Kid, you don’t even KNOW from violence
And that’s too bad as far as I’m concerned, because she could really, really use a crash course in it.
I’m a student who was arrested at a Columbia protest. I am not a hero, nor am I a villain.
New York Mayor Eric Adams has said that there were no incidents of violence. That’s not true.
Yeah, whyn’tcha eat a whole bag of dicks there, Bimbelina. To my way of thinking, the violence hasn’t started until the nightsticks have come out.
Tuesday night, two dozen Columbia University students linked arms in front of the student-occupied Hamilton Hall at dusk. I was one of them.
We sang with broken yet mighty voices, “Your people are my people, your people are mine; your people are my people, our struggles align.” We were a group of activists of differing faiths and none, friends and strangers united, linking arms with one another and, in spirit, with the generations of courageous students who came before us. Electricity crackled through the air from the growing protests echoing just beyond the university gates – gates I had just moments ago slipped through and sprinted from like a bat out of hell.
We knew we were likely to be arrested for being on campus despite the university-mandated shelter-in-place order, but chose we to run into the fire anyway.
As a human chain, draped in keffiyehs and shaking like leaves in the autumn wind, we sang with hushed tones and breathed deeply as hundreds of New York police officers armed with flash grenades and pepper spray marched toward us like a military parade.
As they approached from multiple directions, we sang with frail and cracking voices, “This love that I have, the world didn’t give it to me; the world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away,” as officers threatened student journalists with arrest, presumably to ensure minimal coverage of the aggression they were about to exert.
Students in dorms craned their necks and shakily stretched their iPhones out windows to observe the impending attack.
We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls and slammed us into the hallowed ground of brick and concrete. But unlike rag dolls, we bleed, we crack, we bruise, we feel.
Police at Columbia were anything but professional
Once dispersed, I held my hands up to show I was neither resisting nor armed. In response, I was handled brutally by police alongside other students being shoved down concrete steps saying with shameless condescension, “Watch your step.” We were arrested, bound and shuttled down to 1 Police Plaza, where the New York Police Department had a pizza party prepared for arresting officers.
They threw us in cells like animals – cells where the only toilets women could use lacked any privacy and where our naked bodies were in plain sight to throngs of male officers.
Aw, poor widdle dawlin’. Ain’t much fun being in the slam, huh? And bad as jail is, even that isn’t a patch on actual, y’know, prison. Later in the article, this deluded, pig-ign’ant young ‘un manages to come off as at least somewhat reasonable, if still ignorant, blind, and historically illiterate.
On Saturday, I hosted a Passover Seder at my cramped Manhattan apartment for many of my closest friends. Representing many faiths and none, we broke bread together and celebrated the Jewish liberation from slavery and a broken, unjust system of oppression.
On Tuesday I was shackled and arrested as part of the campus movement that many in the news media are calling “antisemitic.” It isn’t.
Critically, our fellow Jewish students are not the villains in this story. They are our friends, our family, our blood, our fellow foot soldiers. Like us, they bleed, they crack, they bruise, they feel. At no point have the student organizers called for or promoted violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters. We are calling to end the violence and genocide against our Palestinian brothers and sisters.
“Genocide,” yet. “Genocide,” yet AGAIN. Know who really IS calling for genocide—truly, literally, and without embarrassment or hesitation—means every word they say when they do, and has tried over and over again to get the genocide ball a-rolling? Three guesses, first two don’t count.
I realize you’re severely handicapped in your quest for knowledge by not having any non-Lefty-idjit teachers to ask about it; being surrounded by ideologically-rigid, obstinate clods wearing the mask of “educators” at your overrated Leftybaby factory makes it a tough row for any sincere, open-minded knowledge-seeker to hoe. But I beg, don’t let that stop you. Cast off the shackles of arrogance-in-ignorance native to callow youth; stop the sob-sister whining when your criminal actions bring consequences you are in no way prepared to shoulder; and, as Minor Threat suggests in the song “12XU,” flex your head.
Trust me, girl, you’ll be a much better person for it. No easy, obvious path is ever worth following, likewise an angry, destructive mob.
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