Hi everyone,
What, you may wonder, am I talking about with this headline?
And now I want to take about pepper spray. Here's the thing: There's nothing like a good old-fashioned dose of brutality to make me thankful. I am, of course, talking about what happened at UC Davis this week: A bunch of kids sat down kumbayah-style, linked arms, and experienced this attack in response to exercising their right to peaceable assembly.
If you have ever had any exposure whatsoever to pepper spray (I'm from grizzly country, I have) I'm guessing that right now your eyes are filled with tears and you wonder whether any of those kids had to go to the hospital (yes) or worse after this photo was taken. If you haven't, you might want to read AV Flox's
post researching the real health effects of pepper spray. Here's my homegrown anecdotal example of why it's a weapon: I remember a friend of my mother's who once accidentally sprayed pepper spray in a corner of her bedroom in Missoula.
She had to move out for a month.
I choose to interpret what's happening in this photo as a fundamental lack of education, understanding and compassion. When I started as a print reporter in the early 1990s, working the East Bay of San Francisco's Bay Area in San Jose and Fremont, I worked with some amazing and committed public safety officers. In my experience, the very best police departments don't certify an officer for the use of a taser or pepper spray without making sure that the officer has been on the receiving end. The officers I reported on knew the weapons they were using, knew what these weapons would do to the human body.
This guy? I'm going to guess, from the way he's strolling through the students here, that this uniformed officer didn't get that kind of training.
Ironically, today this horrible image makes me thankful.
I am thankful that this spray attack didn't prove
fatal to any of these kids --
read the experts Flox quotes on what pepper spray does to the human body.
I am thankful for the First Amendment and citizen journalists (many in BlogHer's community) who reported or
shared this incident immediately, with
brutal images and video, despite the fact that my New York Times showed up Sunday without either.
And I love the country where this doesn't happen every day -- which is why incidents of police brutality being revealed though social media coverage of the Occupy movement is meeting with such a strong, negative public reaction from citizens like me.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
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