Things to Consider While Occupying America
by Timothy B. Tyson | special to NewBlackMan
If police officers leveling assault rifles at unarmed citizens were not so disturbing, folks in Chapel Hill might act like Sheriff Andy Taylor does whenever Deputy Fife misuses his service revolver. "Give me the bullet, Barn," he'd say. Poor Barney fishes into his shirt pocket and forks over the shell.
Chapel Hill is not Mayberry, but a big university town where law enforcement is dangerous and complex; we honor and support the men and women who protect us. When our cops point assault rifles at our citizens, however, they imperil our values—not just our image--and court real tragedy. We cannot pretend this was okay. Whoever decided that our police officers should go in with assault rifles leveled at unarmed citizens needs to resign right this minute.
Self-romanticizing hotheads are shouting, like the muddy peasants in Monty Python, “See the violence inherent in the system! I’m being repressed!” In the society of the globalized spectacle, front-page pictures of cops with AR-15s make their own fevered case. To the extent to which those dystopian images speak the truth about us, we must change Chapel Hill; to the extent that they misrepresent us, we must tell our own truth still more loudly.
“Our police department responded,” Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt announced, “in a deliberate and measured way.” In the next breath, he denied responsibility, saying that our council-manager system won’t let the mayor direct the police. This is the classic hallmark of a politician who knows he landed on the wrong side. In fact, he claimed, Police Chief Chris Blue did not brief him about the weekend seizure of a downtown building by a violent mob until Monday morning.
Every parent can translate the mayor’s dubious narrative: this was not a mistake and I am not responsible for the mistake; in fact, I knew nothing about it. Not once did my kids ever get the car keys back until they did better than that.
Chief Blue’s decision to reenact the Normandy invasion also defies grown-up logic. That goes double if he actually thinks a two-day building seizure by what he described as a threatening mob does not merit informing the mayor. “Our deliberate response was appropriate,” he says.
Uh, would either of you gentlemen care to try again?
Incidentally, the activists who took over the old Yates Motor Company are not Occupy Chapel Hill. And disdain for Chapel Hill’s official idiocy is not an endorsement of the Unfettered Rave-Action Coalition. Occupy challenges the gap between rich and poor and confronts the corporate purchase of our political system; it is a democratic movement, not the hipster version of a frat party. Occupy defies the framework of politics-as-usual, but it does not attempt to resolve land use questions by mass-action late-night booty calls.
Before we suffer any of these fools further, we should ask ourselves what the words "Kent State" mean four decades after the National Guard fired into that crowd of students in Ohio. Any actual “deliberate response” to the recklessness of this lost weekend must weigh the enduring costs of having "Chapel Hill" become that kind of national metaphor.
To a large extent, I share the rage of this flubbed-up flash mob. Land-use policies and real estate prices in Chapel Hill are pushing working families and the poor out of town; neighborhoods long owned by people of color are being replaced by high-rise housing for millionaires. If the fashionistas wanted a community center in the long-abandoned Yates Motor Company, though, they might have recruited, well, the community. We desperately need to talk about what is happening in this town. A public education campaign, some recruitment at the churches, a few press conferences and protest rallies, and it might have happened. We all know that property rights are not absolute, as zoning ordinances, building codes, eminent domain and affordable housing laws attest. Had the groundwork been done, this old building could have become a symbol of our generous vision; most people in town know the building exists only because of the front-page showdown.
But the Anarcho-Stylin’ Dance Alliance yearned less for a community center than for a confrontation that would validate their paranoid fantasies, some of which, alas, are not entirely paranoid. Their victory created a global spectacle that a single cop stumbling over the curb could have turned into a tragedy for Chapel Hill and a debacle for Occupy Wall Street.
I embrace the Occupy movement, which sparks my hopes for a better world. At the invitation of our brilliant offspring, my wife and I spent several days at Zuccotti Park. (Unlike our kids, Perri and I slept at a friend's apartment. It is possible that we did not subsist solely on the granola bars we bought for the masses. We can neither confirm nor deny the yummy sushi buffet.) Figuratively speaking, and almost literally, we saw Pete Seeger meet Kanye West in that park. Young and old, poor and affluent, aspiring democrats vowed that the gap between rich and poor in America must not continue to widen and that corporations will not be allowed to purchase our political system.
Occupy Wall Street has shifted the national conversation sharply for the better. But its future depends on our poise. We must reach beyond the fashionista impulse to outrage the uncool and instead recruit and educate a larger movement. That means coalition politics. (See Rustin, Bayard. See also Wellstone, Paul.)
As a historian of American social movements, I assure you that the national security state is infiltrating the movement and attempting to strengthen its fringe and isolate its influence. Agents provocateurs or local hotheads—it does not matter much which is which—will always advocate extremist adventures. They will berate more thoughtful activists as “Uncle Toms” or the timid bourgeoisie. If this spirit of ginned-up recklessness prevails, fueled by infiltrators, Occupy’s political vision will descend into a fun-house mirror in which moral authority passes by default to the craziest sumbitch in the room. (See Panthers, Black. See also Underground, Weather.)
Instead, we must invoke the ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu: "Do not do what you would most like to do. Do what your opponent would least like you to do." Those desperate to avoid a public conversation about the power of corporate money will relish seeing the Occupy movement tied to mob seizures of property.
It is time for Chapel Hill, whether we are Occupied or merely residential, to say who does and does not represent our community: this includes the Car-Lot Seizure Cooperative, our officially not-responsible mayor, and whatever mallet-head passed out the assault rifles. Hand over the bullet, Barney.
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Timothy Tyson is the author of several books including Blood Done Signed My Name and Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williamsand the Roots of Black Power.
