I'm wondering if that's just an artifact of lack of coverage, so we don't see as many clips of it. There's also a media-getting-bored thing going on. There's a general sentiment that they want them to go away: next. bILL Maher was bitching about this last weekend, complaining that OWS in NYC had the audacity to protest OBama's visit to Harlem. That's it; that does it. Your job, Mahar says, is to get in the streets and do the shit that I won't do to bring issues to light. Now that you have "changed the conversation" go home so the grown ups can run a proper election."
I also wonder if this isn't an artifact of the shift from focus on NYC -> Oakland, where the relationship to the cops was always antagonist. That's not to say that people didn't engage in "Shame! Shame!" and "We're fighting for you!" rhetoric - which is longstanding approach among Direct Actionists.
Interesting sidenote: Graeber says that the use of these phrases has little to do with actually believing that cops are going to change much.
But he captured something which, for the first time, helps me understand my own transformative experience years ago, in a direct action against radioactive dumping. Some of it I chalk up to having a baby and being a very protective mama bear in the sense that I saw it through the lens of "Don't fuck up the world for this kid." But the other part of it was as Graeber describes.
When you are up close and personal with the cops - Michael Smith saw this too - you realize that they are human beings: they have faces, show emotion, smile, grimace, nostrils flare in anger, they tear up. You see baby faced ruddy skin. It's no longer a uniform and a vague threatening presence.
And I can remember laying down in the blockade, feeling the presence of sheriffs and troopers and rifles and boots, and then seeing their faces, up close.
They're just other human beings. For me, the reaction was one of: "We can win this thing. Go ahead, shoot us. (because you knew they wouldn't)"
It made you bold. It made you feel that you could win. Because it wasn't some monolithic machine. It was ruddy boyish faces, tired men, people afraid, masked up with their State Trooper stare, but unable to keep it that way all the time.
Graeber says that others feel a similar reaction. While they don't really expect cops to drop their weapons and sign up to the movement, they do get bold and in their face and less afraid, willing to scream a useless chant of "Shame! Shame!" at them. But also willing to try to tempt them with slogans about their pensions because, up close and personal, you are reminded that they are filling a role, and some of them are shit at it.
The other reason you engage in some of it, Graeber says, is solidarity. The appeals aren't to cops, but to let your friends who're being hassled know that you are there, fighting for them as best you can.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)