Thursday, November 17, 2011

So Did Mayor Bloomberg and Every NYCP Officer Play Hooky From Their History Classes?

Photo: The Occupy Wall Street library on Oct. 10.
Credit: Andrew Burton / Associated Press

One of the things that made it impossible for any of the attempted labeling of the Occupy Wall Street movement as a rabble of hippies, rioters, and bums was the existence of their library.  It began as a single box of books and grew through donations into over 5000. When the weather turned someone had donated a tent to keep them dry.

These books represented an attempt among the protesters to have a dialog on the issues affecting their lives and motivating their turnout, to educate themselves on some of the economic, political, historical and social roots of their various frustrations and sorrows.  The presence of the books represented the spirit of this movement as one grounded in rational thought, if also anger.  They symbolized their determined commitment to non-violence.

Monday night that library was raided and trashed by NYCP officers in the middle of the night in the rain.  They came in force of 100 or more and circled the library and proceeded fill a dumpster with the books.  Later a witness claimed to have seen them fed into a sanitation truck and crushed.

watch and listen as the crowd chants shame on you

This gives me the shivers.  It reaches deep into one of my earliest and most disturbing memories of watching WWII movies on TV as a preschooler and seeing men in uniform raiding homes in the middle of the night and throwing books out the windows onto a bonfire.

Scenes like this can only galvanize the movement, stiffen their motivation, grow their ranks.  I know that I'm feeling motivated and if there was some way I could join them, me and my white cane, we'd be there.

So that leaves me wondering What were they thinking?  Bloomberg et al.  All I can come up with as an explanation is that not one of them, from Bloomberg himself down to ever NYCP involved knows their history even as far back as their parents generation.  If they did, they would know, in their gut and very cells, how this play out once images of their thuggery were spread via the media--both the traditional and the social media.  They have entered the history books themselves now.

Won't their grandkids by proud?

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