When I was 14 years old, I watched an Indian film called Rang De Basanti with a tribe of family friends. I didn't like it very much at the time (spoiler: everyone dies). I burst into tears during this scene of a peaceful candlelight vigil that the police thunder into, indiscriminately beating protestors to break it up. I remember congregating outside the theatre afterwards, the old people denouncing the scene as ridiculous, far-fetched in vilifying the police. They thought that this scene diminished the integrity of the rest of the film.
I never, ever thought that I would come so close to this brutality in real life, repeatedly. Certainly not on my own campus fighting for of all things, decent conditions for university staff. That's just nowhere near hard-core enough to justify today.
It was a harrowing day at the protests, at times shoved and manhandled by the police. I became more upset when I came home to my mother glued to a television screen featuring slightly biased reportage of the event. Leaving aside media bias, the violence was awful. To me, triply so because it featured people I know well and like very much. It seemed to affect my mum too, who turned on me and reproached me for over an hour about my involvement with activism, telling me to mind my own business and just study. She pointed out someone on TV with a piercing, who I've never even met. "OH MY GOD, THIS IS THE KIND OF PEOPLE YOU'RE HANGING AROUND?" I let her overreaction slide because after all, it must be quite frightening and foreign. Considering that in school if I ever got a detention (never did, for the record) that would be a matter of eternal shame to the family, or at least for the next three generations, it's a pretty huge deal to see me potentially caught up on the wrong side of the police. It doesn't help that I once told my parents ASIO might have a file on me.
Every time I try to speak to someone about this, I become completely incoherent and choked. In the interest of finishing my readings, I'm going to pour everything out here and let it land in a messy puddle of despair, anger and bitter disappointment. My faith in (most of) society is hacking its way below ground level.
So, as a collection of teenagers and twentysomethings with signs, chanting slogans about FUNDING EDUCATION (!?), apparently we are threatening enough to justify calling the riot cops ON HORSES. I used to get prickly when I heard the phrase ACAB. It has taken me a long time to understand that the police force is really an inherently unjust institution. I want to wring my hands in despair when I realise there is no mechanism to hold them to account. The state won't protect people against the violence of the state. The police nearly choked someone, they broke someone's leg. Last time they punched people in the face, dragged them down stairs, made five unwarranted arrests. Their response to the situation, in every case that I have been witness to, is hugely disproportionate. They have incited every instance of violence. Besides this, I know of a friend who they winked at and today I was actually catcalled. Being objectified at any time is bad but by policemen on ego trips actually makes me sick.
It doesn't even matter that we film them, nothing even happens. It hasn't happened for the thousands of Indigenous people who have died in lock-up and it won't now. It becomes truly horrific when this meets the sweeping social consensus that they are "the good guys", just "doing their job". Since when did a "job" redeem such barbarity? People's reaction against demonstrating dissent, even on an issue that most people agree on (outside the Labor government), is scary. Once, someone (who got a really, really high ATAR) even told me that it was out of my place to raise a squeak because it's Spence's university to do what he wants. I don't even know where to begin with a statement like that.
I thought I lived in a more sophisticated world than what has been revealed to me over the last few months. Much disappointment.
I never, ever thought that I would come so close to this brutality in real life, repeatedly. Certainly not on my own campus fighting for of all things, decent conditions for university staff. That's just nowhere near hard-core enough to justify today.
It was a harrowing day at the protests, at times shoved and manhandled by the police. I became more upset when I came home to my mother glued to a television screen featuring slightly biased reportage of the event. Leaving aside media bias, the violence was awful. To me, triply so because it featured people I know well and like very much. It seemed to affect my mum too, who turned on me and reproached me for over an hour about my involvement with activism, telling me to mind my own business and just study. She pointed out someone on TV with a piercing, who I've never even met. "OH MY GOD, THIS IS THE KIND OF PEOPLE YOU'RE HANGING AROUND?" I let her overreaction slide because after all, it must be quite frightening and foreign. Considering that in school if I ever got a detention (never did, for the record) that would be a matter of eternal shame to the family, or at least for the next three generations, it's a pretty huge deal to see me potentially caught up on the wrong side of the police. It doesn't help that I once told my parents ASIO might have a file on me.
Every time I try to speak to someone about this, I become completely incoherent and choked. In the interest of finishing my readings, I'm going to pour everything out here and let it land in a messy puddle of despair, anger and bitter disappointment. My faith in (most of) society is hacking its way below ground level.
So, as a collection of teenagers and twentysomethings with signs, chanting slogans about FUNDING EDUCATION (!?), apparently we are threatening enough to justify calling the riot cops ON HORSES. I used to get prickly when I heard the phrase ACAB. It has taken me a long time to understand that the police force is really an inherently unjust institution. I want to wring my hands in despair when I realise there is no mechanism to hold them to account. The state won't protect people against the violence of the state. The police nearly choked someone, they broke someone's leg. Last time they punched people in the face, dragged them down stairs, made five unwarranted arrests. Their response to the situation, in every case that I have been witness to, is hugely disproportionate. They have incited every instance of violence. Besides this, I know of a friend who they winked at and today I was actually catcalled. Being objectified at any time is bad but by policemen on ego trips actually makes me sick.
It doesn't even matter that we film them, nothing even happens. It hasn't happened for the thousands of Indigenous people who have died in lock-up and it won't now. It becomes truly horrific when this meets the sweeping social consensus that they are "the good guys", just "doing their job". Since when did a "job" redeem such barbarity? People's reaction against demonstrating dissent, even on an issue that most people agree on (outside the Labor government), is scary. Once, someone (who got a really, really high ATAR) even told me that it was out of my place to raise a squeak because it's Spence's university to do what he wants. I don't even know where to begin with a statement like that.
I thought I lived in a more sophisticated world than what has been revealed to me over the last few months. Much disappointment.
