The Abyss Stares Into You : Where Evil Resides

I felt compelled to reuse Joe Juhasz's blog post title "Where Evil Resides" (blog no longer available) about the incident at Fort Hood two years ago. This weekend New York City experienced something that should remind us to remember atrocities are not something that take place in a foreign land, or something that happened a long time ago. Evil resides here in the US.

Since September 17th there has been a protest on Wall Street called "Occupy Wall Street", where thousands of protestors have flocked to sit, stand, lay down, whatever, and occupy Wall Street in protest of the bailouts and the irresponsibility of how federal funding is conducted in this nation. On Saturday, what started off as protests as usual, a so-called "riot" broke out. At least, this is what the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, and Fox News has called it.

I did not learn until this evening that this "riot" was actually several instances of police brutality. You read that correctly : police brutality. I actually didn't believe it at first and had to do some fact checking and watching the full videos myself. There are few cases where I personally cannot tell if the protestors provoked the NYPD to react as violently as they did. But there is a large number of incidents in those videos that clearly show that the police used physical force that was absolutely unprompted and uncalled for.

These protestors were not just a bunch of whack-jobs. They were, for many Americans, our children. They were college kids and young adults. And they peacefully protested, which is their Constitutional right to do, and had to endure brutality that can only remind us of Rodney King or the African American Rights Activists brutality. And what's more is that most of the unprovoked force was carried out by police in white uniforms, which indicates higher ranks, such as Lieutenant or Sergeant.

So what does all this mean? I have no clue. But it certainly gives us a clear picture of what power can do to police officers. Power can turn people evil, just as it did Lucifer. This is what Philip Zimbardo called the Lucifer Effect. Obviously the Rookies, who do not have a lot of power, did exactly as police officers should do during protests : protect citizens from protestors, and protect protestors from citizens, and to do it calmly and politely. But what do protestors do if the police, who are suppose to protect them, start to attack them?

Is all of this brutality suppose to scare Americans away from protesting? It shouldn't. Some people have commented that the US doesn't know how to protest, and that Greece, London, Egypt, and Syria know how to protest, and that Americans just hold signs. No, Americans protest in the best form of protests : peacefully. We protest in a way that has been shown to us since we were in grade school, the way Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. showed us. Will Americans continue to protest? Or will we let fear grip us against expressing our Constitutional rights? Well, that's all up to Americans.

Some of these shocking videos can be accessed here :
"Is this what you're about?"
Use of Mace
Unsure if this was unprovoked
Unprovoked use of force

"He who fights with monsters [police] should might take care lest he thereby become a monster [criminal]. And if you gaze for long into the abyss [the law], the abyss gazes also into you."
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil : Aphorism 146