“Authorized protests” and Other Dangerous Absurdities

By Patrick Van Gorder

It could have been taken verbatim from an Orwell novel, or from a George Romero movie. It could have been 1992 Belfast, or 1969 Prague, under the full weight of the Iron Curtain. But it was Pittsburgh, in 2009, with the Democrats in control of Congress and Obama in the oval office. For two days last month, Pittsburgh, my Pittsburgh, was transformed and fortified into a totalitarian police state.

Despite the shiniest brass and brightest stars of the international political community, mass civil repression was not a good look for the Burgh.

Under the pretense of protecting the world leaders meeting downtown for G-20 summit, 5100 police and National Guard from across the nation were brought in to police the generally peaceful streets of metropolitan Pittsburgh. They were armed with the latest, most effective crowd-suppression weaponry, and clothed in the most advanced, most ominous riot armor money could buy. Because We the People were footing the bill, no expense was spared.

Here’s the thing; they weren’t here to prevent a terrorist attack – that’s the job of the Secret Service and the FBI, and you can bet your ass they were in town too. The police were here to discourage protesters, and when necessary suppress them. And suppress them they did, dear reader, with gusto.

I understand that protests can turn violent, and that no one wanted a repeat of the 1999 Seattle WTO debacle. But let me tell you something about the protesters, the hardened cells of dedicated anarchists who were rumored in the media to be squatting anonymously in abandoned buildings, meticulously stockpiling their own feces and AIDS-tainted blood for deployment against the people of our city: they were kids. For the most part, they were passionate, idealistic, disenfranchised kids. A lot of them were University of Pittsburgh students whose crime was to be in the wrong part of their own campus at the wrong time. One Pitt undergrad was arrested for letting her fellow students out of the clouds of tear gas, into the safety of her dormitory.

I’m not saying that that there shouldn’t have been a police presence, but in this case the crackdown did not fit the crime. Despite all the hubbub, a paltry $50,000 of damage was done, almost half of it by one 21-year-old jagoff from California. This is a ridiculously small amount when compared to the millions spent by the city to stifle the protests. It also doesn’t quite justify the arrests, the manhandlings, or the pepper spray. It doesn’t justify the prolonged exposure of the protesters, journalists, and bystanders alike to the LRAD sonic cannon, a weapon designed for use against Somali pirates and Iraqi insurgents. Thursday was the first time it had ever been used on American citizens.

What I would like to know is why almost 200 people were arrested in essentially non-violent protests of the G-20, while only 68 people were arrested in the “festivities” following the Superbowl victory in February of this year. At the football riots, the crowds were much larger and much more destructive: I saw mobs rush police lines, tear down bus stops, break windows, start fires, even flip over cars.

What’s at stake here is larger than the tainted records of those arrested, or the shattered windows of Pamela’s Diner: what are at stake are constitutional rights central to the liberty that we associate with being American citizens. As those who were arrested for failing to disperse from what the Police labeled as “unlawful assemblies,” will testify, rights are not rights if they can be revoked when convenient.

We live in sophisticated and uncertain times, in a world rife with crime, violence, pestilence, and inequality. We need the police, to protect us from the coldblooded brutalities that people have always committed against one another.

But the strength of a society can be measured in its tolerance of dissent, and we need the protesters too, the radicals; we need the pacifists, the anarchists, the communists, the environmentalists, and all the other –ists that collectively compose the vibrant portrait of American intellectual freedom and expression. We need them to give voice to the voiceless, and as our President is so fond of saying, “speak truth to power.”
We need them out there to remind us that the world is far from perfect, and that there are more important things than Superbowl rings. We need them out there, fists raised rebelliously in the face of tear gas and billy clubs and sonic cannons, a defiant, flesh-and-blood measurement of the force we as a society are willing to use against our own in the name of security.

Email me at Patrick.vangorder@gmail.com