Notable to me in the eight-minutes-plus flick (below) of the pepper spray incident at UC Davis was the protesters’ restraint in the face of the campus police force’s shameful and cruel use of the spray. It wasn’t clear to me why those police–at least one of whom appeared relaxed and even cheerful–had to move those sitting students; a few of the sprayed students stumbled away while others stayed put and were arrested and the camera-happy crowd around them chanted to the police, “Shame on you!” Eventually the police rallied to themselves and slowly retreated to the victorious cheers of the students.
At first viewing I felt largely unsympathetic to the protesters, whose victory shouts of “it’s our campus” seemed largely irrelevant. Even without that silly framing of the “victory,” what did they think could possibly be gained by sitting in a street in the name of some vague Occupy Wall Street goal that, however magnificent, so quickly proved to be derailable into an–albeit admirably nonviolent, on the protesters’ part–mere push and shove contest with campus police who have no more say about “perceived economic inequality” than the protesters themselves?
In short, it seemed to me a rather trivial and somewhat pointless imitation by spoiled rich kids of the so-called Arab Spring in which protesters risk their lives to confront the powers of oppression, or even of the movement against the School of the Americas in which students don’t risk their lives but still bring their protests to the doorstep of their anticause.
At another glance, however, I had second thoughts about writing off the UC Davis protesters. At minimum, it is a valid and, for our society as a whole, relevant question that a protester shouted at the police: “Who do you protect?” The police are, after all, the front line of societal (mis)priorities; they reveal where the government’s heavy hand drops. To stand up to the police is perhaps the most accessible point against which people can stand up to object to the injustices of our economic system.
At UC Davis, the pepper spraying itself led to an even more remarkable and restrained protest, later on, when the chancellor of the university–there have been calls for her to leave her post–was given a “silent walk of shame” to her car:
