Hella Nation - Evan Wright [43]
Throughout the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, increasingly frustrated cops began attacking groups of citizens farther from the convention center. Late in the afternoon, spotting a group of protesters in turtle costumes, who were walking in the opposite direction of the convention center, several riot police battered them with clubs, then moved off without arresting any of them. Longshoremen who had marched in the morning reported similar attacks on them as they walked away from the marches. In a residential district far from the convention center, I witnessed a group of riot police hurl several concussion grenades—each of which detonate with enough blast to take out an eye or blow off fingers—near a group of people walking near a supermarket. Police stopped a motorist attempting to videotape police brutality and blasted her with pepper spray. Similar attacks by police continued, though at a diminishing rate, during the next forty-eight hours. Dr. Kirk Murphy, a physician from the UCLA medical school who had come to the protests as an observer, ended up treating dozens of victims for face lacerations, knocked-out teeth, torn gums and broken ribs. He sent one woman in her fifties to the hospital for a detached retina, a result of being shot in the eye with a rubber bullet. “Many of these people weren’t trying to block streets,” says Murphy. “They were trying to get away.”
When I later interviewed Seattle’s assistant police chief, Ed Joiner, he defended the police department’s widespread use of force on the grounds that even the “supposedly nonviolent” protesters were a “willing crowd that prevented the police from apprehending” the anarchists. Joiner also was insistent that Rolling Stone note the sacrifice made by a “selfless Seattle police officer” whose fingers were severely burned when a concussion grenade with a faulty fuse detonated in his hand before he could hurl it at some citizens.
In demonstrations that continued the next day, which were permitted by city authorities on streets far from the convention center, where the WTO conference did eventually commence, anarchists were shunned by other protesters. Teamsters and longshoremen shoved anarchists—or anyone in all black—out of the streets. Wingnut claims a nonviolent protester tried to punch him when he attempted to join a street march.
Wingnut believes that peaceful protesters live in a dreamworld. “People think they have freedom of choice because they can buy six different brands of jeans. If we’re so fucking free, why did the police beat the shit out of all those nonviolent protesters exercising their so-called freedom of speech and so-called freedom to assemble? We live in a police state.”
After I caught up with Wingnut and began to follow him, I witnessed him debate several marchers committed to the principles of nonviolence. One such protester, beaten by police a few days earlier, admitted to Wingnut he fantasized about someday being able to use “nonviolent weapons” against the police—nontoxic smoke grenades, liquid nitrogen spray that would ice over the streets and cause attacking police to fall over.
Wingnut looked at the young man and shook his head in pity. “I tell you what, I is pissed off now.”
FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS before his protest in Seattle, Wingnut had been battling government forces and corporate interests on a daily basis by living in a tree in the Willamette National Forest, a forty-five drive from Eugene, Oregon. The old-growth firs in the Willamette Forest are five hundred to seven hundred years old and can reach a height of 350 feet. Unfortunately, very few of these old-growth trees remain. Much of the forest is covered in young, thirty-foot firs, or worse yet, scrub pines that could hardly qualify as Christmas trees. The giants of the forest have nearly all been chopped down and turned