Freedom of speech news
I find it a tad ironic that three settlements in favor of RNC 8 protestors came about in the same time frame that the United States government renewed the Patriot Act, which continues the status quo of limiting civil liberties of people who dare to question the powers that be.
I covered the 2008 Republican National Convention just as I was starting to think of myself as a journalist. Getting arrested kind of solidified the deal for me. The experience was eye-opening about the extent of law enforcement and security lining the streets during every march. The raids prior to the convention, the journalists, legal observers and other law-abiding citizens getting arrested right and left indicated to me that this was not a situation where free speech was tolerated.
As an arrestee myself, I felt a bit vindicated by the settlements, though they didn’t include injunctive relief, preventing law enforcement from behaving in the same way in the future. I should note that these people are not my friends; I do not belong to their political groups nor do I necessarily agree with their political beliefs. I simply believe that they have a right to those political beliefs.
I know the argument: oh well, what about the people that were breaking windows and making bombs? I got an email about just today repeating those arguments. Well, I never made any bombs, and neither did any of the other journalists who got arrested, or the legal observers or any of the peaceful protesters who got arrested.
And if you look at this week's settlements, they were cases that ended with the protesters receiving money because they were not at fault when their free speech was violated. In one case, their home was raided for a mysterious box that was thought to contain guns: in fact, it contained vegan pamphlets. In another case, Mick Kelly was shot at for simply participating in a protest, and in the third case, the protesters had all their literature seized—literature that they had planned on distributing during the RNC . If we want to live in a free society, we need to make it permissible to assemble in protest, and to speak and write freely about political beliefs.
Sadly, the settlements are most likely being paid for by insurance money. The city of St. Paul and other law enforcement agencies knew in advance that there would be lawsuits because of their actions during the RNC, and took out insurance as a precaution. What this says to me is that despite the settlements, there is no indication that during the next presidential election, the same kind of squashing of free speech won’t happen again.
After all, Congress just renewed, and the president signed the extension of the Patriot Act, which allows for wiretapping, spying on library, bookstore and business records, and surveillance of suspects who aren’t necessarily tied to a recognized terrorist group. While I understand the need for security, I’m concerned about the scapegoating that seems to be the norm against groups that are targeted just because their political beliefs fall left of center.
It makes me believe that currently, freedom of speech is in fact an endangered species, and we must, as a society, be watchful of any time these pillars of our free country become threatened.
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Sheila Regan (sheila@tcdailyplanet.net) is a Minneapolis theater artist and freelance writer.
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Comments
speech, action, solidarity
"I know the argument: oh well, what about the people that were breaking windows and making bombs? I got an email about just today repeating those arguments. Well, I never made any bombs, and neither did any of the other journalists who got arrested, or the legal observers or any of the peaceful protesters who got arrested. "
This is a problematic response to me, first as someone who helped in a small way to organize resistance to the Democrat/Republican agenda during the RNC, and second as someone who almost went into journalism but decided not to, largely due to the reason I'm about to describe.
The comment is worth considering: What about the people that were breaking windows and making bombs? Yeah, what about them? They're the people and corporations basically breaking out windows in order to board up houses by the dozens every day in the Twin Cities, while hundreds of people are homeless and thousands more don't have affordable housing. They're the people and governments bombing Iraq and Afghanistan still after almost 10 years now, having killed hundreds of thousands already for nothing, and they're the hypocrisy of the Obama administration and his right-wing allies asking on the one hand for peace in the Middle East and on the other refusing to condemn yesterday's massacre of unarmed, nonviolent protesters by the Israeli military, with two dozen killed and hundreds wounded.
The people who broke windows at the RNC did so in a very very small but justified response to the overwhelmingly greater violence - not just the violence represented by Republican policies, but that which they faced on the streets of the St. Paul that weekend at the hands of the police! And, if we care to look back, those couple who make "bombs" - molotov cocktails, a pretty puny bomb, really - did so at the instruction of an FBI informant.
Arguing that "I didn't do those things!" ignores the reasons it was important to protest the RNC in the first place, and why it is important to continue to resist everyday police and government terrorism. It also fails to show much-needed solidarity, or even a shared humanity, with people who did do those things, and had well-thought out reasons for doing so. Sure, freedom of speech sounds like a great idea, but the reality is that it only exists when it's convenient, and what matters a lot more is the content of that speech and, even more than that, the actions we take to create a tomorrow we want to live in.
And that gets to the heart of the journalism question for me. Back when I considered journalism as a career path - and then, not as a career path, but something to do in my free time - I couldn't help but see the reality of repression against people fighting for a better world, and had to ask: If I don't consider these people my friends, why not? If I don't support their political groups, and belong to at least a couple of them, why not? If they have beliefs I don't agree with, why not--because I genuinely don't agree, or because I'm scared they might put me and all my privilege at risk?
The answers I came up with convinced me that it's not enough to simply extrol the values of free speech, and practice them once in a while. What's need is organizing and action--sometimes illegal action, whenever a law is unjust, and that's a hell of a lot of laws. So with these settlements coming out, I hope people remember the fundamental reason why -- because these people were people pretty much like everyone else who dared to act to tackle the roots of problems, not just to talk and not just to push for reforms.
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