DISSENT
So ok....my life and world so to speak has been completely turned upside down due to last week's activities.......For those of you who don't last week, on the 12th of April, the "National day of Action" against Howard's current policy on on student/workers unionism and welfare - was staged. For most part the demonstrations were peaceful, however here in Sydney 27 students were violently detained and arrested. I was one of them. This has completely fucked me over......
Not in the way that i now fear having a black mark against my name and permanent record for the rest of my life, but has made me question the very core of my beliefs surrounding society, and democracy in general. I dont know if it s out of ignorance or a deluded sense of security that i have createed for myself, but i never thought that it would happen to me. Despite being exposed to occurances all over the world of activist being detained in place such as France, or seeing the violences on the very streets of Sydney (both from civilians and police) i still felt somewhat safe from that......How quickly that dissolves into nothing once place in the frontlines.
What started out as a peaceful protest, ended up being a violent clash between the students and the police - the violence coming completely from the police side. Whilst this sounds cliche, the fact that i am blaming the violence completely on the police - i do so in all honesty. I on my part know what i saw, and what i was made to feel, to confidently say that those fuckers abused the powers they have been given.....
This confrontation with the state has left me battered and bruised and has got me questioning what the fuck......Is our society that fucked that whenever we want to show dissent we are treated this way? Some people will probably answer back saying the action we took by sitting down rather than continuing down the street was illegal and thus we were asking for it. But then how are we to get out point across? If we had continued on we would have shown this fucked up government that we complied with its policy, that we will play by its rules (no wonder a large body of NOLS people decided to just move on......i forget, which party is in power NSW?). How can we achieve anything by passively complying? Others will still say that we must use the system to endemically change it.....but how can we....it seems irrational using a system's way of changing things to change itself......
Forgive my ranting but I've been left dis-illusioned by this concept called democracy. It conjures fluidity and free movement in the mind, DEMOCRACY - the rule of the deme - the people, where things can be up for discussion, up for debate. But when you are being detained by a cops in blue jump suits twice the size of you, when your wrists are being twisted in such a way that you think they are going to fall off, everything is in plain black and white. And in the eyes of the police force, you are the black, and nothing you can do or say will change that.....
I had so many things planned for this mid semester break, to get further ahead with my uni work, yet now all i can think of is my worth as a person, and my rights as an individual within this society. Due to the current political climate we must be vigilant...but of whom or what. The people or those that rule us.....