Occupy Wall Street Response Suddenly Causes Middle Class White People to See Law Enforcement In New Light
reason.com

At right is a picture of Keith Gessen, editor of the pro-OWS literary journal N+1 and author of All The Sad Young Literary Men, a readable bildungsroman about a gang of hyper-literate belly buttons who just want to be successful, and happy. In case you cannot tell, Gessen is being arrested in this picture, for protesting at Occupy Wall Street. I discovered the image on Twitter, where one can watch the revolution happen in real time. It was captioned thusly: “This is crazy. Skinny intellectuals are no danger.”

It’s unlikely that fat and/or stupid protesters are any more a danger than Gessen, but I see the captioner’s point. Harmless, if obnoxious people, are getting the crap kicked out of them by cops at Occupy protests across the country. In Berkeley, one officer beat a young female student in the stomach completely unprovoked. In Seattle, police sprayed an inch-thick stream of pepper spray into a crowd, hitting an 86-year-old woman and an expectant mother, among others, square in their faces. Journalists who have never covered protests before, much less spent time on a police beat, are getting clubbed, gassed, and cuffed alongside their unwashed and unruly story subjects.

Read the whole thing…