last good country

Stand up, fight back

I don’t think I have all of the words to say any of this right, but here goes.

I remember over ten years ago attending my first protest march, down Halsted Street in Chicago. It was a march against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. I don’t remember how many people were there, and I don’t remember feeling particularly fired up. I had a vague sense of why people were there, but it didn’t feel important and it felt like there was barely any “movement,” behind it.

I didn’t go to the Pershing Park protest in D.C., one that would become infamous because of the police response. That event would go on to give birth to D.C.’s First Amendment Rights and Police Standards Act of 2004. 

Most of the time, most of us don’t give a lot of thought to the First Amendment. We may hear abstractions about why it’s important—or we study cases in a Constitutional Law course. I know that was true of me, at least. I was aware of First Amendment case law and such, but it was never really personal.

Then Occupy happened. I know I didn’t see it coming. Like most people, I was upset with what was going on in America, but I hadn’t found a way to vocalize it. Now, in a span of just a few months, so many things have changed. We’re having conversations in every city in the United States about how things are not right.

I don’t know how to solve many of the problems we are facing as a country. But, what I do know, is that the first step to solving them is standing up and saying things are not okay.

I’ve heard people say “what’s the point of camping?” The point of camping, and the point of occupying, is to make the statement that things are not okay and we are going to remind you every single day. We can barely keep our attention span as a nation on anything. Solving the biggest problems we have faced in decades will require a perseverance many of us thought we might not have. But damned if we have it. We have it in New York. We have it in Oakland. We have it in D.C. We have it at Berkeley. We have it at U.C. Davis.

So when I hear people say that we can’t allow people to camp overnight, because it violates some rule or regulation, I reject that. When I hear people say we can’t afford to “police” these protesters because our city budgets are stretched too thin—I reject that, too.

If we can’t come together as a nation and figure out how to support free speech when our nation is in crisis—well then, I don’t know that we even have a nation worth saving.

I don’t know where any of this is heading, or what the ultimate outcome will be. And that’s the most exciting part of this. Every time that a crackdown has been billed as the beginning of the end, Occupy has only grown.

People of all types are coming together to say that things are not right, but maybe together we can start putting our nation back together.

Yesterday was the 148th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Yesterday, people in hundreds of cities across the country continued to occupy and talk about how we can keep fighting the fight to make sure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.