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A police car remains flipped over and destroyed behind the Evergreen State College gym this morning. It is a silent reminder of an infamous Valentine's night. It is important that we try and make some sense of what happened and why. What made hundreds of students surrounding a cop car start chanting for the release of a black man in the back of the vehicle? What made the chanting and blockading become pepper-spray and broken bottles?
The majority won’t look very far for the answers to these questions. Most administrators, faculty, staff, students, media and police will take certain stances that are predictable and simple. Their reactions will be based in stereotypes. Unless we reject these answers as insufficient, valuable understanding will be lost.
A better understanding of why students sat covering their swollen eyes unable to breath and cops were forced into retreating away from a myriad of thrown projectiles can be discovered in a historical context. Olympia passed a law that effectively banishes the homeless from downtown. Police downtown increase their arrests and harassment for frivolous crimes like jay walking. Evergreeners were maliciously brutalized at the Port of Olympia protests by cops earlier this winter. All these are local issues that make this campus upset.
On a larger level students are fed up with a war in Iraq led by a president they hate. This causes a legitimate sense of powerlessness over their government. Issues like global warming and a rapidly recessing economy portend towards hopelessness about their future. These, along with mounting school loans, are common worries of college students everywhere in America. Here at Evergreen these troubles have started to lead towards action.
The students acted decisively to stop the vehicle and free the black man. Why he was arrested didn’t seem to matter. The challenge was towards the cops, towards the systemic racism that leaves black people poor, in jail, and without opportunities. The students chanted to the cops, “let him go,” and the cops ignored their demands at first. A half hour later, when people began pounding on the cop car and objects began to be thrown, they listened and the man was freed, only after he gave them his name.
The police used pepper-spray on the faces of the students. They had their tazers ready in hand. The students continued to throw objects at the police car as it and the other ten cop cars slowly backed up and left. One car was left behind empty and the students went to work on flipping it over and destroying it. The students were unrestrained but not out of control. They focused on removing the cops from the area and destroying the remaining car while rallying solidarity.
Students showed solidarity against the police and for destroying the implements of capitalist control. Keep in mind the historic context, the powerlessness within the system, the hopeless futures not as good as their parents and much worse for their kids. Currently civilization is facing problems of a magnitude that they cannot solve through simple changes in elected officials, new laws or $600 buyouts.
As the lives of the poor and the entire young generation get worse, these incidents will become more frequent. It is going to begin looking more cohesive too. Don’t fear the masses when they are unrestrained like this. This is a healthy destruction.
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Hey what are the odds that someone will step up and accept responsibility for their roll in the riot?
All it takes is a gunman to start shooting up campus and all the students become cop lovers?
Did you even read the whole article?
These students are worried about some really important issues (the war in Iraq, the ecomony, homelessness, racism, and so on). I'm not sure if that justifies an extreme action like this, but I do wish more students were actually concerned about these issues. Most of the students on my campus are such apathetics.
I too am sick of the justice system being used to silence those who would challenge the status quo (or more often for being the institution maintaining the status quo). Poor people, minorities, young people- we are not the enemy! But in so many ways, our society seems to waging its own war on us.
Yes, I demand change from this world, I refuse to sit by and let things happen like this. Yet I feel slightly less inspired to see violent action being the ONLY action.
Should the students be punished? Not by the law. But if I knew any of those who protested that night, I would challenge them to use that solidarity and passion in conjunction with their WORDS. We cannot take over by force- we will be left without weapons, without resources, without freedom, and possibly without our lives.
However, I disagree slightly with the statement that the students should not be punished by the law. Granted, I think that the 10 years suggested for physically damaging an emergency vehicle is way too harsh (and probably not actually going to happen either), I think some sort of lesser sentence like community service or a school sanction instead of a criminal sanction, would be more appropriate. (Check out the Campus Progress blog post on this - Link ). The problem with pursuing an arrest is because there is no way to fairly punish people involved in this spontaneously organized “riot.” Who can be pinpointed to punish? Who can we blame? Just people on camera and identifiable?