No Justice, No Shit
I know from experience that if someone’s assaulting you, don’t fight back — it only makes it worse. So when the cop shoved me, I went limp and let the impact flow through me like a wave.
I also didn’t particularly want to give the citizen journalists that surrounded us fodder for their feeds. Mostly male, they watched but did nothing, like men used to do back when I was regularly, publicly, assaulted by a private citizen.
One placed a camera in my face when, arms folded, I cut the silence by beginning to scream “My body!” at the wall of cops who had shut the street down. “My choice!” responded the young woman who had given me, a 38 year old, the wherewithal to do so.
I hadn’t traveled downtown with the intent to scream directly at a wall of cops, but her ire forced my hand. I had just watched as, with a mixture of equal parts perplexity and outrage, she confronted the small crowd staring at said cops. “Why isn’t anyone chanting?” she asked, shaking with indignation. “Aren’t you here for a reason?” No one would answer her; no one would even look at her, their gazes affixed instead on their iPhone screens, filming motionless officers fingering riot guns.
Minutes before, I had met her in an empty Pershing Square; bogged down by three bags of water bottles, she asked Zia and I if we knew where the crowd went. The cops had just dispersed the group we were marching with, filling the street with cars so we could no longer occupy it and backing everyone into an intersection. Some dipshit had thrown a firecracker at them, which did nothing to quell their hostility. The terrified congregation scattered; mission accomplished.
We didn’t know where everyone had gone, but I knew that, whenever one wonders this, one should look up — where there are helicopters hovering, surely people are below. And anyway, it was only twilight; I certainly wasn’t ready to go the fuck home. She asked if I’d carry a bag of water. I willingly obliged.
There had already been waves of dispersions, starting hours before the sun had begun to set. As soon as the first organized protest at City Hall ended, people began to file out of the area; in the midst of this, a Black woman with a bullhorn walked into the middle of the street and told the stragglers she was not here with anyone else, not here to be on the news, not here to take a photo for Instagram, she was simply here because she was fucking mad and if we were as fucking mad as she was we were welcome to follow her. I couldn’t not.
And so, a handful of us just walked down the road, a series of roads, following the woman with a bullhorn like ducklings. This was not part of the plan and that was the point of it all — we were creating genuine disruption, a physical manifestation of our anger, not a photo-op or carefully contained demonstration.
We walked past the Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights rally, huddled in front of news cameras at the courthouse. I had seen their presence at the previous protest and smelled a rat — they were too organized, too branded, to be anything but a front for nefarious shit, which I later found they most certainly were, opportunistic social movement grifters who glob onto any civil unrest in order to solicit donations that go directly to their parent organization, that being a racist, homophobic, male-run communist cult.
One offered me a green bandana, which I refused. I failed to see how buying and distributing synthetic bandanas manufactured by female slaves in third world countries helped the cause of reproductive rights.
Side Note: If an organization is handing out professionally printed protest signs that prominently feature their own branding, you may want to look into exactly what you’re holding up to the heavens. Using a social movement to promote your own agenda is just as insidious as Pepsi handing out signs that say “Pepsi: It’s the Pro-Choice of a New Generation.”
They were there to be on the news. But fuck the news, fuck the citizen and professional journalists running around with their DSLRs, fuck the man selling hats and buttons. (The opposite of fuck is extended to the woman I saw wearing a shirt with Aileen Wuornos on it and the caption “I’m With Her”.)
Protests, when done civilly, can easily feel stupid, pointless; an echo chamber, an opportunity for social media hits. I couldn’t help but lament the co-opting of the movement until I saw a woman gutturally howling, holding a piece of cardboard that read “I was raped twice in Texas.” Y’know what? I thought. She needs this.
Sun fully down, streets fully empty, we followed Water Woman (what kind of water did she bring to hand out to protesters, you ask? Why, Nestle, of course — damn, there really is no ethical consumption under capitalism) to the area below the helicopters; there, we found an entire city block shut down, walled off by cops in riot gear. Behind the cops were a handful of people, stuck; no one was allowed to go in or out. There were hundreds of cops, dozens of cars, multiple helicopters hovering overhead. All for nothing — for stasis. The whole affair was such a wild violation of civil liberties and wanton waste of resources I couldn’t help but laugh. For lack of anything else to do, I walked up to one of the shitheels in riot gear.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“The street is closed off.”
“Why?”
“Because of the protest.”
“When will it be open again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cool.”
Dozens of people just stood there, silently filming the silent cops. I noticed a man live streaming the anticlimax on his phone had almost two thousand viewers and an endless stream of comments like “oh my god this is crazy” and “what tf is happening.” The amount of tips he had received for doing this was $17. Very cool.
Water Woman asked a female cop how she felt about what was going on — she said she couldn’t comment while in uniform then stared at the ground, hanging her head in shame. If Water Woman was the future, things seemed less bleak. She chugged a bottle and crushed it, the jarring sound of squeaking plastic making a cop whip his head in anticipation of a reason to start shooting rubber bullets. She flagged down another cop who had previously told us to step back.
“Can you throw this out for me?” she coyly asked. “I hate littering.”
He did exactly what she requested, as she was clearly an exquisite alpha and he, a sniveling beta.
Discontent to impotently stand and stare, she said she’d walk around the shut down perimeter trying to find a way in.
“I’ll follow you,” I told her.
“You don’t have to,” she replied.
“Well, I have your bag.”
“It’s a $7 bag, don’t worry about it.”
“In THIS economy?”
I followed her, from corner to corner, until we reached the final one, where the screaming and the shoving commenced. Everywhere we went, absolutely nothing was happening — the only thing that made the cops finally start moving and get out of the fucking street was when the two of us began to scream and others gingerly joined in. At this, the wall of cops began walking toward us, yelling at us to disperse. We continued to stand, as we were doing nothing illegal.
Finally, they closed in on us — one shoved Water Woman, who was fumbling to pick up her bags. I went to grab one and got shoved myself. “I’m trying to fucking help her,” I muttered to no one in particular. The cop who shoved me picked up the bag I was trying to grab and threw it down the street; when I went to retrieve it again, he shoved me once more. I was finally able to grab it and jog away to a position in which I was once again distanced from the wall of cops, standing alone in the middle of the street.
“What do you think about all this?” I asked the female cop in the middle. “She can’t answer,” Water Woman said, “she’s in fucking uniform.” “Well, take it off,” I yelled. She did not.
There was a beat. “What the fuck are you so afraid of?” I screamed. They said nothing. We stood there, staring at one another, in silence. Shortly thereafter, they literally ran away, disappearing into a parking garage. The street was open again.
It felt good. Few things do these days. You’ve gotta take what you can get.