Yes, I know that all over the USA there has been violent police repression against peaceful Occupy Together activists, much of it involving the use of tear gas and pepper spray. I know it really fits a tragically predictable storyline that all cops are pigs. Okay, most of them are. I’ll give you that. I blame management and the organizational trend towards paramilitarization for that reality. But tonight at Occupy SF’s Black Friday action, this has not been the case.
I will never be able to singlehandedly fight the meme that tear gas has been used against the Occupy SF marchers tonight. I can only offer this YouTube video showing what most are assuming is tear gas, but is actually sewer vapor arising from a manhole cover on a typical SF street during a typical night.
I get it: being tear gassed during a protest is romantic on the same level as Cyrano de Bergerac fighting off the corrupt palace guards with a single sword and a rapier wit. I love my romantic do-gooder imagry as much as everyone else. I dig the whole use of the Guy Fawkes masks straight out of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta graphic novel. But let’s not ditch factual reporting for a romantic meme that has no basis in reality.
Maybe the rumors of SF tear gas is entirely the fault of MSNBC, but they’re only following the Twitter hashtag. I can’t stave off millions of mindless Twitter RTs. I get the whole ‘post without thinking’ mindset. We all do that. It’s in our heuristic programming. Just do me a big favor, okay?
Stop it!
Stop the fairy tale that the bad ol’ SFPD are acting like fascist swine. If anything, the SFPD have been blocking off car access to Market Street because several protesters were being hit by stupid drivers. Hell, I lived in SF for ten years during which I finished my BA degree at SFSU. You don’t need a fucking car in SF. They have the best mass transit in all of California. Only tourists and pricks drive cars in SF. If you’re not a tourist and you drive there, then you are obviously a prick.
Anyway, I have seen in the past when the SFPD were acting like fascists. That was during the first Gulf War. I had just moved there about three months before that began, and I know how the SFPD were under former police chief Frank Jordon. Trust me, what happened then is not happening now.
The ones really being assholes were the ones wanting to buy their fucking iPads and iPhones at the Apple Store and who were pushing violently through the protesters. [I'll insert video here as soon as someone uploads it to YouTube.] See what happens when Steve Jobs dies on us? Apple cultists all start acting like they’re corporate psychopaths buying Windows peripherals. (I left the Apple Cult before Jobs kicked the silicon bucket, mainly because it sucked that I could not upgrade my old MacMini to run Lion. End of digression.)
Here’s my point: we need factual reporting, not rumor mongering. We need to take a deep collective breath and stop retweeting every damned fool thing that we see. For the most part, I pick and choose my RTs. If someone is saying something stupid or self-serving in 140 words or less, I ignore it. I don’t regurgitate it. I don’t follow Snookie, and the only reason I follow Billy Ray Cyrus is simply out of a perverted sense of schadenfreude.
That having been said, I hope that one day after the 1% start paying their fair share we can all live happily ever after…or at least for a couple of generations until they regroup and take over again. Cue chorus of “The Circle Game,” cause I’m done here. Peace!