#J28 was an all-around shit show
Almost a week later, I have finally had time to respond about what happened in Oakland last Saturday.
I said that morning that I wasn’t going to go to any protests. It will be uneventful, I thought. But after looking on Twitter and getting text messages from friends, I was very wrong.
While the march was a logistic and tactical failure, what I saw and heard on UStream really hit me and I went to Oscar Grant Plaza to defend the people’s 1st Amendment right to peacefully protest. OPD punished all for the actions of a few. Once they riled everyone up by throwing tear gas and smoke bombs, of course it’s going to look like a mob. And to arrest 400 people and only charge 12? That is a huge waste of funds…why aren’t more people outraged about that? To hear someone announcing that everyone in that group was under arrest over a loudspeaker really showed how of a police state that Oakland has become. I would expect to hear that in a dystopian sci-fi movie…not 10 miles from my home.
I don’t agree with flag burning, but I will defend a person’s right to do it. I still treat the Constitution like it means something; not like OPD that only cites it when it is in their favor. I gave an oath to protect those rights when I joined the military and I will still do so even though I don’t agree with the military industrial complex.
I got to the Plaza right after the flag burning…it was a shame to see the spray paint all over, but I knew that it was the actions of some opportunistic punks. I was also concerned that the OPD (along with the city) kept us in the Plaza. We were surrounded for the most part and the entrance to BART was closed. There were ways of getting out, but who knew what would have been around the corner from an exit. Eventually, OPD backed down, but it was only after they saw that we weren’t going to move and we weren’t going to provoke them. The Plaza is a public space. To declare us being there as unlawful was total BS.
This isn’t supposed to happen here.
