As our protest came down Telegraph Ave, it was given a two block right-of-way by an ordinary police motorcade. Back in the thick of it, household and commercial waste bins were pushed into the middle of the road and then melodramatically knocked over, to nobody’s horror but their own. A small and quite relaxed procession of municipal vehicles followed the last protesters and uneventfully reinstated trashcans to their original place. People were summoned ‘out of their homes (or bars) and into the streets’. Wistful thinking. A Jeep had joined the subversive stroll, blasting loud music and offering a couple of kids sitting on its tailgate first row tickets. An attempt at public assembly at the Oakland City Hall was a genuine circus, full with bicycles and rings of fire, and it was soon enough hijacked by a delirious woman whose incoherent babble was drowned by applause - the boredom, not approval-induced kind. Then it was time to move again because ‘the police are closing in’. No, they weren’t. No sign of a blue uniform to be seen. Still, it was time to move, ‘keep marching’. Like beheaded chickens we walked from intersection to intersection, bickering at every fork which road to take, only to be eventually met by police who were so disinterested in us they were chewing gum. So apathetic were the authorities, even the helicopter had better places to be. On San Pablo and 40th, a small group decided the goods procured by Safeway were preferable to the goods promised by a classless society. Like the dream of a classless society, their dreams failed to materialize. At best, the crowd and the march it was instigating was submitting a disparate, undecided, disjointed laundry list of individual, sometimes fundamentally irreconcilable, agendas. At worst, it was a pitiful attempt by an intimacy-deprived, adventure-seeking generation to associate and create a semblance of solidarity, co-belonging and fellowship. For the former, police brutality, which nobody sane or sincere denies, serves as pretext for protesting any and all sorts of injustice, unfairness and abuse perpetrated by an incontestably rotten ruling class. For the latter, the need to connect with others in the real world and in meaningful ways is in itself more important than the claims themselves. Resistance, not to speak of revolution, cannot be the result of either. It would be nice, a comfortable thing to do to wink and pretend like something is happening. Unfortunately however, nothing is - except a momentary interlude of excitement, a short break from an admittedly thoroughly unfulfilling lifestyle. Some pundits keep telling us that change cannot happen from the comfort of our homes. And yet it is from the comfort of our homes that we have given rise and continue to empower an exploitative state of affairs. What we need more of is not futile gestures of resistance modeled to resemble our fictional images of what insurrection looks like. There are no more winter palaces to seize and by re-enacting the same performance over and over, we are only making ourselves more predictable, weaker and, effectively, our own caricature. In the present state of affairs, one where we are so deeply immersed in the system we want to overthrow, where we so eagerly succumb to material temptations, where we so foolishly believe that we can use the very tools of oppression for the purpose of emancipation, the only, the most potent, or at the very least the most promising act of resistance at our disposal is abstinence: pure non-action, non-participation, withdrawal; active, deliberate refusal to partake of any of the benefits that the current system of things dangles before our gullible eyes. The most revolutionary thing one can do today, is do nothing. The rest is, quite frankly, for show. An old, non-scripted and poorly acted show. --Berkeley, 12/10/14 (now watch this video:) vimeo/113841341
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 03:52:11 +0000
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