glyph theory

To sum up: the only two mainstream media live-feeds switched off at precisely the same instant—the minute before fifteen police departments working together engulfed a peaceful group of protesters in tear gas.

That crucial minute, when the media (whether by accident or in compliance with police orders) enabled the police to tear-gas peaceful American citizens untelevised, shares something with the time of day recorded by those chalk shadows on the sidewalk. It’s an ephemeral moment, but it lasted much, much longer than a minute should. It’s a shadow whose original has disappeared, and it’s all the more significant for that.

Given our image-saturated society, it’s hard to explain how the absence of an image can be more dramatic, a bigger scandal, than the hundreds of disturbing videos of citizens being attacked by police. We’re used to thinking of surveillance as the enemy. Big Brother abides, and I can testify that there’s something undeniably eerie about the news helicopters hovering over my neighborhood. But for those helicopters hanging in our sky for hours and hours, waiting for a story, to disappear precisely when the story breaks—that’s a different kind of sinister, a different kind of wrong.

Police brutality is, on the other hand, overly familiar. It’s a phrase we know too well; part of what should shock us about it is the easy way it rolls off the tongue. But we’re used to shock by now; “shock and awe” is in our national lexicon and we’re no longer either shocked or awed by it. People observe, sagely, in comment threads across the Internet, that yes, sometimes the police use excess force, but this is what happens when people don’t obey police orders (however unlawful those orders might be). Honestly, what did they expect?

Those people tend not to know Oakland’s history with the police, or the police’s history with Oakland, they’ve probably never experienced anything remotely like police brutality themselves, and they also tend to let a winking cynicism about how the world works disguise their resignation and passivity. (I should know—I’m not too far from being one of them.)

Underpinning those fatalistic, head-shaking comments is a faith that the world works more or less the way it’s supposed to. Don’t do anything wrong and the police won’t bother you. Vote and you’ll be represented. Do your job and you’ll be able to live in relative comfort. And if you want to change things, go through the proper channels. Start a petition! Write to your representative! If something really important happens, the news will surely cover it.

The rightness or wrongness of that sentiment varies wildly depending on what you look like and where you live. That’s an incredibly unoriginal observation, but it’s not the sort of thing you really understand until someone decides you look the wrong way. I, for example, am extremely unlikely to ever be accused of loitering, no matter how long I stand outside a certain building. The fact that I can stand in a public place for as long as I like and someone else can’t means that I have more freedom than an equally deserving fellow American citizen. I have never had to fight for my right to stand in a public park, for example, or in a public square.

It is no coincidence, in other words, that the people who started Occupy Oakland in a public plaza know what it’s like to have to fight for rights the rest of us don’t spend much time thinking about. Nor is it a coincidence that they’re comfortable facing down a police force whose willingness to use force is legendary. The people who started this are extreme; you have to be extreme and dedicated to be willing to risk your personal safety, your record and your sanity to organize a functioning mini-society right in front of City Hall.