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WTO
Protest Has Links With The Past..........
By Rowan
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Recent
events in Seattle have led some to look back to times gone
by for answers. Answers are hard to find in this situation,
a situation where hundreds of peaceful protesters with support
from the president were treated horrifically by the Seattle
Police and the other battalions that were brought in. As police
used more and more brute force in Seattle, protesters began
chanting "The whole world is watching!" in reference to the
numerous television and video cameras about. Nary a soul out
there knew the roots of their chant.
The first time that chant was used was in downtown Chicago
in 1968. The situation was much the same. There was a large
organized event, in this case the Democratic National Convention,
and a larger underground event was created around it in the
city streets by the radical left, mostly youth, from all across
America. Radicals such as David Dillinger and Tom Hayden were
in attendance, as well as Allen Ginsbergh and the Zippies
and whatnot. In both cases the protester's demands were varied
but almost all protest was peaceful, and in both cases the
police brutalized them. "The whole world is watching!" was
a spontaneous chant that got going at one of the peaks of
violence in Chicago, where huge Chicago Police were grabbing
anybody they could and beating them senseless. I've seen a
bit of the footage of it that the whole world was watching
and I can tell you, it looked like a war with only one side
fighting.
Who started the parallel chant in Washington, I don't know,
but it certainly was a poignant statement, and one that deserves
looking into. How are we different from how we were then,
as a country? I think some people believed that the press
coverage of the 1968 convention would put an end to such abuses
of power. It may have had some effect to that end, but obviously
incompletely. My sister was in Seattle protesting, and I would've
been too, if I hadn't gotten a false snowstorm report a few
days prior. There are questions I have about the morality
of protesting in the street and holding up traffic and such,
but beyond any of that, how can these cops get away with beating
up America's children? I pray that this time around, with
times changed and the Baby Boomers in more positions of power,
there will be even more public outrage and productive thought.
In the case of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, I
think it's fairly well agreed upon that much of the violence
had roots in class struggle. The cops, for the most part,
were young men without much economic prospect in life, without
much exposure to the intellectual and political worlds. The
protesters were generally middle class to upper middle class
youths, who were generally in college or had graduated from
college or had dropped out of college. These were people who
had the bourgeois world at their fingertips, but chose to
look beyond it. These cops had little trouble developing a
terrible hatred of the protesters, hippy types that they were.
What created that predisposition to hatred is not entirely
clear, but it seems to fit in with the atrocities in Seattle.
Until we solve problems like these, I won't have the heart
to tell anarchists that this system is good and just or that
they're wrong in tearing it down. And that is something I'd
very much like the ability to say.
By Rowan Millar Rowan is a Gen Y'er living in Silicon Valley.
He has a personal interest in history of the 60's and Boomers
Generation. Rowan will be writing articles for us and representing
the voice of Generation Y on Boomers International Web Site.
GenYers
Main Page
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Other columns by Rowan
Generation Y And The Internet
Hip Hop,
And Its Place In The Generational Soup
THE GENERATION GAP
Among Pirates and Rastas
WTO Protest Has Links With The Past..........
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