in the context of OO, the Black Bloc will destroy the wider coalition, evict the camp, bring a further worsening of the situation for the marginalized...
Nicholas Roberts
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I'll try to say this nicely. You don't know what you are talking about.
I was definitely not impressed with the GA process at Zucotti Park. After some thought, I decided I didn't know what I was talking about so I said very little. If it works for them, who am I to put it down? I was seeing this process as the worst sort of touchy-feely Berkeley. NYC has gone Berkeley? Well, who would have thunk it?
Oakland is a violent city---and it is much better now than yore. Breaking a window is childish and irrelevant. Graffiti is irrelevant. It is a matter of routine that young black and latino men are routinely profiled and a special target for a traffic stop where the cops can run a rap sheet for outstanding warrants. If their captives start resisting or even talking back, they get arrested and or shot. OO is in Oscar Grant park, get it? It is virtually impossible to break the coalition between minority groups and their white counterparts. They may not be kissing brothers and sisters, but all sides share common ground in solidarity. That's good enough.
More radical elements of the ILWU do occasionally bring out the baseball bats. They don't tolerate cop violence. The cops are afraid of the more militant unions here, because they know the union guys are serious combatants, just as big, just as tough, just as determined in the rank and file. The leadership might get all weak kneed, but the guys on the docks are a different sort. You don't understand because you have not faced the idea of death as an instant possibility. Carry a sheet of plywood on a narrow cornice 75 feet off the pavement below. Do that for three weeks or a month and nail the fuckers square on a commerical roofing job.
Everybody forgets that construction, operations of big machinery, with the safety threats of instant death are all part of the job. Yes it is a masculine world, that few of the office types understand. It is a part of working class life that something terrible can happen to you: accident, disability, disease, early death. In the end, something will get you. Occupational hazards abound.
Compared to that reality, you think I care if windows get broken? I don't do it, and I don't like seeing it, but really it is ridiculus to get worked up over it.
If you persist in this violence will ruin everything line, well, so long.
CG