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Report Back/Much Needed Venting from TacomaSmashICE Demonstration

author: another tacoma anarchist
Apr 28, 2008 18:52

I think that I can do this now. I guess I get a little acute PTSD the day after, every time. Its strange, now that I think of it. I have never been in a situation where there are riot or bike cops at hand that has not turned violent. It is the cops that start it, every time. Every time too, I feel the same. It's a sick feeling, a feeling of desperation and hopelessness. They are like the Nothing from the Neverending Story. Maybe they are what the Nothing is...and the Nothing is everywhere and most people on this planet are faced with it every goddamn day of their lives and we are the lucky ones that have the “choice” of confronting it. The thing about the Nothing is that it will catch up to you, even if it hasn't taken everything yet and you only hear stories of it happening far away to “other” people. The Nothing always has been. The Nothing is unstoppable. Or is it?

I digress. The day before yesterday. Saturday the 26th. I have this staunch belief that people are good and that when they know that something is happening that is just wrong, they will stand up against it. So we take to the streets. Hey, they are making concentration camps and putting people in them! OK, so no they aren't extermination camps... does that make it alright? At what fucking point is what they are doing going to be the popular thing to protest? They are killing people. They are destroying the lives of thousands, they are ripping families apart. They are making 300,000 children in this country orphans and wards of the state (these children are Americans by the way, so they do count, right?). This is actually fucking happening.

I saw footage once from 1960-something and there are people demanding their right to vote and they are marching in the streets holding flags. There is a child on the steps of a federal building? and he is tiny and holding a flag in one hand and his mother's hand in the other. A pig fat piece of shit pig rips the flag from the hand of the terrified child, who nonetheless tries to hold on to it. They haven't changed. They never will. I cried when I saw the footage because that fucker of a pig did not see a child. That soulless piece of human shit saw only proof that he was wrong in that child and therefore did what they all do...and I knew then that what I was looking at was the reason that all the violence of humans toward other humans was encapsulated in that moment.

We are attempting to call attention to the fact that thousands of human beings, neighbors and coworkers and fellow students are being treated like that by I.C.E. and that it is happening under our noses (I swear I can smell it sometimes, like the smoke rising from the ovens at Birkenau). Right now, I have to choose to put myself in front of their batons and pepper-spray. I MUST put myself in front of them...maybe its the ghosts of distant relatives long dead in the Nazi camps that make my blood scream, “You cannot let them continue, we are the end result of what is happening right in front of you”

On Saturday I saw a child pulled to the ground and arrested by the cops, in front of a playground that children were playing in. I saw another child cry in fear and pain after being hit by a baton. This all happened quietly and unremarkably in the hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma. The media, although invited many times never showed up to any of our workshops and did not want to air what we had to say. They did not want to air what the cops did to stop us either. They want to do stories showing someone getting arrested (as long as it isn't a crying kid) or black-clad anarchists looking menacing. Not that most of us weren't black-clad anarchists looking menacing...dancing around and making noise with our plastic drums.

To the assholes running the NWDC, to Wells Fargo, GEO Group and the TPD know this : We will not give up, we will ride you like a fucking nightmare. Fuck you all and I truly hope you die alone and afraid. I hope that in the last seconds of your mortal lives you are looking into the eyes of that child who is the proof that you were wrong and your life was a lie.

To everyone else, get involved with this. There are many ways to offer aid and solidarity, many ways to throw a wrench in the system. We have to stop the NWDC...and then move on to the rest of 'em.

Until all the prisons are closed forever and everyone is free.
With Love and Solidarity – Yet Another Tacoma Anarchist

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