The millionaire Mayor of New York City (who thrice has purchased that position by spending inordinate amounts on his campaign and spending his personal funds to get the charter changed so he could run for a third term) ordered the New York City police in full riot gear to remove the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street area and destroy their makeshift abodes and tents. Then he secured a court order “allowing” the protestors to demonstrate during daylight hours but not gather or sit/sleep in the park at night. In Oakland, California, the Mayor ordered police to disperse the protestors and they used strong physical force to do so.
For 222 years Americans have had a constitution that included a Bill of Rights. Rights that were preserved for the people by restricting the power of governments. The First Amendment of that Bill of Rights guarantees a freedom of speech and a right of association for the purpose of petitioning the government for redress of grievance. Our country’s history shows times when peaceful demonstration has caused the government to change course and to redress grievances. During the Great Depression the Veterans of WWI marched on Washington to demand their promised war service bonus. They stayed and occupied Anaconda Park - built shelters and raised tents. President Hoover sent General MacArthur, and his aide Dwight Eisenhower, with the Army to clear out the residents of this “Hooverville”. They did and burned the shanties. But some veterans stayed and the new President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sent his wife to talk to them. He tried to redress their grievances.
During the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's it was when protestors sat in at lunch counters and when marchers were attacked by police with hoses and dogs that America rose up and redressed their grievances. Our political moral guideline the Declaration of Independence goes so far as to declare that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e. ensuring the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it”.
The Supreme Court has recently declared that the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment apply to corporate entities; and, now rich businessmen can use their corporate funds, often taxpayer subsidized and in my opinion the property of the shareholders, to influence elections and secure the friendship and support of elected and appointed officials. Yet now the Mayor of NYC, along with Oakland, CA and others would have us believe that amendment does not guarantee the right of less wealthy people to gather in a park and pitch some tents and demonstrate.
In 1773 a group of citizens angered at being subjected to a tax by a legislative body to which they had no representation gathered and painted themselves to look like their image of native Americans and seize the to be taxed goods on the ships docked in Boston Harbor. They threw the tea into the bay so it could not be unloaded and the tax applied. Nineteen years later the new country born out of a democratic revolution enacted its’ Bill of Rights. Some would focus on the second amendment which guaranteed those Tea Party rebels the right to bear arms. But it is the First Amendment that has been the basis of our nation’s governance. The freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the freedom of association, the right to petition the government these are the basic guarantees that so many men and women died for in the wars of defense and liberation fought over the centuries.
The American people have a right to exercise their free speech in any way that does not endanger other people. They have a right to express their frustration with their government and when doing so peacefully should never be restricted. We do not need government sponsored thugs to attack protestors as they did in the early days in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and we don’t use military force to disperse protestors as the Chinese did in Tiananmen Square.
In America we celebrate diversity and we support the right to dissent. As Lincoln so nobly put it this “government of the People, by the People and for the People shall not perish from the earth”.
16 Nov. 2011
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