would you think ignoring this is dangerous??

[G_j]

Look at this. If Americans, and pointedly, liberals-progressives are indifferent, what will the future hold?

Minnesota Monster Mash: Police-State Zombies in a Dead Republic

by Chris Floyd

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3894314

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/30/195220/250

From: Starhawk
Subject: Republican National Convention--Convergence Center
Raided
Date: Saturday, August 30, 2008, 10:00 AM

By Starhawk

It's Friday night. Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the bluff of the
Mississippi having our first real meeting, when Lisa gets a call. The
cops are raiding the Convergence Center, where we're organizing meetings
and trainings for the protests against the Republican National
Convention. It's not a role play, the caller says. It's real.

Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old
theater we are using for meetings, trainings and social gatherings. I've
spent the last two days doing magical activism trainings, teaching
people how to stay calm and grounded in emergency situations and when
things get chaotic. Now it's time to put the training into practice.
Aaron, a tall, red-headed young man who could be one of my nephews
strides along beside me. 'Are you grounded?' I ask him. He nods, and
runs ahead.

Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead like an arrow, walking,
not running, but still covering the ground quickly. Andy and I trail
behind. We're often street buddies, because we're both big, slow, and
supremely calm and stubborn, willing to wade into almost any situation
and become the immovable object.

We're stopped by a line of cops just before we reach the building. They
refuse to let us through, or to move their van which is blocking
Scarecrow's car. There's an investigation underway, they say, and won't
say more.

Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to a jail solidarity
meeting, ironically enough. So are two very young people who had just
joined our cluster that night. I try calling Brush's cell phone, but get
no reply.

We wait. That's what you do when the cops have guns trained on kids
inside a building. You wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try
to think of useful things to do.

We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to call media. We call
friends who might know politicians and media.

Through the kitchen door, we can see young kids sitting on the floor,
handcuffed. We walk across the street, back, made more phone calls. An
ambulance is parked in front, and the paramedics head into the building,
leaving a gurney ready. Susu, from her car around the corner, reports
that the cops have been grabbing pedestrians from the street, forcing
them down to the ground, handcuffing them.

Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City Council member. She
wants to call the Mayor, Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul
will be as welcoming to protesters as to delegates, but no one has his
home number.

What I have forgotten to tell people at the training is how much of an
action is just this: tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in
your stomach and your feet starting to hurt. Song talks to a helpful
neighbor, who's come over to find out what's happening. He knows where
the mayor lives, says it's just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.

We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could call off the cops.
About five of us troop down there, through the soft night and a
neighborhood of comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs above the
Mississippi. The Mayor's house is a comfortable Dutch Colonial, and
lights were on inside. We decide that just a few of us will go to the
door, so as not to look intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied
middle-aged woman with a sweet face. Ellen is a tiny brunette with a
gap-toothed smile, and Lisa, formidable organizer though she is, looks
slight and unthreatening. The rest of us hang back. Someone opens the
door. Our friends have a conversation with the mayor's wife, who is not
pleased to be visited by constituents late at night, and who tells us we
should call the office. The Mayor, she says, is asleep, and she will not
wake him up.

We think a mayor who was doing his job would get up and go see what's
going on. Nonetheless, we head back to the convergence space.

A protester has been released from the building. A small crowd has
gathered across the street, and Fox News has arrived. They interview
Song, who does her first ever Fox media spot. She tells them the truth -
that people were in there watching movies - a documentary about Meridel
Le Seuer. Meridel would be proud, and I'm glad she is with us in some form.

One by one, protesters trickle out. Now we get more pieces of the story.
The cops burst in, with no warning. They pulled drew their guns on
everyone - including a five year old child who was there with his
mother, forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.

They had a warrant, apparently, from the county, not the city, to search
for 'bomb making materials.' They were searching everyone in the
building, then one by one releasing them as they found nothing.

They continue to find nothing, as we wait through long hours. Meanwhile,
more and more media arrives. These cops are not as creative as the DC
cops during our first mobilization there against the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Those cops confiscated the lunchtime
soup - which included onions and chili powder, claiming they were
materials for home made pepper spray.

We wait until the last person gets out. He's a twenty year old who the
cops have accused of stealing his own backpack‹but apparently they relented.

And now it's morning. I wake up to the news that cops have been raiding
houses where activists are staying, bursting in with the same bogus
warrant and arresting people, including a four year old child. They've
arrested people at the Food Not Bombs house - a group dedicated to
feeding protesters and the homeless. They've arrested others, presumably
just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Poor Peoples' Campaign, which had set up camp at Harriet Island, a
park in the middle of the Mississippi, has also been harassed, its
participants ordered to disperse and its organizers arrested.

Let me be perfectly clear here - all of us here are planning nonviolent
protests against an administration which is responsible for immense
violence, bombs that have destroyed whole countries, and hundreds of
thousands of deaths.

This is the America that eight years of the Bush administration have
brought us, a place where dissent is no longer tolerated, where
pre-emptive strikes have become the strategy of choice for those who
hold power, where any group can be accused of 'bomb making' or
'terrorism' on no evidence whatsoever in order to deter dissent.

Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.

Call the Mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Tell them you are outraged
by these attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People encamp and to
let dissent be heard.

FLOOD THE MAYORS' OFFICES ASAP

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman
651-266-8510

Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak
[phone]
[phone] outside Minneapolis

Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a
leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, author or
coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred
Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest,
The Earth Path.

Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more of her writings and
information on her schedule and activities can be found there.