At mid-evening, on Saturday,
March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in
Lower Manhattan, the NYPD initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS
activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might
venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression
across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.
After all, the NYPD suffered
no ill consequences from its search-and-destroy mission launched in the late
fall of 2011 to scour the park, renamed Liberty Square
In a police state, unjust
actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies
in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the
degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the
state’s assaults on civil liberties and common decency.
Why? Because they view OWS
as a rival gang — not a force of democratic passion and outrage. The defining
creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by
the modus operandi of violently crushing perceived rivals.
If rank-and-file police
officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this event will have come
to pass because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and that
issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse.
Anything you can do to
challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of exploitation and
terror that is the neoliberal international superstate will, in turn, prove
helpful in achieving the goal of ceasing the brutality inherent to the U.S.
But, and I hope I’m wrong in
positing this dismal augury, there will be much blood lacquering the pavements
of the city of New York, and scores of other municipalities, worldwide, before
that day arrives.
At our best, as a species,
we human beings use our minds and imaginations to bring less suffering to the
world; at our worst, we use said attributes to rationalize causing so much of
it.
Although not widely
acknowledged by mainstream opinion shapers, the struggle to retake the public
commons by activists facing hostile local municipalities and their police
enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind’s destruction of the ecological
balance of the earth are related issues, of which the implications extend far
beyond the political realm.
The unfolding of these
matters determines how you spend your days … from when you rise in the morning,
to what you eat, to which locations you proceed during the day, to when and how
you sleep at night … right down to the state of your health and the condition
of your soul.
To those who proffer the
excuse, “in my heart, I know you’re right, but I have to be a realist about
this”: you’re letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely frame the
matter. Given that the heart is more than a pump — it is the alpha and
omega point of the soul of the world i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are
confused regarding the nature of reality.
Moreover, you sound like
George F. Babbitt … giving a book report on Hannah Arrent’s conception of the
banality of evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem
And it seems to be what
you’re actually trying to express is closer to the following: I feel
overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it makes me feel
uncomfortable, so I’ll just accept the matter, maybe grouse about it a bit, but
I’ll continue to accept the small comforts the system proffers and I’ll hope
that will serve as balm to my empty, troubled soul.
The Cartesian fallacy that
one’s joy and suffering are almost exclusively a private matter — the idea that
the process all takes place in one’s own mind and body and has no connection to
any larger order — has diminished perception and has stressed the environment
to the tipping point. This is the dismal litany of Industrial/Commercial Age
false consciousness: the paramount function of the intellect is to reduce the
vast and proliferate criteria of life down to the “bottom line.”
But anyone who posits the
concept that life can and should be reduced to only self-serving,
mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death
camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present-day analogs of Auschwitz:
the so-called industrial “farming industry”; the practices of deep sea
“fishing” by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world’s oceans); deep water
oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds an
analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.
Yet the agenda of the
corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and expand these
practices, the very practices that keep its populace alienated, locked into
benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and
addicted to distraction.
Withal, the acceptance of a
way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement from the very acts
that maintain one’s culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning
wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality. To awaken to
reality is to suffer … allowing oneself to experience feelings of despair,
powerlessness and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because emotion
engenders motion.
If witnessing peaceful
protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by
its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on
trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent soul can be
located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party with Adolf Eichmann.
To express indifference or
to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like
the “good Germans” of the 1930s, you might believe your codified hatreds and
commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the
state, will deliver and preserve freedom … but these beliefs, maintained by
systems of mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold
dear.
How can an individual gain a
modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the
operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own degraded
condition?
At this point, the awakening
of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don’t quite know
where you’re going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart
yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you wander off
the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving rationalization — then,
even in moments of doubt and confusion, you can make a home in being lost.
“Show your wounds,” exhorted
artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us. Pain and
sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order … to
give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.
You can join this chorus or
elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the
dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed. The earth’s song, at this
juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence. This song
needs you to lend your voice.
And I submit this lyric as
the song’s refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts
of our men and woman uniformed in blue: “Our rights do not end where the
caprice of authoritarian bullies begins.”
Phil Rockstroh is a poet,
lyricist and philosopher bard living in New
York City
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