When You're a Protester, the Color of Your Skin Is All That Matters
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a50106/oregon-militia-verdict/
Yes, there is a cruel, stupid irony about living in a country when, on the same day, a bunch of gun-toting rubes who have less understanding of the Constitution than a wombat does of nuclear fusion get acquitted after an armed takeover of federal property in Oregon while, half a country away, peaceful protesters doing nothing but praying on land to which they have a right guaranteed by treaty get rousted, roughed up, and hauled away by a militarized police force acting largely at the behest of a private company. For those of you who are sorry you missed the last Gilded Age, hang in there. You're going to get your wish fairly soon.
The white privilege embedded in the two competing narratives is almost too garish to contemplate, and it is beyond argument. In Oregon, people with a history of armed sedition were the beneficiaries of a clear case of jury nullification. Even the counsels for the defense had sharply smacked gobs on them when the verdicts were read. From The Washington Post:
"I had been telling my client you can count on being convicted," said Matthew Schindler, a lawyer for one of the men on trial for the armed takeover of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. "You don't walk into a federal court and win a case like this. It just doesn't happen…Defendant Shawna Cox issued a call to action: "Wake up, America, and help us restore the Constitution. Don't sleep with your head in the sand."...
But, at the same time, one of them was shot and killed during the action. I may be alone in this but I think the killing of Leroy Finicum by federal agents made the nullification a lot easier. (And "suicide by cop" has the dangerous potential of becoming as big an all-purpose alibi as "a threatening motion" has become.) Treating the water-protectors on the prairie as though you were British paratroopers patrolling the Falls Road in Belfast in the late 1970s is an overreaction as potentially deadly as it is obviously stupid. The vested interest in a quiet, docile population is sadly bipartisan.
There is little question that, since the political process is manifestly incapable of dealing with the climate crisis, and since the crisis itself is ongoing and becoming more critical by the day, it seems inevitable that any pushback against the forces contributing to it is largely going to come from outside the political institutions, from the streets and the prairies and the badlands beyond the Beltway.