RAT Cheese it, the Fuzz!

["William Houts" <houts.w@ghc.org>]

Here's a little thing I wrote to a friend about the cops.  It might be interesting, or not.


    --Bill

—-

...I don't like cops on principle, but they started out  being respectful.

Of course, they didn't end that way.  Unprovoked by anything more heinous than name-calling, they started firing tear gas cannisters into the crowd.  This  is what injected fear and anger into a situation, which needn't have gone beyond jeers and catcalls.  People who otherwise would have been content to sit at intersections were furious to be assaulted this way, and I think that some of the responsibility for the stupid acts of thievery and violence can be laidd squarely at the feet of the Seattle police. 

Here's the thing that I don't think most people get about the police.  They don't mean to be evil, most of them aren't consciously out to smash faces and use weapons.  But the psychology of cops is rooted in fear, anger and pain:  they became cops in the first place because it seemed the most effective way of dealing with a sense of personal helplessness and terror.  These guys --of course most of them are men-- were smacked around by their Daddy's when they were 7.   Or they were thrashed in the schoolyard.  They're violated people to a man, and guns and truncheons sprout from their hands as a direct consequence, like dark flowers.

When they hear protesters calling them Nazis and mind-slaves, that pathetic terrorized seven year old wakes up from his traumatized slumber and now he has access to weapons. 

Of course it's not right or justified.  But it's easy to understand, like something out of a Bill Nye science program.  Why are they so violent?  Because they're so scared.