mein gott, hakki's provided me with a jiggler to replace (? in addition to?) the lesbian phallus!
thanks. i love it when my assertive argumentativeness gets read as manly!
:) when they know i'm a chick, i'm just a bitch that needs to get slapped
or a big bully that needs to get kicked in the ass. heh.
look, i think it's pretty simple, particularly if you read the interview with Oden that Tom Wheeler forwarded. she says herself that she raised a ruckus. she's proud of it. she also does not provide any evidence that they really did flag her because of her politics. she simply jumped to that conclusion. further, she makes it real clear that her problem was with an individual. not with the system. in her interview, she says that they offered to get her out on a plane later in the afternoon. they also said that she could go to boston logan and get a flight. these are not the words of people who are detaining her because he politics means that she's not allowed to fly. they didn't want her on that flight, and when she kept "showing her ass" they didn't want her on any flight in their airport.
does it suck. you bet. BUT.
also, consider that, since plenty of other greens probably traveled on planes to go to a national meeting this weekend, and since none of them reported a similar story, i think we can tentatively conclude that it wasn't her politics, but the way she purchased her ticket.
if you read what i wrote, i made it really clear that it sucks to get searched at all. it sucks the way she got treated.
but Art is entirely right: only an ignoramus would act like she did and then be outraged about what happened to her. she's an ignoramus because she is privileged by white skin and middle class status. only a white, middle class person who's never dealt with the cops the way that cops treat people of color and poor whites would be outraged that they got treated like shit when they resisted power, authority, the law. it's a survival skill you have to learn, blacks far more than poor whites, that's for sure.
so, Oden is outraged that, in this climate, she got shat on by people wielding arbitrary authority against someone who
1. walked slowly when she was asked to walk faster. 2. as she described, she gave them some attitude--like demanding to rest from carrying luggage. 3. she touched a cop. even in self defense or in gestures that are unthinking because you typically do brush hands away when they violate your space.
well, guess what, those are things that you learn not to do when you're black. Oden never learned those things because she never had to: she's white. and she's outraged because she got the kind of treatment blacks get all the time and poor whites often get. cop invades your home, your personal space, gets in your face, tells you to spread em, pushes you around... tough fucking shit. you comply and you comply fast.
that is exactly what i was pissed at too. and i was pissed because Oden is an embarassment. crying wolf and exagerrating what happened. what happened is disgusting on its own terms; it doesn't need to be exagerrated. AND, it friggin helps us understand how this kind of shit happens day in and day out to people. no conpsiracy. no plans to detain. just assholes acting like the assholes they been trained to be and that they presume they can be when they think they can and when they have a gun to back up what they're saying.
oden presented it nearly as if she walked into the airport, got held up with armed national guardsment and kept from flying. no, she got marked for a search because of her eticket. then she "showed her ass". and she got harassed for it.
it sucks. but it's sure not getting "busted at gunpoint" as the title of this thread would suggest. she and the other greens that fabricated this nonsense make me sick. if they had an ounce of human decency they'd retract it all and apologize and they apologize for the mockery they make of the lives of people who don't share their privileged status on the fucking planet.
kelley