part of valor thrillseeking.
A couple of cops in military uniforms walked up from behind and asked us to move north off the bridge and back off the street. The ten or so of us turned around and started trudging up the hill.
A lingerie-model hot woman with a digital SLR quipped “so it’s a police state!”
I’d been listening to this crap all day. I couldn’t take any more.
“If this were a police state”, I said just loudly enough for everyone to hear, “the protesters would already be dead”.
They didn’t really talk with me anymore.
Yes and yes. It is my fervent prayer that these brave soldiers, these lonely voices in the wilderness, would at some point live in an actual police state, and then write an honest compare and contrast essay on the US and said police state.
For instance, “What happened on my Iranian Summer Vacation when I tried to start a Bahai congregation in downtown Tehran.”
Or, “My anti-China march in Tibet”
Or, “My experience telling people about Jesus in a Saudi Arabia shopping mall”
Or, to go back a spell, “What Happened When I broke into a Baath Party convention in 1985 and denounced Saddam Hussein”
and so forth…
I kept my own beliefs pretty quiet all afternoon while wandering among them
As if they wouldn’t recognize The OAO Mitch Berg.
This excluded middle stuff continues to bother me, whether it’s coming from the right or the left. It’s entirely possible — and seems increasingly evident to me is the case — that there was serious, and downright albeit marginally authoritarian, overreaching by the authorities in all of this.
And worse.
Some specific reports by people I disagree with politically but who I have no reason to think are liars about things that they said they witnessed are either lies or crimes against them, by folks with badges and guns.
I guess I could give examples, but I’m increasingly persuaded that this is the wrong crowd for that, alas.
That said, sure: in China, protesters would be taken out and beaten or shot. No protesters were taken out and shot; only a few were beaten. Yay.
So put it up on your blog, Joel.
There are plenty of law-and-order Conservatives who are troubled by police excess and are interested in what you have to say. This doesn’t strike me as that sort of situation.
Maybe it’s just that l-a-o-c’s typically see a difference between people who get into trouble while minding their own business versus people who go looking for trouble and find it.
I can’t prove objectively that St. Paul isn’t a police state, but if anecdotal evidence has any value, well, I never got tear gassed once all week long . . . neither at work in my office doing my job nor while at home in Como Park, not even while shopping at Cub in Midway.
Anybody who got tear gassed was either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was looking for trouble and found it. If they’d been CCW holders who ended up having to shoot somebody in a dark alley in a bad neighborhood, wouldn’t you be one of the first to say “Why did you put yourself in that situation?” Same logic applies here.
.
I guess I could give examples, but I’m increasingly persuaded that this is the wrong crowd for that, alas.
Well, no. As Joel Hodgeson once said, “the right people will get it”.
Let’s see examples; I’d be interested in seeing what you have, here or on your blog.
I’m somewhat disturbed at the reports that the cops grabbed people who were down, ripped off their goggles and gave ’em full-body macings. If true, tt seems excessive.
Beyond that – behond the occasionally questionable acts of individual cops, really – what was the overreach. An overlypunctilious interpretation of parade permit rules? Perhaps, but I’m not sure where it violated the letter OR the spirit of the law.
I could use those examples.