There’s a video making the rounds this work-short week of activist journalist (as opposed to just a plain ol’ journalist, who merely reports the news) Amy Goodman being arrested outside the RNC in St. Paul while trying to inquire about the fate of two colleagues who were injured by the police. If you haven’t watched it, please do. I’ll wait…
…done? Good. Now, my question: Ms. Goodman is by all accounts an activist with a lot of experience attending events like the RNC, where there’s a large military or police presence (or both) standing by in case of trouble (or making trouble, in some cases). In other words, she knows the drill, and one would think she understands that her press pass does not afford her the right to push past a police cordon after repeatedly being asked to return to the sidewalk. Why would she force the police to arrest her by refusing their orders to simply step back a couple feet? I mean, unless she’s looking to create a story. Her account of the events caught on the video:
“They took me, handcuffed me immediately, said, ‘You’re under arrest,’ ” Goodman said. “They pushed me to the ground. I said, ‘You can clearly see I have all the proper credentials, I have my security clearance for the (convention) floor.’ “
The video clearly shows that 1) she was not handcuffed “immediately,” but only after trying to push past police, and 2) she was not pushed to the ground (unless that happened after the video was shut off).
Whether there were abuses by the police taking place in other areas outside the convention center is beyond the scope of this video. It sounds like there were. The fact that there were a couple hundred self-proclaimed anarchists running around creating all sorts of mayhem didn’t help matters. I’m not an apologist for the police, but Ms. Goodman clearly had the opportunity here to stay calm in the face of an overwhelming police presence. It could easily have been avoided. What happened was that she was arrested for physically confronting riot police after repeatedly being asked by them to stand back. What she wants us to believe happened is that she was simply standing on the sidewalk, asking for information, when the police grabbed her, arrested her, and threw her down.
Leah and I work with our four-year-old daughter every day to teach her that there are consequences for her actions. We tell her not to walk up to unfamiliar dogs and start twisting their ears. And when the time comes, we’ll teach her that she needs to stand up for what she believes in. She needs to express herself when she sees people being treated in an unfair or unjust way, and she needs to try to help people who can’t help themselves. By then, hopefully she’ll understand that there’s sometimes a price to pay for doing what’s right (and especially for doing what’s wrong), and that adults (usually) accept that price in the process of acting according to their beliefs. Amy Goodman took a bad situation (her colleagues being injured by overbearing police) and turned it into a worse one by getting herself arrested. It’s important that she was at the convention to cover the treatment of anti-war protesters, but that we should take her arrest as evidence of the police run amok at the RNC is, in my opinion, a stretch, and it diminishes the story she was there to cover as well as the personal sacrifices made by her colleagues.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying I won’t be invited to Decorah for Thanksgiving this year.