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tatestripedsweater · 4 years ago

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Perfect Pair

Plot: After doing odd jobs around town to save up for a home, Jimmy finds out from a friend who caught you sneaking back into camp.

Domestic Male Reader x Jimmy?? Maybe saving up enough money and buying a little house and wanting to ask him to move in with them but being too nervous (until someone from the camp says something maybe n thats how jimmy finds out?) - Requested by @darlingkitt

Wordcount: 1,890

Warning: Discrimination (‘Freaks’), Mentions of Homophobia (Not much)

AHS Taglist: @tatesimper @mxlti-fand0m-imaginess @darlingkitt @mrs-march-ahs @kitwalker02 @satanscomplex @mossybank @cleanup-aisle5 - Let me know if you want to be added!

A/N: The plot is slightly different but I still hope you like it!

The mud under your fingernails was worth it, had to keep repeating the words ‘do it for Jimmy’ in your head. The money wasn’t great for these small little garden jobs, and people often gave you dirty looks due to you being associated with the Freak Show. But it had to be done, for Jimmy.

You knew how badly he wanted to leave the show, to have some sort of normality in his life. He worked so hard and for people to shit all over him, to treat him like crap annoyed you to high heaven.

“You nearly done?” The voice of the male homeowner could be heard from behind you, his stare burning into the back of your head. Taking a deep breath to compose yourself, you went to speak but soon got interrupted by the same man. “Look at me when you speak freak.”

Biting your tongue to stop yourself from saying something insulting, you stood up from the grass floor to look at him. Mud smudged on your jeans and white vest, sweat forming on your vest from being out in the sun most of the day.

“You know what, screw this.” You threw the garden tools and climbed over the wooden wall, ignoring the profanities and shouting coming from the ignorant male who had you working for him. Part of you felt bad since you knew you needed the money, but there was only so much a person could take.

The sign across the street caught your attention, it almost bringing you to tears. There was a picture of a family: A male and a female along with a small child. ‘Perfect Homes for Perfect Families’ was the slogan. The fact you and Jimmy could never have a family with one another broke your heart. Two males in a romantic and or sexual relationship was known as taboo, something to hide.

The two of you had met when your car had broken down in the middle of nowhere, he was sat on his bike when he found you kicking the wheels of your ride.

“Hey, don’t take it out on the car bud.” Jimmy chuckled as he walked over to you, your car wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon so by the looks of it neither were you. “Let’s have a look under the hood.”

The both of you coughed as soon as he opened the hood of your car, smoke engulfing you both. You along with Jimmy had to step away from the car, it was obvious you weren’t a car person or mechanic. Anyone would’ve noticed the smoke but not you.

“I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on fire yet.” Once the coughing had subsided you looked over at Jimmy as he spoke. You took in his appearance and couldn’t help but feel yourself go bashful; he was beautiful.

“Guess I’m one of the lucky ones” Shrugging at his comment since that is all you could think of saying in the moment. Not many people knew about your sexuality, in fact the only person that knew was yourself. “I’m Y/N.” You noticed the hesitation as you held out your hands, your eyes soon meeting his gloved ones.

“Jimmy, Jimmy Darlin’.” He shook your hand and the leather against your skin forced you to bite your bottom lip, it was still warm. Probably from the engine of Jimmy’s motorcycle.

He had noticed your lip bite but decided against it on bringing it up, Jimmy could tell you were attracted to him, but he wasn’t going to shame you for it. He had been shamed enough for being different.

“Lovely to meet you.”

Walking back into camp, you tried to steer clear of anyone so they wouldn’t ask you any questions of your appearance. You often did these jobs at the dead of night or in the early morning as to not raise any suspicion, but that clearly did not work out for you.

‘’Jesus, what happened to you?’’ Of course, Eve was awake so early in the morning. There would be no way you’d be able to hide from her what you were doing, she was a very observant person. Raising her eyebrow as if to wait for a response, you sighed heavily before speaking.

‘’I’m saving up money, been doing these stupid jobs for assholes.’’ Your voice was quiet, but it was enough for her to hear, she knew how much both you and Jimmy wanted out of the show, so she wasn’t that surprised when you told her this. ‘’I found this house, it’s lovely but it's expensive’’.

‘’Have you told Jimmy?’’ The silence was enough of an answer for Eve. Of course, you have not. He would not like that you were doing jobs like this, especially for something he wanted. ‘’Well, he isn’t going to be happy, remember what happened last time you tried to do this?’’

‘’What do you mean?’’ Jimmy looked at you with a confused expression on his face, he wasn’t used to people doing things for him, so this came as a shock to him. He looked at your appearance, you were covered in mud and some car oil.

‘’I know how much you want to move away from this life. I thought if I did a few jobs around town and earn money it might help.’’ You were expecting him to be happy, so when the frown appeared on Jimmy’s face you felt your heart drop.

‘’No. Stop doing the jobs, you’re going to hurt yourself or end up getting into a fight.’’ He wasn’t wrong. The last time someone had insulted Jimmy, you had punched them square in the face. They deserved it. ‘’We can get through this just stop doing all these jobs, we will figure something out okay?’’

Nodding at Eve, you huffed heavily. You just wanted the best for him, Jimmy deserved all the happiness in the world, but he refused anyone that was willing to give that to him. You debated on if it would be a good idea to walk into the camper van you both shared dressed like this, he would surely figure it out.

“Go on by the lake for a wash, I’ll keep Jimmy busy.’’ Smiling softly, you made your way to the lake with the wet grass under your bare feet. The small campervan that both you and Jimmy shared had a small shower within it, so it was hell trying to wash yourself in there.

Eve had knocked onto the window that was shining through Jimmy’s bedroom as soon as you left, she knew you were doing it for his own good but he had a right to know where you were going and what you were doing. Groaning at the knock on the window, Jimmy tried to shut it out by putting the pillow over his head.

“Go away..” It came out more like a grumble from his lips but it was enough for Eve to hear. With her knocking a lot harder on his window, Jimmy had no choice but to get up from his slumber. “Okay I’m coming, keep your socks on!”

The morning sun heated up Jimmy’s chest as he opened the door, he was only in a pair of boxers so he clearly didn’t care who was on the other side of the door. Eve wasn’t surprised at all with the sight. She had seen worse.

“It’s about Y/N.” The moment that left her lips Jimmy was wide awake. In fact he hasn’t actually seen you all morning, not that he would remember as he had been sound asleep. He was just used to waking up to your presence.

Jimmy had motioned Eve in as he went to go put some clothes on, she couldn’t help but look around the room with a soft smile. There were mundane items around that showed Jimmy didn’t live here alone: Two coffee/tea mugs already set out, your jacket still laying on the chair from the night before, not to mention underwear on the floor as well.

“What about him?” Jimmy asked with a puzzled expression on his face, with him now all dressed and smelling somewhat of the cheap musk cologne he usually wore.

“He’s done it again, doing odd jobs around town.” Jimmy wasn’t at all surprised when she told him, in fact he had a hunch that’s what you were up to again. Jimmy knew you meant well and that you wanted out just as much as him, but he didn’t want you doing all the work. He certainly couldn’t go back to what he used to do. “Y/N is down by the lake.. Take him some fresh clothes, idiot forgot to grab some.”

You were an idiot, but Jimmy’s idiot. Grabbing what you usually wore during hot days like this, he made his way to the lake where you were stood in. You let out a cry when Jimmy threw a bar of soap at you since you had forgotten that aspect as well.

“Ass.” You could only watch your boyfriend undress once you had called him that, he was certainly a god to look at. Even if he didn’t see it himself. “How did you know I was here?”

“Eve..” Of course, you should’ve known the answer already. Jimmy noticed the look on your face as he stepped into the river, his own clothes piled on top of your own. “I’m not mad, I’m not happy. But not mad.”

Before you could even speak, Jimmy kissed you. The both of you knew you’d be safe to show your affections to one another here, it wasn’t like anyone came to these parts anyway. The only people that knew were the members of the camp, they accepted you as their own.

“I need you to promise me when you start new jobs you’ll tell me, okay?” Jimmy needed reassurance that he knew where you were, the last time he didn’t you came home with a black eye and a broken nose. That was only due to a bunch of greasers.

“I promise, but I’m still going to save up until we find the perfect home.” You were stubborn, but of course Jimmy knew that. He wouldn’t have you any other way, just like you wouldn’t have Jimmy any different. “Deal Mr Darling?” You asked in a teasing tone since you knew what that name did to him, especially if you were both alone.

“Deal. Now kiss me before I loose control”

___

“So.. what’d you think?” Looking over at Jimmy, you couldn’t help but smile widely at the home that was now yours. “I mean it has a lovely view, and a spare room for y-our mum.” The both of you had decided to play the brother card, as no one would suspect why you two lived with one another if that’s what you told them.

“It’s perfect.” Jimmy smiled and was careful with what way he touched you, this was due to the man that was showing you around the property. Jimmy had his hands covered with his trademark leather gloves as he went to sign the form. It was really happening.

“It’s all yours!” The man looked at you both with a big smile, which Jimmy and you soon returned. This was the start of something special. You could feel it.

#american horror story #american horror story gifs #ahs #ahs gifs #ahs imagine #american horror story imagine #ahs imagines #jimmy darling

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bucks-little-hop · 5 years ago

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it cannot wait, I'm yours.

Day 1 of @buddiefirstkissweek

Prompt: Related to Pride

Read on AO3

Despite living there for several years, Buck had never actually attended L.A pride. He usually flew to New York City to celebrate with friends there. However, with T.K. being in Austin, they had agreed to go to each other’s Prides together. The only issue was T.K. couldn’t get off until the second day, and Buck didn’t exactly want to go alone. His first choice would have been Hen, but she got stuck working as well. He realized that he needed more friends than just his co-workers as he scrolled through his phone trying to figure out who to call. He could ask Maddie, but she would probably spend the whole time trying to find a cute guy for him to date. He loved the support, but sometimes he didn’t need to be reminded he was single when all his other friends had a significant other.

He thought about texting Michael, but they had talked last time he was over at the Grant-Nash household, and Michael was going with his new boyfriend. Buck was ecstatic that Michael finally found a boyfriend. It was about time. He deserved it. If Buck was his type, Buck for sure would have tried to date him.

Wait, Josh was single and gay. He was probably going to pride, and likely wouldn’t want to go alone either. Perfect solution. He sent a text off and got a quick response before going to get changed. Normally Buck dressed pretty conservatively, but this was the one time a year he really let himself go all out. He put on his crop top that said ‘if you play for both teams you always win.’ It was probably his favourite shirt, he loved the slogan. He basically worked out for a living, and he was glad that crop tops highlighted that. He threw on his ripped jeans that were just on the right side of too tight, and had one rip that went a little too far up his thigh. He was lacing up his pride Dr. Martens when he heard a knock on the door.

“So glad you could make it.” Buck pulled Josh into a hug. It was a bit of a surprise at first how well the two got along. They even went out on a date together before realizing they were better off friends. The teasing they would have gotten from Maddie would have been unbearable if it had actually worked out.

“I’m just happy I have someone to go with now. I brought the face paints!” Josh immediately grabbed one of Buck’s kitchen chairs and pushed him down into it. Josh was already sporting a gay flag painted under his eye, and he clearly had plans to put on on Buck as well. “I know you care about your hair, but really I think we need some glitter in it. It’s the spray kind that comes out easy I swear.”

Buck rolled his eyes but sat still while he got a bisexual pride flag painted under his right eye. “You can do the glitter, but I’m showering at your place. I’m not trying to deal with clogged pipes because of it.”

“Fair deal. We better get going, or we won’t ever be able to get an Uber downtown.”

******

L.A. Pride was somehow exactly like NYC Pride, and completely different. All the elements of pride were there. The drag queens who were performing up a storm, the baby gays who it was clear this was their first pride, and those who had been going to prides longer than Buck had been alive. There were definitely more west coast vibes to it. Either way, Buck was thrilled to be at Pride, and happy to have a friend along with him.

The two wandered through the marketplace, stopping every now and then to buy a couple of items. The two spent a couple of minutes laughing when they found the LAFD calendar, except they were able to get any face photoshopped on all the firefighters. They got one with a photo of Chim sneezing on it for Maddie’s birthday. It was even better because it actually had Chim in it. There were some advantages to Buck not having won that year. Josh saw a lesbian couple from work, and dragged Buck over there to introduce him to them. Buck was known for both being Maddie’s younger brother, but also the firefighter whose name got mentioned more than it probably should have been. His dumbass heroics got him far more recognition than they should have been.

Buck saw a familiar face in the crowd, and they made eye contact before they turned away. He let Josh know he was going to talk to them. He knew Josh would be safe with his friends for the moment.

“Now Athena, I know you’re not just going to ignore me like that.” Buck jokingly called out to her.

“I wish I could say I was ignoring you, but I owe Hen money unfortunately. You just had to get a boyfriend.” Athena sounded almost disappointed,

“What Josh? No we aren’t dating, we’re just here as friends. Actually, you’ve met him before I think. He works with Maddie.” Buck wasn’t offended about the fact she thought he and Josh were dating, he didn’t like the thought of the bet. “Any other important bets going on about my life?”

Athena had the decency to look a little ashamed. “Well there was a bet about whether or not you had a secret boyfriend. Hen said yes, I said no. Mainly because you would have told Maddie, who would have accidentally told Chim, who would have immediately texted Hen, who would have shown up at my house with a bottle of wine to gossip. We all know secrets don’t exist in the family.”

Buck knew she had a point. Secrets didn’t exist, and because of that betting run rampant. Hell, he had won $50 on the bet of when Micheal was going to announce his new boyfriend. “How much do you have on it, because I’m willing to lie to split the winnings. Hen deserves some payback after how often she keeps winning.” Buck was never above a small lie. He could just say they broke up in a week because it wasn’t working out.

“$200. Go collect your fake boyfriend over there and we’ll go find the 118. They’ve got a tent set up to hand out water.” Athena nodded her head towards Josh.

Buck didn’t think that they would actually be there. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of being bi, but he had never officially come out to the 118. Hen knew because they ran into each other at a gay bar, and Athena knew because she got called to pick them up when they were too drunk to drive. “Alright yeah, I can drop all my stuff off there too. They’re all going to be too scared to look through the bags.” Even though there was nothing bad in them, the fire fam was going to assume there was.

Buck walked back to Josh and explained what was going on. Buck owed Josh an expensive bottle of wine for it, but he was totally down to mess with the 118. The wine was to placate him from any of the text Maddie would send him after Chim texted her. On the way over they all chatted. Buck agreed to bring May with him on the second day. Athena wanted her to go with someone who was more responsible, but also not afraid to throw a punch. May was like a little sister to him, and Buck was fully ready to square up for her. Plus, T.K. and his new boyfriend would defend her too. Actually, based on what he had heard about Carlos, he would get along with Athena. Buck made a note to introduce the two. As they got closer to the tent, Buck put his arm around Josh’s waist. With Buck being such a tactile guy, it wasn’t the first time he had held Josh like this. He allowed himself to be more touchy feely with Josh because he knew the other was okay with it.

“Hey guys, this is Josh. He’s an operator with Maddie. I’m sure you’ve heard his lovely voice on the phone a few times.” Buck spoke to the 118 with a grin on his face. He could feel the fact that all eyes were on him. Hen scowled at him and then Athena. She pulled out her wallet to pay up.

Buck leaned down to talk to Josh, and softened his voice to talk. “Why don’t you go talk to Chim about Maddie’s surprise stories. I’ll deal with all the questions.” There was zero reason for him to do that, other than to sell the idea. Buck had big plans for that $100.

Josh walked over to Chim, and pulled him aside as the rest of the 118 descended on Buck.

“Listen Buck, not that I’m not proud of you for this, but you really had to wear your best outfit the day I’m not with you?” There was no actual malice behind Hen’s voice. She had made teasing Buck into an art form.

“Hen this is a go big or go home event, and I certainly wasn’t going to go home.” Buck gave her one of his patented golden retriever smiles, before he pulled a small enamel lesbian flag pin out of his pocket and held it out to her. “I got you a present to make it up to you at least. Figured you could wear it while you work to show support.”

Hen took the pin, seeming to accept the apology gift. She walked over to Athena, the two already starting to gossip.

Bobby cleared his throat. “So Buck, you know you could have told us before. We would have supported you.” He was clearly into his dad mode, trying to approach the situation delicately.

“I mean you never came out as straight to the station. I’ve told you about people I’ve gone on dates with. If you assumed Jordan, Addison, and Kennedy were girls, that's on you.” Buck viewed Bobby as a father, but sometimes he was very much a straight cis man. They were working on changing his set views. But he supported them all and that was what mattered the most to them.

“Buck, can we talk, over there. It cannot wait.” Eddie’s voice was tense, and Buck didn’t like how it had sounded. Buck nodded and followed him, not trusting any words that would come out of his mouth. Buck was fine with Hen, he figured he would be fine with Buck being bisexual. There was a chance Eddie was one of those people who just thought bisexuals were just greedy and needed to make their mind up. He hadn’t been prepared to lose Eddie as a friend, not over something like this. Having Chim and Bobby know made him feel like a weight was lifted off his chest, but Eddie’s reaction made it all come crashing back down. The two walked behind the ambulance, where they were out of view from the public. There was just a couple of photographers hanging out in their event tent.

“You’re not actually dating Josh, are you?” Eddie crossed his arms, taking a defensive stance.

“Why does it matter to you? If you can’t accept me having a boyfriend then we are going to have bigger problems than who I’m dating.”

“You told me you were single at movie night last week.” Eddie sounded exasperated, and Buck was really confused as to why.

“Fine, Josh and I aren’t dating, but we tried at one point. We’re better friends, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still bi. I’ve dated plenty of guys since we’ve been friends, it just hasn’t worked out.” They were friends, Buck was going to be honest with Eddie. Well, mostly honest. If Eddie asked if Buck had a crush on him, Buck was going to deny it. He didn’t think Eddie would be the kind of straight guy who would get all weird about Buck’s crush, but then again he didn’t think Eddie was biphobic either.

“Good, because I can’t see you with a boyfriend...” Eddie seemed to have calmed down, and a realization had swept over him. His face looked a lot softer, it was a look Buck had seen many times but was never really sure what it meant. Buck anger was going in the opposite direction. He took a step back.

Buck didn’t bother to let Eddie finish before he cut him off. “Listen, if you’ve got such a problem with me dating another guy, then you should transfer stations. I’m not going to hide a part of me because it’s not something you like.” His words were harsh, but he kept his voice down. He didn’t want any yelling to attract the others. Buck started to walk away when he felt Eddie grab his wrist and pull him back so they were face to face.

“Evan, You didn’t let me finish. I can’t see you with a boyfriend that isn’t me. If I had known you liked guys, I would have done this sooner.” Buck was shocked by the statement, but even more shocked by what came next.

Eddie leaned up and kissed Buck.

Buck did not in a million years see Eddie returning his feelings. Buck felt Eddie start to pull back, and he knew the older man was overthinking things the same way he was. Buck brought his hands up to cup Eddie’s cheeks, and pulled him back in. He could overthink this later, for now he was going to enjoy kissing Eddie. Finally it didn’t have to be something of his dreams anymore. He felt Eddie’s hands come to rest on his waist. Buck had every intention of deepening the kiss, but when he moved to get closer, he managed to slip. Thankfully, Eddie managed to catch him before he completely fell on his back.

They had been pulled apart by the fall, but they rested their foreheads together.

“We should talk about this…” Buck started to say.

“We’ll have plenty of time to talk later, I got months of kissing to make up for.” Eddie leaned down, kissing Buck with far more passion this time. He wasn’t worried about being rejected.

Eventually Buck fully got back up to his feet, but not before a photographer had snapped a photo of the two.

******

Buck promised to drop Eddie off at the station the next morning, so he wouldn’t have to ensure the teasing alone. They didn’t have to walk far into the station before the teasing started.

Hanging from the balcony was a blown up photo of the two of them kissing. Buck had seen the photo posted all over last night. Out of context, it looked like Eddie had dipped Buck, not that Buck had just been clumsy first. He knew there were comparisons to the soldier celebrating V-J day, and the navy soldier getting his homecoming kiss. The photo was heralded as one of the defining photos of pride that year. Would Buck have liked their first kiss to be a little more private, sure, but it wouldn’t have been true to the way his life had gone so far. The teasing would be worth it, especially since he got Eddie out of the deal.

“They’re all just jealous Eds, just remember. I’m yours.”

#my fics #buddie #buddiefirstkiss #firstkiss2020 #related to pride

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alexsmitposts · 4 years ago

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Fakes of the Belarusian Maidan

The "potato" revolution in Minsk, which some publications have already hastened to call "the first Telegram revolution", did not happen. "Chronicles of the coup attempt" could be seen in social networks, and this despite the Internet being disabled in places. The images and messages were full of tragedy. In Telegram channels and Twitter, colorful photos "from the scene of events" and even more colorful messages about almost "shootings arranged by riot Police", the crowd "rammed by car bombs", injured protesters and even the first victim from among the protest activists began to appear. We carefully looked at both the video and photos "from the scene". And what can you see on them? Youngster against the armed forces The first photos closely resembled staged shots taken during the Moscow protests: a proud young protester stands alone against a line of Riot police "cosmonauts" bristling with shields. First, it is beautiful, and second, incredibly touching – an unarmed youngster against the armed forces. This theme is constantly exploited. Of course, such photos were taken in Minsk.

This is a good picture for the Western media – almost children against the "chain dogs of the regime". Do you think the photo was taken "purely by accident"? It is clear that the production. Photo: EPA/Yauhen Yerchak/TASS. Another picture: a young couple on a moped passing by the same line of riot police. It is also a touching shot, especially the white long dress on the girl should be touching. Well, a little provocation, test the nerves of the security forces. But also in the trend: almost peaceful protest, which is about to be crushed by the police in armor and with shields. This is a good picture for the Western media – almost children against the "chain dogs of the regime". Do you think the photo was taken "purely by accident"? It is clear that the production. As well as the bloodied heads of the protesters in another photo, which immediately flew around all the European media with comments-they say, this is how dictator Lukashenko suppresses the peaceful protest of Belarusians, who wholeheartedly strive for European integration and freedom. It turned out to be alive Somewhere we have seen all this before, but then "accidentally" it turned out that the blood is actually ketchup. It was very awkward. The awkwardness was quickly forgotten. In Minsk, everyone will also quickly forget – about as quickly as they "forgot" about the "first sacred victim" of the protest, when the police allegedly began to crush the crowd of protesters with a car. As it turned out, the victim is quite alive and did not even want to stay in the hospital. We are talking about a certain Eugene Zaichkin, who last night jumped on the bumper of a MAZ-paddy wagon, drove it for a while, holding the handles over the hood of the truck, and then, unsuccessfully jumping off, was under the wheels of the car. Interestingly, Zaichkin not so long ago moved to live in Poland, but at the" right moment " was back in Minsk. The first aid to the activist was called by the riot police themselves, and in the hospital it turned out that the guy does not even have fractures and can go home. It didn't work out. Just as there was no crowd "rammed by a truck" - this can be well understood if you carefully watch the videos. As there is no evidence that the riot police beat women and children, and "dictator Lukashenko" hastily "escaped on his plane to Bodrum". Fakes, fakes, and more fakes. However, this is nothing new-it's all within the technology of color revolutions and the art of propaganda: "the more terrible the lie, the more willing to believe it" - we did not say. There will be no bouquets of violets The exact number of protesters in Minsk is not specified, and Telegram channels write about hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of protesters. In the capital of Belarus, they gathered at three main points: at the stele "Minsk-hero city", on Victory square and on Nemiga street. It was difficult to estimate the number of people gathered in the dark, and they were constantly moving.

The protesters were managed and coordinated by the authors of several Telegram channels. The NEXTA channel, which operated from Poland, was particularly successful in this. Photo: Victor Lisitsyn/Globallookpress. Of course, the security forces used tear gas, water cannons, and stun grenades – the effect of the latter is clearly visible in the video footage, which also got into the Network. But let me ask you, in the same France free from dictators, the police met the "yellow vests" with bunches of violets? Of course not. An attempt to build a barricade on Masherov Avenue for the protesters was unsuccessful – fifteen minutes later, the security forces destroyed it. It turned out that waving flags and shouting is one thing, but getting into a fight with the riot Police is quite another, few people were ready for this, and there were no leaders among the participants of the action. Telegram-revolution on the March However, it is impossible to say that all these protests were spontaneous: before the problems with communication began, the protesters were managed and coordinated by the authors of several Telegram channels (which is why they called the events in Belarus the "Telegram revolution"). The NEXTA channel, which operated from Poland, was particularly successful in this. According to political strategist Marat Bashirov, NEXTA is registered to 22-year-old Stepan Putilo: The channel contains instructions on organizing riots and video streamers working in Belarus. Do you believe, Yes, that a 22-year-old guy organizes everything himself? Study. Many technologies will then be used in Russia in a year's time. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who managed to call herself "the winner of the last elections", appealed to both the police and the protesters to stop the violence and prevent provocation, and then quietly left, without risking becoming a "banner and icon of protest". Of course, it's safer this way, but the people – well, they will be beaten up, well, they will take some number of protesters to the police stations. But this is all without her-the" technical function " of the candidate-housewife has fulfilled. Detention of Russian journalists – what was it? What is not a production is the detention of Russian reporters, at least five people. This was reported by the Union of journalists of Russia. We are talking about Semyon Pegov, Maxim Solopov, Yevgeny Oleinik, Anton Starkov and Dmitry Lysenko. The Russian foreign Ministry intervened, and Sergey Lavrov took the issue under his personal control. Russian journalists were soon released. They were in the Minsk center for the isolation of offenders. Semyon Pegov shared his story on Vladimir Solovyov's program: It was visible provocateurs in the crowd who run up to the riot Police and say something. And I have a feeling that after such a provocation, I "flew". Because of these people who jump out and try to provoke the security forces, as a result, they grab everyone who comes to hand. There are a lot of random people who are detained, and it's not a secret. But slowly now everyone is being released. "Take helmets and gas masks with you" Meanwhile, the protests in Belarus are not going down. Today they continue, as previously reported by the same telegram channel NEXTA, the publication of which States the following: Friends, after yesterday's events, Lukashenko cannot remain in power. He lost the election, he threw his punishers with weapons against unarmed and peaceful people, he shed a lot of blood and now hopes that people will tolerate dozens of victims and even killed. It is not known what" killed " the provocateur was talking about. According to official data, there are no victims either from the protesters or from the security forces. And there are sweat victims: 39 Riot police officers and 50 protesters were injured. In total, about 3,000 people were detained in 33 cities where clashes with security forces took place.

The protesters chanted slogans, burned flares and waved national flags. Photo: Victor Lisitsyn/Globallookpress. If in Kiev six years ago, initially called to go to the Maidan, taking with them "umbrellas, thermos of tea and a good mood," then in the scenario for Minsk, this stage was skipped. Participants are offered to take gas masks, protective helmets, or better, helmets, protective shields for the knees and elbows, and instead of a "thermos of tea" - a first-aid kit. Umbrellas, however, also remembered, but in order to "protect themselves from checkers". Spikes and nails, apparently brought by someone on purpose – they could not "completely accidentally" be in the places where protesters gathered, activists yesterday scattered on the roadway. Stones, rods, rebar, as it was in the city of Pinsk, were also used. Molotov cocktails were used" What's next? The second day of protests was marked by more violent skirmishes between protesters and police, with activists in the center of Minsk throwing "Molotov cocktails" at riot police, repeating the "Ukrainian scenario" of the Maidan. And again there were fakes: some Belarusian Telegram channels launched a message that "Russian special forces soldiers have been identified on the streets of Minsk". The same throw-in appeared on the NEXTA channel. The author even accompanied the message with a "creepy video" in which a special forces officer orders the girl to get out of the car. The statement about the "presence of the Russian military" is based on the words of two "witnesses". But the fake has already been dispersed through other channels. A General strike is scheduled for today. And then… Who knows what will happen next, where else will the NEXTA coordinator send the crowd?

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hazyheel · 6 years ago

Text

Smackdown Live Review 4/23/19

We started out with a promo from Shane, who said that he was in a bad mood tonight, because of Roman Reigns’ attack last week. He said that he wanted to fire Roman. Roman came out, and but didn’t want to talk. He and Shane squared up, before Elias came down to back him up, and hit Roman with the drift away after a beatdown.

Grade: D. This segment was just nothing. Everything was predictable. Of course he would be beat down, but Roman wasn’t getting fired. Just kinda boring, but cool to see Elias in an important spot.

Next up was a rematch from Raw last week, Andrade vs. Finn Balor. These guys have a great deal of chemistry together, so I was happy to see this rematch. Early on in the match, Andrade hit a huge corkscrew dive out of the corner to the floor, looked awesome. At one point, Balor countered a powerbomb into a DDT for a near fall. However, as Vega was the one to get Andrade the win last week, she caused the loss this week. Vega went up for a crossbody, but Balor dodged and Andrade caught her. Balor then hit the shotgun dropkick into the coup de gras for the win.

Grade: B. Again, not their best work, but the two are 1-1 now, and they could be bound for money in the bank. These guys need to have a pay per view match, and really go all out. They could easily steal on of the upcoming shows, and I am looking forward to when they do. I think that they will both be in the ladder match, but neither will win.

Backstage, Elias challenged Roman to a match at money in the bank, and later on, Roman accepted. Cool, I’m down for that. Good for Elias.

We then went right into a match between Kairi Sane and Peyton Royce. The IIconics cut a quick promo about how the only reason Royce lost last week was that she was caught off guard and dehydrated. It was funny. So she drank a gallon of water, and felt very ready. But, the match was not long. Sane won with an insane elbow. After the match, Fire and Desire came out to intimidate Paige’s new team, so that will be a feud going forward.

Grade: D+. This match was too short, and Royce is not very good in the ring. I will say that the promo before the match was genuinely funny. Still annoying, but annoying in a funny and stupid way. The way they started talking about being dehydrated made me laugh, and it felt improvised. But that doesn’t help a match that was too short, and another time that the IIconics got pinned since becoming the champions.

Next, we were supposed to have a match between Jinder Mahal and Chad Gable, but Lars Sullivan ran out and murdered everyone. He threw Gable around ringside, before turning his attention to the Singh Brothers, hitting them with his freak accident and running powerbomb. R-Truth ran out to confront Sullivan after his attack last week, and although he got some shots in, Truth too was killed.

Grade: B+. Lars is actually being booked well. He is a monster on a brand that has smaller guys. He is destroying people that are much smaller than him. If they keep him doing things like this for a few weeks, he will be a solid midcarder. Keep it going beyond that, he could be a conceivable challenger in the main event, possibly even a champion. I think he and Truth will be feuding until Money in the Bank, which would be a great place for Sullivan. I really like his booking, and I hope to god they don’t mess it up.

Charlotte Flair then came out, for her big confrontation with Becky Lynch. Flair blamed Rousey for her loss of the championship belt, saying that Rousey lost her championship for her. So, Flair called Lynch out to defend herself, saying that Lynch is not the rightful champion. Lynch was pretty typical here, but she seemed a lot tougher in this scenario than she is in solo promos. Flair says that she is in Lynch’s head, and Lynch simply said that she had destroyed Flair on many many occasions. Lynch said that she wanted new challengers. Bayley then came out to throw her hat in the ring, and she told Charlotte to earn a title shot for once in her life. Charlotte said that Bayley wasn’t worth her time, and Bayley got pissed.

So, the two had a match! And I was excited! They have history and it is a new matchup, and they have a lot of chemistry. Bayley had a new fire during this match, hitting some pretty brutal moves, and showing that she deserves to be competing for the title. Bayley had control during much of the match, until Charlotte started to target the knee, clearly setting up for the figure 8. Bayley fought back with a brutal belly to back suplex, as well as a sunset flip into the corner. Bayley almost had it by rolling up Charlotte during a figure 8, but Charlotte kicked out and hit a spear for the win. After the match, Becky announced that she would defend both belts on the Money in the Bank pay per view.

Grade: B+. Really good stuff. The promo was great, and Becky had an awesome reason for not wanting to fight charlotte, and Bayley was the perfect opponent. The match between the two was really good, and I’d love to see more of that.

They did another firefly funhouse thing. Fuck this. Maybe it was the same one from yesterday, but it deserves another F. If you don’t like that, you clearly didn’t see the segment. I would tell you to watch it, but I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

Into the next match, Kofi Kingston took on Shinsuke Nakamura. Pretty good match, with Shinsuke showing his old strong style roots. He was delivering some stiff kicks and knees. He even at one point hit a sliding german suplex, reminiscent of Taiji Ishimori over in New Japan. However, Kofi was able to fight back into the match, even mocking the “come on” slogan. Kofi was able to hit the trouble in paradise, but as he did, Rusev ran in to beat up Kofi. Xavier Woods and Kevin Owens at ringside ran in to help Kofi, with Woods landing an assisted dive onto Rusev, only to be hit with a Kinshasa. Back in the ring, Kofi landed another trouble in paradise on Nakamura, only for Owens to betray them and hit him with a superkick. Owens then beat down both Kofi and Woods, hitting his Powerbomb on the apron.

Grade: B-. The match was alright, with Kofi not really getting in enough offense. I think these two could have a really good match if they wanted to, but it wasn’t meant to be just yet. However, as good as the betrayal was, I think Owens should have waited a while to turn on Kofi. He was very good with the New Day, and they have a good dynamic as a threesome (not like that). If he had waited until summerslam, then I would have given him more of a chance to win the belt. But now, Owens is probably going to lose unless he goes crazy apeshit like he did with Jericho a few years back. WWE pulled the trigger too early, but it should still be a good match.

Overall grade: B-

Pros: Balor vs. Andrade; Sullivan attack; Flair Lynch Faceoff; Bayley vs. Flair

Cons: Predictable Storyline to open; Women’s tag champs pinned again; the fucking funhouse bullshit.

#hazyheel #wwe #wwe smackdown #smackdown #smackdown live #wwe smackdown live #wwe review #smackdown review #wwe smackdown review #wwe smackdown live review #smackdown live review #pro wrestling #pro wrestling review #kofi kingston #becky lynch #lars sullivan #kevin owens #charlotte flair

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hellyeahomeland · 6 years ago

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How about explaining all of the episode’s titles? Would you? Maybe one a day/week.

“Ok, here we go. This is only from memory and if any of this is wrong or contains typos please don’t @ me I didn’t edit!

Season one:

“Pilot: twas the pilot!

“Grace”: Brody prays at the end

“Clean Skin”: I think this is because Nazir lets Brody take a bath

“Semper I”: it’s a play on “Semper Fi” which is short for “Semper Fidelis” which is a Marine motto which means “always faithful”

“Blind Spot”: Carrie thinks Brody uses the blind spot in the safe house to slip Hamid the razor blade plus her growing attraction for him is kind of her blind spot!!

“The Good Soldier”: almost undoubtedly a reference to a novel about a love triangle between a woman and two soldiers

“The Weekend”: because it’s THE weekend, duh

“Achilles Heel”: Saul’s Achilles heel is that he always answers when work calls, Tom Walker’s is that he loves his wife and kids… Carrie’s is literally every aspect of her existence

“Crossfire”: Issa gets stuck in the crossfire

“Representative Brody”: it’s the episode where Brody decides to run for Congress lol

“The Vest”: Brody tries on a vest!

“Marine One”: *FORGET ABOUT BEFORE, THIS IS NOW. I SAW THEM! WHO? BRODY… THEY HUSTLED IT RIGHT THROUGH THE METAL DIRECTORS ALONG WITH THE VICE PRESIDENT. DO YOU EVEN REALIZE WHAT YOU’RE SAYING. YES. HE’S PLANNING ON TAKING THEM ALL OUT. THAT IS WHAT’S COMING. WE’VE BEEN HEARING CHATTER FOR DAYS NOW, MARINE ONE, MARINE TWO. IT’S NOT THE PRESIDENT’S HELICOPTER. IT’S ACTUAL MARINES. BRODY. AND WALKER. THEY ARE MARINE ONE AND MARINE TWO THEY’RE WORKING TOGETHER THEY MUST BE. **transcribed verbatim from memory

Season two:

“The Smile”: CARRIE FUCKING SMILES FOR FUCKING ONCE

“Beirut Is Back”: I could have sworn that there was a tourism campaign for the city of Beirut and this was the slogan but now I can find no evidence of that online

“State of Independence”: idk if this is a reference to the Donna Summers song or just a reference to Carrie being on her own again

“New Car Smell”: Brody gets a car wash to get rid of the odor of tobacco and murder

“Q&A”: Carrie asks some questions

“A Gettysburg Address”: play on words with Abraham Lincoln’s speech and the fact that Quinn & Co. literally go to a physical address in Gettysburg

“The Clearing”: I think this has multiple meanings: Carrie meets Brody in the clearing in the woods, Dana clears her conscience, Brody attempts to clear his

“I’ll Fly Away”: a reference to the 90s TV show that Henry Bromell (and, hi! Barbara Hall!) both wrote on but a more literal reference to Brody being whisked away on a helicopter at the end (lmao s2 is wild)

“Two Hats”: so many people wearing hats in this episode!!

“Broken Hearts”: lulz Walden’s breaks at the end

“In Memoriam”: because Nazir dies (fact: this episode was originally titled “The Motherfucker in the Turban” but was changed last minute, thank god)

“The Choice”: Carrie must choose between red and white wine JUST KIDDING IS ANYONE STILL READING THIS???

Season three:

“Tin Man Is Down”: someone says this during the weird Wizard of Oz op

“Uh… Oh… Aw”: phonetically it sounds like “fuck… you… saul” if you were drugged out on thorazine

“Tower of David”: Brody’s residence

“Game On”: because it’s when Carrie and Saul’s spy-came-in-from-the-cold operation is revealed

“The Yoga Play”: it’s Carrie’s very unoriginal name for an espionage scheme in which a lady with blonde hair attends a yoga class in her place

“Still Positive”: Carrie takes a 47th pregnancy test and is still positive #scarredforlife

“Gerontion”: ugh this is a poem I don’t know more go find Jacob Clifton’s TWoP recap

“A Red Wheelbarrow”: Carrie texts this to the Franklin man, it’s like spy code for “i’m the one answering this not some other dude”

“One Last Thing”: Saul to Brody: “you will do this one last thing” (literally though!)

“Good Night”: more spy code. I think it means “we’re fucked!”?

“Big Man in Tehran”: Brody becomes one of these when he denounces America for terrorism! (but only for show!)

“The Star”: probs dual meaning and allusion to the literal star Carrie draws and Damian Lewis’ stature on the show

Season four:

“The Drone Queen”: we stan one!

“Trylon and Perisphere”: a reference to the two structures at the World’s Fair and I can’t remember where I read this but I think it’s a reference to Quinn and the Landlady which is 100% horrific and offensive

“Shalwar Kameez”: this is the national dress of Pakistan but beyond that I got nothing

“Iron in the Fire”: Carrie says this about Aayan

“About a Boy”: think this is not a reference to the book/film but rather just to Carrie trying to figure out Aayan’s dealio

“From A to B and Back Again”: possibly a reference to the circular nature of the episode? They go from thinking they’ve got Haqqani to being back at square one by episode’s end

“Redux”: Carrie hallucinates Brody

“Halfway to a Donut”: Duck says this about some pastry. Like 4.06, they think they’ve got Saul and end up back to zero (donut)

“There’s Something Else Going On”: well there was!!

“13 Hours in Islamabad”: reference to the Benghazi attacks, which the episode basically lifts from directly and which also lasted ~13 hours

“Krieg Nicht Lieb”: Carrie meets a German spy woman! This means “war not love” (not perfectly translated), so an ironic take on “love not war”

“Long Time Coming”: Carrie and Quinn finally have sex!!!!!!! (just seeing if anyone is still reading this)

Season five:

“Separation Anxiety”: I think this a meta reference to the time jump and also to Carrie’s anxieties about being out of the CIA but back in that world

“The Tradition of Hospitality”: I believe this is a reference to Carrie + Otto being guests at the UN refugee camp and how… un-hospitably that trip ends

“Super Powers”: Carrie believes she has super powers when she’s off her meds

“Why Is This Night Different”: these words at said at Passover seder, which starts out the episode

“Better Call Saul”: horrifically embarrassing title that is a reference to Carrie calling Saul as well as the Breaking Bad spinoff starring Bob Odenkirk

“Parabiosis”: I honestly don’t know. It’s a scientific term and I haven’t rewatched those middle season five episodes since they aired and also don’t care to!

“Oriole”: this was Carrie’s code name with one of her assets in Iraq

“All About Allison”: this episode centers on our Lord and Savior Allison Carr, Queen of Online Handbag Shopping!

“The Litvinov Ruse”: I think this describes the trick they played on Allison thinking she was blown when she wasn’t

“New Normal”: some military or CIA person says this about ISIS or Russia and Quinn being gassed

“Our Man in Damascus”: this is the title of a book about a man who infiltrates a foreign government at the highest levels so I’m pretty sure it’s a reference to Allison

“A False Glimmer”: lifted straight from Quinn’s letter!

Season six:

“Fair Game”: was surely sad by Keane or Dar or Saul or someone else about something (sorry, haven’t rewatched these episodes either)

“The Man in the Basement”: it’s where Quinn threw that mug at Carrie

“The Covenant”: believe this is a reference to the scene with Saul and his sister and Palestine/Israel

“A Flash of Light”: Etai says* this to Saul: “And the question I keep asking myself is this-- should we [the Jewish people] pack up and leave before it's too late? All eight million of us? Should we go back to the ghettos of Europe and Asia and wait for the next pogrom? Or just pray it doesn't happen here first, in a flash of light?” *not recited from memory

“Casus Belli”: apparently this was the actual name of meat face?? The phrase actually means a justification for war, so...

“The Return”: isn’t the episode where Javadi comes back?

“Imminent Risk”: Carrie is this to Franny and Quinn is this to.... himself?

“alt.truth”: I think this was someone’s sock puppet handle or website name or something? Idk it was about online trolls I think

“Sock Puppets”: Max finds ‘em!

“The Flag House”: the house where meat face lives has a flag out front

“R is for Romeo”: there was an R on the white board at the flag house which I think meant eastern time?? It was spy code I can’t remember!!

“America First”: term that used to mean non-interventionist policy but has been today co-opted by the American right to mean that we gotta put America ahead of all other interests (moral, humane, rational, etc.) because... AMERICA!!! Typically used to justify fascist policies

Season seven:

“Enemy of the State”: Carrie’s power of bun have put her in the crosshairs (is anyone still reading this?)

“Rebel Rebel”: I remember this being a play on words and it’s a verb, not a noun. Said by those gun crazies with Brett O’Keefe.

“Standoff”: Saul and O’Keefe

“Like Bad at Things”: definition for “incompetent.” Said by Carl, who deserves a Best Supporting Actor Emmy

“Active Measures”: term for actions taken by Russia to undermine America

“Species Jump”: another science term to describe the jumping of a pathogen from one host to another... I’m thinking this might be Carrie understanding who Dante really was but it’s a Chip Johannessen title so anything is possible

“Andante”: it’s how Carrie ends the episode! (that is a joke and it is 100% another meaning for the title but it also refers to a moderately slow tempo which is basically this episode’s structure until, y’know, the ending!)

“Lies, Amplifiers, Fucking Twitter”: it’s one half of a haiku Carrie is writing

“Useful Idiot”: see: picture of Carrie in a PowerPoint presentation

“Clarity”: Carrie gets it (kinda)

“All In”: what Carrie must convince Saul she is for the 650th time because Saul remains trash

“Paean to the People”: a reference to Keane’s speech

#painterx92 #ask #hyh ask #by: sara #OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE I WROTE ALL THAT #i put it under a cut for kindness

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lodelss · 4 years ago

Link

“All Hell Broke Loose.”

When Kishon McDonald saw the video of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of four officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, he could tell it was going to turn the country upside down. “I knew it was going to catch fire,” he said. McDonald, a former sailor in the U.S. Navy, watched over the following days as demonstrations against police brutality spread from Minneapolis to cities and towns across the country, eventually reaching Washington, D.C., where he lived. On June 1, he heard that people were planning to peacefully gather at Lafayette Square, a small park directly across from the White House, and decided to join them. By then, police had begun to attack and beat demonstrators in Minneapolis, New York, and others in states everywhere, escalating tensions as smaller groups broke into shops and set fire to police cars. But when McDonald arrived at Lafayette Square, he found a crowd of a few thousand people cheering, chanting slogans, and listening to speeches. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had imposed a 7 p.m. curfew after clashes the night before, but that was still an hour away. “Everybody there was like, it’s alright, we’re going to be here until 7 o’clock,” he said. “It was a very good energy.” It wouldn’t be long before that would change.

Kishon McDonald, 39, originally of Cleveland, Ohio, poses for a portrait in his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

In the days following George Floyd’s murder, President Trump had focused his attention on the relatively small number of people who had damaged property, threatening to use the “unlimited power of our military” and tweeting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” What the protesters gathered in Lafayette Square that day didn’t know was that he was planning to stage a photo opportunity at a nearby church that evening. Unbeknownst to McDonald, as he and the others chanted “hands up, don’t shoot,” the U.S. Park Police and other law enforcement agencies were just out of sight, donning riot gear and checking the weapons they would shortly use against the crowd to pave the way for the president’s walk to the church. At 6:30 p.m. — half an hour before Washington D.C.’s curfew — dozens of battle-clad officers rushed the protest, hurling stun grenades and firing tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and pepper balls into the crowd. McDonald says there were no warnings, just an onslaught of violence. “All hell broke loose,” he said. As the deafening explosions from the stun grenades gave way to thick clouds of tear gas, terrified protesters began to run from the batons and riot shields that police were using to force them out of the square. “It was just straight fear. Everybody was scared and running for their lives,” he said. McDonald tried to plead for instructions from the advancing officers, asking them what they wanted people to do. Instead, one threw a stun grenade at him. “As it exploded, hot shrapnel hit my leg,” he said. “It felt like somebody put a cast iron skillet on my leg, it was just so hot. I started jumping up and down trying to get away from it, but shrapnel was going everywhere.” Suffocating tear gas enveloped him and the other protesters, making them gasp and cough as they ran down the street. “I saw a young boy, he must have been about 15, and he was choking a lot. Somebody put a shirt over his face and kind of ran him out,” he recalled. McDonald had seen enough. Bruised from being hit with riot shields and with his vision still blurred from the tear gas, he walked home. In a phone interview with the ACLU, he said that the experience had made him more wary of attending protests, but it also illustrated why he’d gone there to begin with. “It seems like everything is getting to be a military type thing in our society, and we were protesting to calm that down,” he said. “And the message we got is, ‘No, we aren’t calming down.’” “I hope someone gets held accountable,” he added.

****

Law enforcement officers clearing protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2020.

Derek Baker

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Americans poured into the streets to voice their condemnation of police brutality against Black people. The weeks that followed were a milestone in American history, with protests and displays of solidarity reaching towns as small as Cadillac, Michigan, and cities as large as Atlanta. As months of a painful COVID-19 lockdown gave way to incandescent fury over the killing of Floyd and the violent response of the Minneapolis Police Department towards the initial protests, a few people went as far as burning police precincts or destroying upscale shopping districts. The vast majority of protests, however, were almost entirely peaceful. Still, police departments across the country deployed staggering levels of violence against protesters. On social media, the world watched a near-instantaneous live feed of police in dozens of cities firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and other projectiles into protests, using pepper spray against protesters and journalists alike, and beating people with batons. This widespread and indiscriminate deployment of what are often called “less-lethal” weapons – LLWs – injured countless people, some severely. In Austin, Texas, 20-year-old college student Justin Howell suffered a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a “beanbag round” filled with lead pellets. Linda Tirado, a journalist and photographer, lost her left eye to a “rubber bullet” fired by police in Minneapolis. In Seattle, 26-year-old Aubreanna Inda nearly died after a stun grenade exploded next to her chest. According to Carl Takei, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality who focuses on police practices, this widespread and violent use of LLWs during the George Floyd uprising was an attack on the protesters’ constitutional right to free speech. “There’s just no justification under the existing Fourth Amendment framework for the use of these weapons,” he said. “And it’s happening over and over again, with patterns that are so similar across the different cities.” For years these weapons were referred to as “non-lethal.” But in practice, they have a long history of causing serious injuries and deaths. A 2016 report by the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations analyzed 25 years of available data on the use of LLWs by law enforcement across the world. It found that between 1990 and 2015, “kinetic impact projectiles” — a category that includes rubber bullets and beanbag rounds — caused at least 1,925 injuries, including 53 deaths and 294 instances of permanent disability. Tear gas, which is banned for use in warfare under the 1925 Geneva Protocol, injured at least 9,261 people over the same time period, including two deaths and 70 permanent disabilities. The report also found that LLWs are most commonly used to stamp out political protests and shut down aggressive demands for greater rights. According to Takei, even the term “less lethal” downplays the damage they can inflict. “Beating somebody with a baseball bat, as long as you’re not hitting them in the head or other sensitive areas of the body is ‘less lethal,’ but it’s still incredibly violent,” he said. During the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s, police used tear gas and other LLWs extensively to disrupt and disperse protests. But after three federal commissions found that abuse of those weapons provoked aggressive responses by protesters and contributed to a cycle of violence, they fell out of favor with U.S. law enforcement as a method of controlling crowds. According to the Marshall Project, in subsequent decades, some police departments adopted a “negotiated management” approach to protests, working with organizers in advance to establish ground rules meant to prevent violence. But any movement toward de-escalation evaporated in the wake of large anti-globalization protests that took place during a 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, in an event that would come to be called the “Battle for Seattle.” In a prelude to how many police departments would later approach the George Floyd uprising, Seattle police attacked the mostly non-violent protesters with LLWs, provoking a handful to respond aggressively in kind. “The response of a lot of police departments after that was, well if some people won’t act as predicted, we should have a hyper-aggressive response for everybody,” said Takei. “But when police adopt this type of response to Black-led protests against police violence, they are repeating a pattern of brutality that goes back to the origins of American policing in Southern slave patrols.” Now, as outcry over the indiscriminate use of LLWs against Black Lives Matter protesters mounts, some municipalities are weighing restrictions on the weapons. After the ACLU sued the Seattle Police Department in early June for its violent response to protests in the city, a judge ordered police there to cease using the weapons against peaceful demonstrators, saying they had “chilled speech.” Days later, Seattle’s city council voted unanimously to prohibit their use against protesters. Legislators in Atlanta and other cities have also proposed similar bans. The ACLU spoke to a number of people who were attacked with LLWs by police during demonstrations over George Floyd’s murder in recent weeks. This is how they described their experiences.

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Gabe Schlough at his home in Denver, Colorado.

Jimena Peck for the ACLU

Gabe Schlough wasn’t surprised that the Minneapolis Police Department had killed another one of its Black residents. He lives in Denver now, but he’d gone to college years earlier in Minneapolis. Just before he graduated, he’d been shot in the back with a stun gun by police who entered his home and tried to arrest him in a case of mistaken identity. Schlough had been invited to a protest at downtown Denver’s Capitol Building that night, but instead he decided to drive his motorcycle up into the mountains with a friend. “In one of the areas where people were hiking and snowboarding and skiing down I saw three Black people, and I was just fucking happy,” he said. “I was like, thank God not every Black person thinks they need to be at the Capitol right now.” But when he got back home later that night and saw images of the Denver Police Department’s response to the protest, he felt his blood start to boil. “We can’t even give doctors and nurses facemasks, but we can give our police access to militarized weapons that are exceedingly more expensive and hard to create than the protective mechanisms we need for health care workers,” he recalled thinking. Schlough has a degree in public health anthropology, and he’d worked in health care across the world, including a stint in an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone. He had medical training and had participated in protests before, so he decided to defy the curfew along with a few friends to see if he could offer help in case anyone got hurt. Donning his face mask along with sunglasses to protect his eyes, Schlough set off towards the Capitol Building. When he arrived, he saw a crowd of two or three hundred people facing down a line of police. “They were standing just a little bit more than shoulder to shoulder apart with full riot gear, with their face shields and full protective armor on,” he recalled. Schlough moved up toward the front of the crowd. Behind him, somebody set a pile of garbage on fire. That was all the police needed to begin their advance. As they moved forward, they shot canisters of tear gas into the crowd and tossed stun grenades. “I was going around and telling people who didn’t have eye coverings to watch their eyes and protect their face,” he said. “Just running up and down the line and getting people educated, like this is happening and this is what you need to know.” As a canister of tear gas landed next to him, Schlough bent down to try and cover it with a traffic cone so the gas wouldn’t spread. Suddenly, he felt sharp blows to his face and chest. “A shock hit me and my head popped up,” he said. “I felt like somebody had punched me in the chest.” Schlough had been shot with rubber bullets, although he didn’t know it yet. As he fell back further into the crowd of protestors, someone told him he was bleeding. “You need to go to a hospital,” they said. “Your face is falling off.” Another bystander pulled out his phone and showed Schlough his injury. The bullet had left a gaping wound on his chin, and blood was pouring down onto the front of his shirt. In retrospect, Schlough says he thinks he was specifically targeted, and that police knew exactly where they were aiming when they shot him. He and a friend left and started walking toward a nearby hospital where he did volunteer shifts. But when they arrived, Denver police were also there. “There were cop cars there and more pulling up, and I understood that it was not a safe place for me to get treated because of the amount of police presence there,” he said. Instead, Schlough had to drive outside Denver to be treated at a different facility. Doctors cleaned his wound and gave him 20 stitches. More than a week later, part of his chin is still numb. He worries that he may have suffered nerve damage. Last Christmas, while visiting his mother in Wisconsin, he says one of her friends asked him what the most dangerous place he’d ever been was. “I told her that I’m the most scared when I’m in the U.S. and around a police officer,” he said. “Because I know that no matter who I am or what I’ve done in my life, I can be shot and killed, and nothing will matter.”

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Toni Sanders, 36, poses for a portrait at her home in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

Toni Sanders arrived at Lafayette Square along with her wife and 9-year-old stepson in the late afternoon of June 1 – the same day that Kishon McDonald was there. Their son — identified in court papers as J.N.C. — had been watching the news over the preceding days, and the family had been having difficult conversations about George Floyd and why there was unrest rocking the country. “We spoke about Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Tamir Rice, and people right here in D.C. who had been killed by Metropolitan Police — Raphael Briscoe, Terrence Sterling, Marqueese Alston, and explained to him that was why people were protesting,” Sanders said. He said that he’d like to accompany Sanders and his mother to Lafayette Square. “I assured him that it would be safe because it was a peaceful protest and that we would leave before the curfew started,” she said. At first, she was glad that she’d agreed to bring him to what felt like a “community environment.” People in the square were passing out snacks, chanting, and kneeling in solidarity with George Floyd. “Everything started out wonderful, it was a great experience,” she recalled. “We even took a picture when we first got down there just to remember the date we all stood together.” Then, the attack began. “I just heard the loud bah bah bah bah, and smoke started to fill the area.” Sanders was immediately terrified for her young stepson. “I just started screaming to my family, run, run, run,” she said. The three sprinted away from the sound of detonating stun grenades and the shrieks of injured protesters. After making it a few blocks away, they stopped to catch their breath and check in with one another. “He said, ‘I can’t believe I just survived my first near-death experience.’ And it literally broke my heart because there’s honestly nothing I could say to him. I couldn’t tell him this wasn’t a near-death experience.” Sanders was furious that police hadn’t warned protesters to disperse before violently clearing the park. If they had, she said, she would have quickly brought her stepson to safety. “If we had been asked to either move back or leave, we would have. We would not have protested that because we have a child that we must look out for,” she said. After the attack, Sanders’ son expressed anger and hurt over how police had treated them. Sanders had refused to allow the experience to scare her away from attending protests, but now when she left the house he would ask her to promise that she wouldn’t die. “I wanted to show him that even though you’re afraid, if someone is trying to take your rights and do you wrong, you have to stand up for who you are and what you believe in,” she said. The couple decided to put him into therapy to work out how that day affected him. Sanders says he told his therapist that he thinks that it’s the end of the world now, and that the government is at war with Black people. “Now we have to have uncomfortable conversations with him about systemic racism, overt racism, covert racism,” she said. “And it’s horrible to have to take that innocence from him.” Along with Kishon McDonald, Sanders is one of two plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit over the attack on Lafayette Square protesters that day. Over the phone, she recites the poem ‘If We Must Die’ by Claude McKay. We’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! “We’re here to show you that we’re still citizens, and we’re going to exercise our rights, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

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Alexandra Chen, a law student at Seattle University and a plaintiff in the lawsuit Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County v. City of Seattle, poses for a portrait in Seattle, Washington on June 15, 2020.

David Ryder for the ACLU.

On May 30, first-year law student Alexandra Chen marched to a police precinct in downtown Seattle along with a few hundred other demonstrators. It was the second protest she’d attended, the first being the day before. When they arrived at the precinct, there were police in riot gear out in front, with others standing in the windows and watching the crowd from above. “People were clearly agitated, but I didn’t see anyone really try to push the ticket,” she said. “Folks were just crowding around and leading chants.” A few scattered water bottles along with a road flare were thrown at the precinct, but aside from that, Chen said nobody in the crowd was signaling that violence was coming. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘You know, this would be a great opportunity for someone to come out with a megaphone and make a statement about how you understand why we’re so angry and you want to work with us on how to fix this,’” she said. Instead, just like in Washington, D.C., Denver, and dozens of other cities, the Seattle Police Department began to throw stun grenades and tear gas into the crowd. “There was no warning at all,” she said. “It was just absolute chaos.” When the first stun grenade detonated near her, she felt a “deep percussive feeling” in her chest. People began to scream and run as tear gas filled the street. As she and her friend tried to move away from the precinct, she noticed another young woman desperately trying to find fresh air. “There was a gap in a wall that was about six to eight inches between buildings, and she was trying to escape the gas. It looked like she was trying to crawl into that space, and you could hear her retching,” she said. Tear gas is by its nature indiscriminate. It can’t be controlled or targeted to incapacitate specific people. As soon as a canister or grenade is launched, it becomes the property of the wind. Young and old alike are subject to its effects, which Chen says go from “uncomfortable to intolerable in a short amount of time.” Chen says that when the group first arrived at the precinct, nearly everyone was wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But after the tear gas was fired, people began to rip them off as they choked, coughed, and gasped for air. “First, you think to yourself, “Okay, I can tolerate this,’” she said. “You don’t really expect that it’s going to get worse, but it does. It moves deeper into your face and once it gets into your sinuses, everything it touches burns.” All around her, people were calling out for their friends and loved ones through the thick smoke. “It was hard to tell which direction to run because when they threw the canisters, they rolled down the hills spewing tear gas the whole way. So effectively, you had not just the immediate area in front of the police station gassed, you had the whole block, and when you’re in the middle of it, you can’t tell where it ends,” she recalled. After Chen and her friend emerged from the cloud, a medic nearby helped flush her eyes out with water, and the two walked back to her apartment. She is now a plaintiff in an ACLU lawsuit brought against the Seattle Police Department over its use of tear gas and other LLWs. “I don’t care what they want to say about how people are violent,” she said. “What I saw was peaceful protesters met with an immediate and overwhelming show of force to get us to disperse.”

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Jared Goyette stands in front of the remains of the Minnesota Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Brandon Bell for the ACLU

Policing the Press: A Journalist on the Frontlines

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police…

Listen to this episode

He managed to woozily make his way to safety, and after gathering his composure for a few minutes, found his car and drove home. Initially, he didn’t think he needed medical attention, but his girlfriend told him he had to visit a community clinic. Health workers there said that if he’d waited longer for treatment, he might have lost sight in that eye. He says he thinks it’s unlikely that officers didn’t know he was a journalist when they shot him. “I wasn’t running, I wasn’t chanting,” he said. “Protesters aren’t normally dressed in a dress shirt and slacks.” Goyette wasn’t the only journalist who was targeted by Minneapolis police that week. Many documented being pepper sprayed despite clearly identifying themselves as reporters. Others were arrested, gassed, threatened, or ⁠— like Goyette ⁠— shot with rubber bullets. In a clip that went viral, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television, despite the fact that he was accompanied by a full news crew with cameras and sound equipment. “I worry that the sort of ‘fake news’ doctrine is leading to journalists being targeted,” said Goyette. “And this is the first time that I think we saw that at a systematic scale.” On June 3rd, the ACLU filed suit against the City of Minneapolis over the attacks on journalists that were carried out by MPD officers. Goyette is the lead plaintiff in the case. “I don’t want this to come out wrong, but I feel angry, and a little bit afraid,” he said. “The Police Chief made an apology to journalists who were fired upon, but there wasn’t anything behind that apology. No promise to investigate and hold people accountable, nothing other than a sentimental gesture. And I fear that people are just going to move on.”

Published June 23, 2020 at 11:42PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3eu2a5Y

#IFTTT #Blogger

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nancydhooper · 5 years ago

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“All Hell Broke Loose.”

Kishon McDonald, 39, originally of Cleveland, Ohio, poses for a portrait in his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

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Law enforcement officers clearing protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2020.

Derek Baker

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Gabe Schlough at his home in Denver, Colorado.

Jimena Peck for the ACLU

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Toni Sanders, 36, poses for a portrait at her home in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

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David Ryder for the ACLU.

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Jared Goyette stands in front of the remains of the Minnesota Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Brandon Bell for the ACLU

Policing the Press: A Journalist on the Frontlines

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police…

Listen to this episode

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/all-hell-broke-loose via http://www.rssmix.com/

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mewhunter9 · 5 years ago

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there are many, many protests going on around the world and police and authority figures are abusing their power against people of color in all of them. i do not want what happened in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the city i go to university in, to go unnoticed because it is not a major city

(disclaimer, I am white and was not in the protest, but i did my best to take video from local news stations that actually shows what happened and first person accounts from those who were at the protests)

- on Sunday, May 31, a vigil was held in Murfreesboro square for George Floyd. it was arranged by a white man who planned a small event for solidarity, but eventually hundreds of people showed up

- The event was planned to last from 3 PM to 6 PM. A livestream of much of the vigil can be seen here. The protest included an eight minute silence to represent the length the video of George Floyd’s death, Marching around the square with many common slogans, such as “I will breath” “Silence is violence”

- It was a largely peaceful event. However, before the vigil even started, police showed up in riot gear, businesses around the square (which are all white-owned) boarded up their windows (one had “all lives matter” spray painted on it), and the national guard appeared also in full riot gear. There were drones and snipers as well

- it is important to note that Murfreesboro is not far from Pulaski, where the KKK was originally founded. many marches from the KKK and other white supremacists groups have occurred in Murfreesboro before. The most recent was a White Lives Matter event in 2017 held in Murfreesboro and nearby Shelbyville. The leader eventually canceled it due to overwhelming counterprotesters. some white supremacists still showed up, and the police protected and kept protesters and counterprotesters separate (see previous link)

- there are many accounts of people talking about the corruption within Murfreesboro’s police force and other members of the legal system. You can find many just from searching twitter for it. It is overwhelmingly white as well, which you can see that many protesters in the video are white too, though they came out in solidarity for those targeted by the police

- back to the current protest, the only damage from the protest one armored car being vandalized. A bar on the square had a broken window, but the damage was from two white supremacists taking advantage of the protest

- despite this, the police were extremely hostile during the whole protest even though they showed no such action at the previous white supremacist rallies. They barricaded protesters into the square with only one entrance and exit, and thoroughly searched everyone who arrived. Many were not allowed to bring water bottles, bags, or protective gear. They were suppressing the protest from the start.

- one woman passed out from the heat and had to be taken away by ambulance.

- at six, the protesters left the square. After stopping by the Murfreesboro police headquarters, they broke into two groups. One headed toward MTSU, the university nearby that has a building named after Nathan Bedford Forrest. Tthe other went to an intersection and blocked it to continue protesting

- the police claimed the protesters at the intersection were “almost run over by cars” and said the crowd had turned “violent.” The protesters were warned to leave, but before they had the chance, tear gas was thrown at them. Again, as soon as the officers finished speaking, tear gas was deployed. ( TW: the video of the gas being thrown)

- “we are deployed gas if you don’t move” and immediately throws gas.

- another video of more tear gas being thrown right after the other

- the mayor set a curfew for 6:30. Yet no one was informed until 6:37, and the police department only released it at 6:50

- the mayor also defended the use of the tear gas despite many children being present in the crowd. He said it was necessary to “disperse the crowd” and protect civilians and police

- one person was overcome by the tear gas and needed treatment on the scene

- flash bangs were used as well despite no danger to the police or violence. One flash bang was thrown at only two people standing together, not a crowd

- the curfew was issued right after the tear gas was deployed in an effort to justify its usage. Two people were arrested for violating curfew even though the curfew only being issued AFTER the time had passed

- the day after, a protest occurred again in Murfreesboro after a black university student was arrested due to “violating curfew”. He was stepped on by a police horse while the officers were dispersing the crowd. The officers saw and arrested him and “coincidentally” found a previous charge for failing to appear in court.

- a video of him speaking about the incident at the protest and how his treatment has made him realize how corrupt the police really were

- many news outlets pushed propaganda of officers “peacefully having conversations” with protesters and university police helping students get to their cars. Yet these officers threw tear gas, smoke bombs, and flash bangs at the same protesters without remorse

tldr: Murfreesboro was set up to fail by police officers who refused to let a peaceful protest occur. When protesters did not turn violent like they wanted, they used weapons to initiate violence and make arrests over a bullshit curfew from the mayor who supported the police’s action

#long post #murfreesboro #black lives matter protests #ask to tag

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evion · 8 years ago

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It is important to know the political and physical geography of today’s events. First, there were five distinct groups. The Trump supporters were based in Terry Schrunk Plaza. They tended to wear flags, fatigues and red Trump hats. A handful of minorities were present. Surrounding them were four different groups. A peace group began their protests outside Portland City Hall. The diversity in this crowd ranged from different ethnicities, to clothing, to age (young children and their parents, teenagers, millennial, boomers, and a group of 80+ year olds who have been part of Portland protests for decades.) By 11:30, when I arrived, City Hall walkway and the sidewalk in front were packed, making it difficult to walk along the sidewalk. The crowd shortly was filling one of the lanes of traffic along 4th avenue. A number of religious and ethnic community leaders gave speeches. Chanting and loudspeakers were directed towards the small group of Trump supporters who came to the west end of the park with signs and flags. This was, by far, the largest of the anti-Trump groups. On the east side of Schrunk Plaza a group made up of Union members and an older crowd with a megaphone taunted the Trump supporters closer to the stage in the plaza. The chanting was robust from both sides. And in Chapman Park there were two groups, though at times difficult to distinguish between them. The color of the day was black. Some were covered head to toe. Others wore t-shirts with slogans attacking both the Trump administration and the Portland police. There were a number in the park who were there to protest the Trump rally and call for peace. And then there were those itching for a fight: Angry at Trump, his supporters, the media, and the Portland Police. Perhaps especially the Portland Police. The largest area with direct contact between the opposing protestors was between SW 4th and SW. 3rd on Madison. That is where the largest conflict occurred. It made sense this was the area that police heavily patrolled. A concentrated line of police in riot gear spaced just a few feet apart, three to five feet off the sidewalk. At times one lane of the street included patrol cars or vans with running boards and handles on the outside that acted as transport for twelve or more police. One lane was always open to cars on SW 4th, 3rd, and Madison. That made it easy for police and security teams from at least three of the groups to ask, (Yes, “Ask”, This is Portland) people to stay out of the street. Those in Chapman Square, Schrunk Plaza, and along Madison Street had either a barrier of police in riot gear or yellow police incident tape to show them where the demarcation lines were. Perhaps the most obvious part about the Portland police presence was whom they were watching. The anti-Trump demonstrators outnumbered the Trump rally by estimates of 20:1. And the police approach was clearly that Trump supporters were considered in danger. Police stood facing Chapman sometimes shoulder to shoulder. To the east and west of Shrunk Plaza they were not as concentrated, 8-10 officers with one or two facing the Trump supporters. The rest focused on the peace group at City Hall or the union chanters at the Federal building. That focus was commented on constantly. Along with those comments was a memory of the action several weeks ago when buses were ready to transport Trump marchers back to the starting point when they marched through a multi-ethnic neighborhood chanting anti-immigrant slogans. No riot police presence was evident then, so police are seen as protecting Trump supporters while aggressively agitating those against the Trump administration. About 30 minutes before the scheduled end of the Trump rally things began to change significantly. I stood at the Northwest corner of SW 4th and Madison starting around noon. I could see straight down the line of the police facing Chapman Square. I could also see the peace groups gathered at City Hall and the small contingent of Trump supporters in constant shouting. I could see into Chapman Square itself only a few feet. Lots of black clad people concentrated in the SW corner of the square, making it hard to see much in the center. It was a busy corner. For a time, there was almost a joyous atmosphere to the crowd. But it was not without its tension. At one point, as I was talking to a friend, a group of Trump supporters carrying various flags and paraphernalia came through the crowd outside City Hall. They made it a point to shoulder their way pushing people. When they got across the street, one of them had his red hat knocked off of his head. It fell to the ground and a heavyset black clad fellow in his 20’s grabbed the hat and started to walk away with it. My friend intervened and told him, “We don’t do that,” effectively de-escalating the incident and sending the anti-Trump guy across the street to Chapman Square and the Trump supporter on his way north on 4th. A white truck circled the blocks several times. It seemed to want someone to get agitated as it constantly sped up to trap people in crosswalks. A number of individual incidents took place with police isolating people for a time and searching bags, taking away poles, and then releasing them. Then the scene got intense around 3:20. Scores more police arrived with insignia from several agencies. A loudspeaker announced the “Because of Criminal activity, people need to move to the center of Chapman Square.” Something had happened. We could not see what that was from the corner next to the Portland Building. Standing where I was, NOT in Chapman Square, across the street, I figured I’d be able to watch the situation. But that was not to be. As I stood there, I was suddenly pushed by a Police officer with a baton telling me that I had to move. I said, “the announcement said people in the Square. I am not in the Square. And I am observing as an elected official.” (I had my little magnetic nametag on my right side of my shirt.) His response was to say, “Hello Lew. We’ve met. But you still need to leave this area.” So I started walking north along 4th watching the Square. It became clear that more was going on there. Within a few minutes several large reports rang out. Smoke of some form was evident. Angry voices rang out across the park. I could see batons being swung. I could not see whether people or objects were being hit. I called to one of the activists I saw in the center of the square to come my direction. He was helping a woman who was clearly disoriented and upset. They came under the chain that surrounds the park and into the sidewalk and street, yelling at the police for what was likely tear gas or pepper spray of come kind. What sounded like a series of pellets being fired could be heard. The next announcement said that police had been assaulted and that the gathering had been declared illegal. Eventually the line of police stopped a few feet in from Main Street while still in Chapman Square. By that time I’d seen a number of water bottles and rocks thrown at the police. I did not see who threw them. But they landed near the front of the police line. A new announcement said Lonsdale Square had also seen criminal activity and that it too must be cleared. I started walking that way. At one point a group of folks threw several newspaper vending machines into the center of the street. Then came several orange cones. Remembering the fire that was started at the May Day march, I walked directly over to the growing pile and stood there for a while. A masked friend from the crowd yelled at me to watch out because tear gas weapons were pointed at me in the center of the street. I decided to stand there a while to see if anything more would take place. Nothing did. I left to go closer to the stand off line. There a few individuals were yelling at police. One attempted to get others to join him at the front of the line. It was only marginally successful. But something had changed. The large group of black clad people gathered to march north along 4th. The police line dispersed and moved back to the Madison Street location. I looked down 4th to see the group chanting and heading towards Morrison, possibly Burnside, with Police in pursuit. (Note that because 4th and 3rd avenues had been blocked, the peace groups at City Hall and the Federal building were separated from the smaller groups in Chapman Square. I wonder how they would have handled the pushing and shoving. Some folks had simply sat down in Chapman Square, only to be moved forcibly with batons.) By this time the Trump rally was officially over. It was clear from looking across the street that those in Schrunk Plaza were agitated and looking to the police for directions out of there. Those directions had a small number walking out the SE exit and up Jefferson Street. I walked up to City Hall. (Hearing along the way from ACLU legal observers that flash and tear gas canisters had been used around 4th and Morrison and that the group had been surrounded and everyone arrested.) At City Hall the numbers had diminished somewhat, but the enthusiasm had not. Chants were still going. I do not believe the group at City Hall knew that the Trump rally had ended until police started letting a larger number of folks out of the Plaza on the west side. Anti-Trump demonstrators formed a gauntlet for them to go through for a time on the corner of Jefferson and 4th. There were a few punches thrown before police broke up that gauntlet. Only to see another one form half a block down. And then still another skirmish in the next block. That seemed to be the case along a path that went several blocks south and then doubled back on 5th avenue to the Portland building. By the time I got to Madison again, a pepper spray incident had taken place involving the police. Demonstrators were treating several people, including a photographer. As I left down town I unsuccessfully tried to find the larger group that had moved north. Helicopters were circling. I did not find them. But I saw both brief skirmishes and measured conversations taking place throughout the downtown. Take a ways: If the message was that Portlanders reject the Trump agenda, that came through loud and clear. Were the Black clad folks heading into the streets to create more problems? Possibly. Did Portland police give clear directions? No. Was the strategy simply to move the more volatile elements away from each other before the end of the Trump rally? Well, that worked. I’ve been told that at least one brick was thrown at police prior to the closing of Chapman Square. That would likely be grounds for some action. Was it over reaction? Did the isolation approach work for the five rally groups? The peaceful groups continued to make their views clear. At what cost to future demonstrations? I know one former state senator who lost a great deal of respect for the Portland police after being manhandled and tear gassed while standing in what she had been told was a safe place to be. I have not seen the media coverage beyond one article that spent ¾ of the time talking with and about the Trump supporters. I get it. The huge numbers of people protesting them were there because of them. And I think it was also likely that the reporter had not met or talked with that group before. I’d also say that the reporter decided to lump all of the protestors in one easy meme rather than understand the differences and how that played out on the streets and parks downtown. And of course the adrenaline spikes when there is action. Understanding the deeper issues or differences takes time for broadcast news and greater history and awareness for print. These days’ reporters are given neither time nor support for providing context. Finally. It, frankly, could have been a lot worse.

Lew Frederick, Oregon State Senator (via Facebook)

#Portland #Long post

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kjack89 · 8 years ago

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The Liberator, Vol I: A Passing Hero (2500 Follower Giveaway Fic #18)

For @lotaire, who requested an ExR superhero AU with some more plot details for me to know and you to find out. Called “Vol. I” because I couldn’t quite fit everything from the prompt in (mainly the happy ending), which means at some point, a second volume will be required. (Also because, like, comic books. And such.)

ExR, Modern, superhero AU, developing relationship.

“Not guilty.”

Long after the verdict had been read and the courtroom cleared, the two words still seemed to hang in the air just as Enjolras still sat at the prosecution table, stunned. Slowly, he packed his papers into his briefcase and stood, ready to begin the long walk out of the courtroom. He paused to frown at the figure still seated in the back, fast asleep. “I can’t wait to see your sketches from today,” he said, a little loudly, and even managed a smile when the court artist woke up with a start.

“Oh, is it over already?” Grantaire asked, stretching and yawning. “I mean, I didn’t expect it to last long. It’s not like there was a solid case.”

“Excuse me?” Enjolras said coldly.

Grantaire smiled at him. “Don’t take it like that,” he said, standing and following Enjolras out of the courtroom. “It’s not your fault that you weren’t given much more than circumstantial evidence to work with, and it’s pretty hard to get a conviction these days.”

Enjolras snorted. “You’re telling me,” he said, running a tired hand through his hair. “I swear, these days it seems like the bad guys just keep winning, and the District Attorney’s office doesn’t have the resources to keep up with the volume of crime.” He smiled slightly. “But at least we have the Liberator on our side. Maybe he’ll bring this guy to justice as well.”

Grantaire’s smile faded. “I’m not sure you can call what the Liberator does ‘justice’,” he said, almost reluctantly. “I mean, he’s killed people. You’re an officer of the court -- surely you don’t want a murderer to escape justice of his own.”

“I don’t think it’s as black and white as that,” Enjolras said, his conviction clear in his voice. “Our legal system is currently broken -- there’s too much corruption from the top down to truly bring some very dangerous people to justice, to get them off the streets.” He shook his head. “Obviously I don’t condone killing anyone, but we’re talking about rapists and human traffickers and murderers, not petty thieves or vandals or anything like that. With these people left on the streets, more innocent people will get hurt, and criminals are emboldened.” Enjolras shot a sideways look at Grantaire, his tone turning curt. “Of course, given your lack of convictions, I’m not surprised that you don’t share my view.”

Grantaire shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t share your view, I’m just not thrilled about one person playing judge and jury. It’s too much power for one person, especially a vigilante that the public knows nothing about.”

Enjolras’s eyes narrowed. “I know he’s a good man,” he said simply. “I don’t need to know much more.”

For a moment, it looked like Grantaire might argue, but he settled instead for winking at Enjolras. “If I had known that all it took to get you hot and bothered was being a vigilante dressed in a leotard, I would’ve done it a long time ago.”

Enjolras scowled at him. “Putting you in a costume wouldn’t change the fundamental things we disagree on. And being a superhero would require you to actually care.”

“Oh, so now you’re saying the Liberator is a superhero?” Grantaire asked, laughing slightly.

“No,” Enjolras said shortly. “But you would have to be to get me even remotely hot and bothered.”

With that, he left, walking in the direction of his office and leaving Grantaire staring after him, something like resignation in his expression.

“Honey, I’m home,” Grantaire called, dropping his bag on the floor next to the couch before collapsing against the worn cushions. “Did you get my suit ironed?”

Combeferre leaned back in his computer chair, sipping from a mug of tea. “For the eighteen-thousandth time, don’t call me honey,” he said calmly. “And I don’t do your laundry, asshole, ironing included.”

Grantaire yawned widely. “Someone’s in a bad mood,” he said, rolling over and squinting at the computer screen. “Tracking bad guys not going well?”

“Hardly. I tracked Le Cabuc’s movements all the way from the courthouse. He’s at a bar on 5th Street with known Patron-Minette ties and has been for awhile. I can’t imagine him leaving anytime soon.” Combeferre picked up his cellhpone and looked at Grantaire accusingly. “I got a text from Enjolras.”

Sighing, Grantaire leaned back and closed his eyes. “Then I understand your bad mood,” he said sourly. “Talking to Apollo is enough to make anyone crabby.”

“He doesn’t understand why you hate the Liberator so much.” Grantaire’s expression didn’t change and Combeferre sighed. “Grantaire, you’re going to have to tell him eventually.”

“Am not,” Grantaire said petulantly. “And I thought you were perfectly fine keeping your best friend in the dark. If you’ve changed your mind…”

Combeferre shook his head. “It’s not about me,” he said, a touch impatiently. “It’s about the fact that you’re keeping a huge secret from the guy that you purport to have feelings for.” He shrugged and drained his cup of tea. “I’m perfectly happy keeping Enjolras in the dark because I’m frankly not keen on putting him as an agent of the court in the position of knowing that we’re committing felonies, even if they’re felonies he would support. Besides…” He trailed off and shrugged. “It’s not my secret to tell.”

“You’re right,” Grantaire said, sitting up and ruffling his hair. “It’s not your secret. And it’s not your problem.” He stood and walked over to the wall, pressing a button and watching impassively as a panel slid back, revealing a dark blue suit of body armor emblazoned with a silver “L” across the chest and three stars on either shoulder. He picked up a small silver shield with the words Unus ex eis sum written across it and inspected it for any dings or dirt. “Is Le Cabuc still at that bar?”

For a moment, Combeferre just looked at him, clearly wanting to say more, but then he shook his head and turned back to the computer. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll take it you’re going after him?”

The question was probably unnecessary, as Grantaire was already strapping himself into the body armor. “He was accused of killing a man in cold blood, and your search indicated he’s probably guilty of killing at least two kids.” He paused in the middle of pulling his gauntlet on. “He laughed about it,” he said quietly. “After the trial. He laughed about murdering three people and getting away with it.”

Combeferre nodded slowly. “I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it,” he started cautiously, “but honestly, I’m worried about you. You need to make sure that what you’re doing isn’t taking a toll on your soul.”

“That would require me to believe that I have a soul to be worried about,” Grantaire said before putting his helmet on, making sure that only his mouth was visible. “Besides, it’s not me doing this. It’s the Liberator.”

With that, he was gone, slipping out into the night, and Combeferre sighed, turning back to his computer to track Grantaire’s movements. “Just because you choose to believe you don’t have a soul doesn’t make it true,” he muttered, putting on his headset and cracking his knuckles before getting down to work.

Grantaire stared dully ahead, his eyes red-rimmed and exhausted, nursing the largest cup of coffee that the café offered. He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t even notice when Enjolras slid into the seat across from him until he spoke. “Did you hear?” Enjolras asked, practically jubilant. “The Liberator took Le Cabuc down.”

It took a moment for Grantaire to realize what he was talking about. “Oh, really?” he asked, a little listlessly.

Enjolras frowned. “What’s wrong with you?”

Grantaire shrugged. “Nothing,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. “I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.” He took a large gulp of coffee before asking Enjolras, “So why aren’t you at work right now?”

“I took the day off,” Enjolras said, still frowning at Grantaire. “There’s a rally downtown to protest another round of cuts to social service agencies, and you know I wouldn’t miss that. Besides, I could ask you the same thing -- why aren’t you at work?”

Grantaire half-smiled. “Well, there’s no court cases on the docket today, so not exactly anything for me to draw. I was thinking of heading to the park, doing some sketches, whatever.”

Enjolras opened his mouth to reply when the barista called, “Double red-eye for Enjolras!”

He stood, hovering awkwardly for a moment before telling Grantaire, “Maybe I’ll see you at the rally, if you decide against the park.”

“Yeah, sure,” Grantaire said, watching Enjolras leave, coffee. “Maybe you will.”

“Social services save lives!” Enjolras shouted, his fist raised in the air. His shout was matched by hundreds of similar slogans bellowed throughout the square, and his blood seemed to thrum with the very exhilaration of seeing so many people come together to fight for the same cause. “Safe communities start with social safety nets!”

Another shout rang out, not too far from Enjolras, but this one was far from the message the rally was trying to spread. “Waste of money!” one guy shouted, as another called, “Fuck socialist propaganda!”

Enjolras moved quickly towards the source of the shouting, ready and willing to convince any counter-protesters that it would be in their best interest to get out while they still could. But before he could get there, one of the protesters threw down his sign and pushed one of the counter-protesters.

And that was when things got ugly.

Pushing and shouting erupted all around Enjolras, who found himself face-to-face with a massive guy sporting a swastika tattoo on his neck, and Enjolras had only just managed to push him out of the way when, without warning, gunshots rang out.

People screamed and scattered, panic spreading throughout the rally. Enjolras turned, eager to get to safety -- and eager to avoid police entanglement if possible, knowing that another mark on his record would not look good to the DA -- and almost ran right into the guy still brandishing his weapon. “Oh, shit,” Enjolras said, backing up slowly.

“You!” the guy half-snarled, pointing the gun at Enjolras. “Aren’t you that prosecutor who tried to send me to jail?”

Enjolras held up his hands placatingly, but his mouth never did know when to stop. “For possession of an illegal firearm, if memory serves, and it looks like you’re really living up to the charge, Brujon.”

The gunman, Brujon, sneered. “Good thing you can’t charge me if you’re dead, bitch.”

He was just about to pull the trigger when out of nowhere, a gloved fist smashed into his face. Enjolras’s eyes widened as the masked face of the Liberator turned to him, something almost familiar in the set of his jaw. Wordlessly, The Liberator grabbed Enjolras around the waist with one arm while aiming a grappling hook gun with the other one and firing.

When Enjolras later told the story, he conspicuously left out the part where he screamed and threw his arms around the Liberator’s neck as they flew through the air. He also left out how he was pretty sure, for just a moment, that the Liberator was laughing at him.

Only when they were safely up on a roof, far above the chaos below, did Enjolras let go of his grip on the Liberator’s neck. “Are you alright?” the Liberator asked, taking a step back from Enjolras, who couldn’t stop looking at him, drinking him in eagerly as if he was a dream that Enjolras might wake up from.

“I’m fine,” Enjolras says, smiling almost shyly at him. “Thanks to you.” The Liberator nodded and turned to leave. “Wait,” Enjolras said, reaching out to grab his arm. “Where are you going?”

The Liberator half-turned. “Someone needs to make sure Brujon doesn’t get away. And there are innocent people still in danger.”

Enjolras smiled slightly. “Well, I can’t argue with that, but before you go, I want to tell you something.” He bit his lip, feeling close to tongue-tied, which was a rare experience for him. “I’ve always admired what you do, and, well, I have friends with far more principles than I’ve ever claimed to have, but I know that death is sometimes a necessity.”

“Maybe,” the Liberator said quietly, “but I think of it more as a duty.”

He hefted his shield and Enjolras looked at it, frowning slightly. “What does your shield mean?” he asked.

The Liberator seemed surprised by the question. “I am one of them,” he said. “It’s Latin.”

“No, I know that,” Enjolras said, blushing slightly. “I mean -- one of who?”

For a long moment, the Liberator just looked at him. Though his mask hid most of his face, Enjolras got the feeling that he was debating over how to answer. Finally, the Liberator said softly, “One of the people I’m trying to save.”

Enjolras didn’t know what to say to that, so he settled for blurting, “You’re a hero.”

The Liberator just shook his head. “I’m no hero.”

“To me, you are,” Enjolras said simply. “I believe in you.”

Without warning or preamble, the Liberator crossed over to Enjolras and kissed him, his gloved hand warm against Enjolras’s cheek. Enjolras was surprised for a moment, but then kissed him back, surprised by the passion he felt from a man he had just met.

Then, equally abrupt, the Liberator turned away, leaping off of the roof, using his grappling hook to swing back down toward the rally. Enjolras watched him go, his cheeks tinged pink and a slow smile spreading across his face.

“Honey, I’m home,” Grantaire croaked, no humor in his voice as he dragged himself across the living room to practically collapse onto the couch. He was bleeding on his arm from a switchblade that had managed to find a weak spot in his body armor, and he could feel the bruises blossoming across his torso and back.

“Are you alright?” Combeferre asked mildly from his computer chair. “Do you need me to call Joly?”

“No, I’ll be fine,” Grantaire groaned.

Combeferre took a sip of tea and watched as Grantaire slowly began to remove his body armor, wincing with every piece that he took off. “You don’t seem fine,” Combeferre said.

Grantaire shrugged, examining the cut on his arm. “It’s only some bruises.” he said, not looking up at Combeferre as he said it. “I don’t even think this’ll need stitches.” Now he did manage to look up at Combeferre, smiling with a ghost of his usual grin. “Trust me, I’ve had worse.”

“I didn’t just mean physically,” Combeferre said evenly, tapping a finger against his cellphone. “I meant this text that I got from Enjolras.”

Suddenly, Grantaire couldn’t seem to meet Combeferre’s eyes. “I’m not a mind reader,” he muttered. “I don’t know what the text says.”

“It says that Enjolras met the Liberator,” Combeferre told him. “It also says that Enjolras thinks he might be a little bit in love with him.” Grantaire still didn’t look up at Combeferre, who sighed heavily. “What did you do?”

Grantaire just shook his head. “Something I’ve always wanted to do,” he said quietly, staring straight ahead and replaying that moment on the rooftop, a moment he would hold onto as long as he lived. “And something I never should have done.”

#Enjolras x Grantaire #ExR #Enjoltaire #Enjolras #Grantaire #Combeferre #fanfiction #Les Miserables #modern au #superhero au #secret identity #sorry I know you asked for fluff and a happy ending #and this is literally the opposite of that #so when day when I write vol 2 I'll give you the fluff you wanted #promise #violence cw #blood cw #mild injury cw

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phoenixcelestino · 7 years ago

Text

Warrior

The sound of rain hitting the street below drifted in through the open window. Prudence sat on the ledge smoking a cigarette as she watched the people below scurry about trying to keep out of the storm.

"That's such a dirty habit," Hera chimed as she glided into the room without a sound. She was exceptionally graceful for a normal person, and given that she towered well over six feet, most considered her to be gifted with dexterity and grace.

Prudence didn't say a word, just rolled her eyes and took one last, deep drag and flicked the butt into the street below. Her face settled back into a scowl as she continued to stare out the window, visibly tense.

"Is there something you don't like about the rain, Prue?" Hera joked as she watched her friend flick her lighter open and closed, open and closed, open and closed. Hera moved to join Prue at the window, ducking to be at her eye level, trying and failing to get her to look her in the eye. "You've been restless lately."

Prudence sighed and pushed her blonde bangs away from her face, and Hera noticed the circles under her eyes. Her skin was sallow, like she hadn’t had sleep or water for days. Prue finally turned to look at Hera for a moment, thinking hard, before turning back out the window and sighing again.

“You know I am worried about the results of the election-” Prudence began.

“Oh come off it,” a voice from the back of the room shrilled, “It’s been months, and you’re just upset because you lost.” Prudence closed her eyes and looked like she was considering very carefully the ramifications of a murder charge while Hera turned a dirty glance toward the girl who had just come blundering up the stairs. They hadn’t gotten along with Corrie since she had moved in, but they had no authority to kick her out, and she paid her rent in advance. None of the girls had ever seen the landlord, so they never had a chance to complain about each other. Hera had always suspected they did this on purpose to keep rooms filled and stress off their own hands.

Corrie stomped up behind the two girls already sitting at the window, and when they didn’t reply to her earlier comments took this as her invitation to keep talking. “You’re so paranoid, Prudence. I guess you really live up to your name.”

“That is not what my name means!” Prudence stood up quickly, knocking over her chair in the process. The two girls looked like they were about to go at each other’s throats.

“Why don’t you just leave,” Hera said, stepping between the two and turning to face Corrie squarely, “you have no reason to be up here, anyway, your room is downstairs.” Although the girls stood at equal height, Corrie wasn’t nearly so skilled at handling her body as Hera was; while Hera taught and practiced various martial arts at a very advanced level, Corrie trotted around clumsily like a baby elephant. You could almost see this thought turn over in her head as she held Hera’s stare for a moment before rolling her eyes and retreating down the stairs without another word. You could hear her loud gait as she stomped across the wooden floors before she slammed her door and was silent.

Hera and Prudence sat back down with a new tension in the air, silently watching the rain soak the street below, feeling the fine spray that came in with the wind, both wrapped up in their own thoughts.

“I swear I’m not crazy,” Prudence whispered into the air, and she could only barely be heard over the tap-tap-tap of the rain on the roof above their heads.

“I believe you,” Hera comforted her friend, reaching out to squeeze her hand. Hera had to admit, Prudence was right; things had felt…off somehow lately. She couldn’t quite place her finger on what it was. She just had the sensation that lately a dark shadow hung over everything. “Come on,” she tapped Prue lightly on the head, “we need to get to work. Wear your rain boots.” She then retreated down the stairs without a sound, and Prudence lit another cigarette.

The rain poured down steadily, slowly drowning the earth until it could hold no more and the water overflowed the ditches and roadside drains. The girls walked down the center of the street to keep out of the puddles as they made their way to work. Hera held up the biggest umbrella the girls could find while Prudence tried in vain to light another cigarette.

Hera watched the street as Prudence grumbled. They were the only two out, something that Hera found a little unusual, but just attributed to the storm. Lightning flashed and the crack of thunder that followed made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. They passed a weather-worn campaign poster that still hung from a telephone pole with the slogan FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR GREAT NATION still screaming out at them in red ink that bled down the page.

“What were you going to tell me earlier, about the election? You never got to get into it,” Hera asked Prudence. Prue scowled and muttered what sounded like a string of explicatives before sighing.

“The Peoples Interest Campaign; I don’t buy it. I don’t think they have our interest in mind at all,” she began. “Just look at the woman who got elected, Kim Maolihn; do you know anything about her?” Hera shook her head and Prudence continued,” Sure, she’s all about cleaning the crime out of our great nation” she sneered at the campaign slogan, “but I’m starting to worry about what she considers a thorough cleansing. Maolihn has a record of being a zealot; she even had the support of a radical hate group during the election, but no one is paying attention to these facts.”

The rain seemed to hiss as it pelted the street. It seemed like the whole silent world was listening to Prudence speak. Hera almost didn’t dare to let her voice shatter the air around her but finally mustered, “What do you mean, zealot? What kind of radical behavior?”

“It all started after some major incident when she was just a detective. It was a huge ordeal, there was a gang involved. I don’t know exactly what happened, those records are from long ago and sealed, but it’s like she developed a vendetta against all criminals,” Prudence visibly shuddered and pulled her coat tighter around her.

“She tracked down all the members of a gang in her area that was causing quite a bit of trouble, and she came down on them ruthlessly. I saw the pictures of some of those guys when they brought them in. They looked like they’d been in a bar fight, some of them died from internal injuries, but she claimed that they had those injuries when the police arrived,” the frustration was rising in her voice as she spoke. “And that was just the beginning!

“I see what the voters saw, to an extent, about wanting the country to be safer, but in the pursuit of discipline and justice there is a line I won’t cross or endorse crossing to get there. But, Maolihn’s ruthlessness helped her put bad people away, and when that happens who cares at what cost, right?” Prudence sneered again and her voice came out like fire. “Make the people feel safe, so they’ll turn a blind and trusting eye. That’s how she clawed her way to the top, finally making our Attorney General. Did you know she had been Attorney General, the top law enforcement officer in the country?” Again, Hera shook her head no.

“Maolihn targets groups, and even worse she authorizes studies on them.” Prudence spat.

“What? What do you mean? Explain both the groups and the studies, and how did you find out all this information?” Hera wasn’t sure if it was the rain making the temperature drop or what Prudence was telling her, but she suddenly felt cold.

“I…can’t explain. All I know is that she has a file, a growing file, with a bunch of names in it. I can’t find the connection as to what all these people have in common though. Most of them seem like ordinary, everyday people. Many of them are finding themselves suddenly under suspicion and taken in for questioning. After that, my information runs dry again,” Prudence explained.

Hera thought for a while about everything her best friend had told her. She had always been overly cautious, but when Hera really thought about it Prudence had a knack for living up to her name.

“Ok, I understand your concern, but you never did tell me how you got this information,” Hera gave her friend a knowing glare and Prue began to look sheepish. She looked quickly up and down the street to ensure no one had suddenly appeared before turning back to Hera.

“I might have an illegal computer system operating in my closet,” she confessed before giving Hera a mischievous grin and darting ahead into the rain. Hera began to call after her but realized as she watched Prue disappear into the building that they had made it all the way to the gym where they worked without her realizing it.

Prudence swiveled in her chair to face Hera who was examining the roster of checked-in students for her last class of the day. “Have you seen the new guy?” Prue asked, and Hera looked at the list again.

“A new student?” she questioned, confused when she only found her regular list.

“No, you dunce, the new instructor Donna hired. Have you seen him? What am I saying, of course you haven’t,” she said with a sigh before nodding her head in the direction of a man that even Hera was surprised she had missed. He had bright read hair cut close and neatly, and a well-groomed beard to match it. He was doing one-on-one training with a student, and his techniques were advanced and well executed. The most surprising thing to her, however, was that he was easily a good four inches taller than she was, something she didn’t encounter often.

“Close your mouth, you’re drooling,” Prudence said as she tugged the clipboard out of Hera’s hands.

“He’s so tall,” Hera couldn’t help but keep staring.

“Yeah, well, everyone’s tall to me. Go teach or something,” Prudence rolled her eyes and turned back to the front doors to welcome guests, and Hera hurried off to teach her next class. She threw herself into helping her students learn, they were advanced and she was incredibly proud of how far they had come, and she soon forgot all about the new instructor. She might have even gone home without a second thought about him if she hadn’t spotted him observing her from across the gym.

It was getting later; most classes had ended and students were going home, but the man lingered, leaning casually against a machine, watching Hera instruct. After dismissing her class Hera marched past Prudence waiting at the welcome desk and straight up to the man. She was again struck by just how tall he was; she only reached his chin.

“Are you looking for lessons? Could’ve joined the class if you wanted to learn,” Hera said crossing her arms. He smirked and extended his hand. Hera looked at him for a moment before finally extending her own.

“Brenus,” he said when she finally grasped his hand. He gave hers a firm shake before dropping it and smiling. “Can I buy you dinner?”

Before Hera could get over the shock of his question, Prudence was at her side and responding for her, “She and I are really a package deal tonight, so buying her dinner means me too. I like Italian. Let’s go,” and then turned and walked out the door.

Brenus looked shocked, then broke out in a smile before he started laughing. “I can tell she’s equal amounts trouble and fun. I suppose if you’re willing I’ll buy the three of us dinner?” he asked still smiling.

Hera walked to the door and sighed, “It looks like she decided for me. Come on, I know where she’s headed.”

~~~

Brenus carried two boxes of pizza that they all ate out of as they walked, talking and laughing, toward the girls’ house.

“I’m just saying, you’re like a giant beacon, and you would be horrible at even night-time hide-and-seek,” Prudence was saying which had Hera doubled over in laughter.

“I am not a beacon,” Brenus said as they walked beneath a streetlight, and his hair cast a slightly red glow around them. “Oh, damn it, oh well,” he said and threw back his head in laughter.

“So did you two become friends at work?” he asked when they could all finally breath again.

“Oh no, we knew each other way before then,” Hera said. “Too long to remember,” Prudence added.

“Wow, so you guys are pretty close, then?” he continued, and the girls looked at each other mischievously.

“Like sisters,” they chimed together, laughing at their inside joke. Brenus gave both of them a quizzical look, but chose to grab another slice of pizza instead of questioning them further. By the time they reached the house both boxes were empty.

“So where did you get your training, Brenus? I saw you with a few students today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. And that’s no small feat when you live with this one,” Prudence said jerking her head sharply toward Hera. She was laying face up on the floor with her legs up on the couch. She reached up to tap the ash off her cigarette, and Hera snatched it from her fingers and put it out with one sharp twist on the ashtray.

“Ah, I just picked it up here and there,” Brenus replied looking around the room at nothing in particular. He sat across the coffee table in a large over-stuffed armchair, feet propped up as if this wasn’t his first visit.

“Here and there, what kind of an answer is that? You have a honed skill,” Hera scoffed, “I’d even go so far as to say you’d be able to kill someone if you really wanted. That’s not just here and there.”

Brenus looked uneasy, almost sheepish, rubbing his hands through his hair making the fiery red locks stand like waves that had frozen as they peaked. It made him look like he’d gone mad. “I got solid, efficient training in a number of places. I put it all together and kept practicing. Now I’m pretty good. That’s all,” he retorted, almost sharply. The look on his face screamed that he didn’t want to keep talking about his skills.

The girls were silent, a little shocked. A fly could be heard buzzing at the window, a barely audible tap, tap, tap as it tried in vain to get through the window to the cold outside. Without warning Brenus stood and crossed the room, and with a loud crash! He killed the fly in one quick blow, slamming it against the window.

They all sat there, stunned into silence, Brenus included. He looked at his hand as if it had controlled his body just then, and not his head. Before anyone could break the silence, Corrie’s heavy tread could be heard coming down the hall.

“What the actual fuck, you guys? It sounded like you broke something. I am not paying for any damages!”

“I’m sorry,” Brenus murmured, still not facing the girls. Hera and Prudence turned their attentions from him and glowered at Corrie.

“Nothing’s broken,” Hera defended. “Did you need anything else?”

Corrie turned a darker shade of red and sputtered, “I swear to G-“

“I have something much better to do than listen to hot air blow in your ass and out your windpipe,” Prudence yelled while getting up off the floor. She turned and bowed to Hera, then Brenus, and then turned and flew up the stairs two at a time.

Corrie let out an angry shriek, “Why are you both such freaks? I cannot wait until you both move out! Aren’t you better off in the gutters where you came from, anyway?”

Hera had Corrie pinned to the wall, keeping her face pressed to the rough popcorn texture with one hand, before the other girl had time to register that she had gotten up off the couch. “You are the odd one here, not us. Do not call Prudence a freak ever again. Don’t even talk to her,” her voice came out calm and sharp as steel in Corrie’s ear. “Or I swear to God-“ Brenus pulled Hera of the other girl, locking her arms to her side so she couldn’t strike out.

“Leave.” He didn’t need to shout, the warning look he gave Corrie was enough to send her lumbering back down the hall to her bedroom, slamming the door again. It was only after he heard the door lock that Brenus finally released Hera and dodged her attempt to hit him once she was free.

“You wanna tell me what that was about?” He asked, hands up in surrender.

Hera glowered at him for a minute before finally going and sitting back down on the couch. “We’ve had problems since she moved in,” she explained. “Little things at first, but after two years we’re pretty fed up with each other. Prue and Corrie really don’t get along, in case you couldn’t tell.”

Brenus chuckled a little, “I noticed. Prudence really speaks her mind, doesn’t she?”

“She is my most honest and loyal friend. She is honestly my only friend. But I’m ok with that,” Hera said smiling. “She tells you exactly what you need to hear. She’s brutally honest, with only a little less brutal,” she said laughing at her own joke.

“So, really, how long have you two known each other?” he questioned.

Hera looked off, staring at a scene only she could see. “I’m not sure if it’s a memory or a dream. I remember being little, too little to remember much. One day there was Prue, white blonde hair, holding out her hand for us to play. Since then she has been the closest thing I’ve had to home.” Brenus watched her as she relived he past, the changing shape of her face as each memory danced across it. He stayed quiet, letting her have some peace as he studied who she was.

“Get up!”

Hera and Brenus jumped, startled, to their feet. Prudence leapt down the last four stairs with two bags slung over her shoulders and two staffs, the longer of the two she tossed to Hera. “We are leaving now, no questions. You have to come too,” Prudence said to Hera and Brenus.

“Why-“ Hera began, but in the silence outside they suddenly hear the buzz of guns and then the sharp crack of a bomb going off in the distance. Nothing else was said. Prudence led the way out the backdoor and down a gentle hill to a rough trail that cut through the woods. The night swallowed it somewhere in the trees ahead, but the girls knew the way by heart, each step they would take, and every obstacle in their way. They each grabbed one of Brenus’ hands and helped him make his way through the darkness.

“Get to Jerry; get to the boat!” Hera risked a harsh and breathless whisper to Prudence running ahead of her, and without a sound they continued through the trees.

#warrior #creative writing #story #fiction #thriller #struggle #writer #writing #author #new writer

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aion-rsa · 8 years ago

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Cartoonist Seth Tobocman on Art, Activism and Advice in the Age of Trump

Cartoonist Seth Tobocman co-founded “World War 3 Illustrated,” and remains one of the voices behind the influential anthology of politically driven art that he and Peter Kuper launched in 1979. The 47th issue of the anthology was released in November, and 2016 also marked the publication of two other books by Tobocman: His first graphic novel, “War in the Neighborhood,” was republished after being out of print for years; a fictional account of the squatters movement in Manhattan in the 1980s. Tobocman’s second graphic novel was published over the summer, titled, “Len, A Lawyer in History: A Graphic Biography of Radical Attorney Leonard Weinglass.”

The two books are important for the events that they chronicle and remain vital reading as both detail the incremental, hard-fought work of political activism. Tobocman has been an artist and an activist for his entire life and in the aftermath of November’s US presidential election, Tobocman spoke to CBR about art and activism, climate change, the evolution of his art style, art history and his thoughts on President Donald J. Trump, and the work ahead. People may not always agree with Tobocman’s politics or his approach, but at the heart of his work is this idea: “The most radical thing is to explain the process by which things work.”

CBR: Seth, we spoke a couple years back about the “World War 3 Illustrated” anniversary collection, but I hadn’t read your book “War in the Neighborhood” until this new edition. Could you give a little context for the book and where it came from?

Seth Tobocman: We started out responding to the election of Ronald Reagan. That was this mind-blowing, life-changing experience for us. As 19 and 20 year olds we felt we had to do art that was political, we had to talk to masses of people, we had to acquire an accessible language that could allow us to reach out to people. We started our own magazine, “World War 3 Illustrated,” and after about four years of fighting Reagan, we found that he was Teflon and almost anything you threw at him, he survived it. The Iran-Contra Scandal didn’t hurt him at all.

We started to say, “OK, we’re a minority. What can we do as a minority, as a small group of people, that is meaningful?” We started to look around at our own community and see what could we get involved with here on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that’s meaningful. There were a lot of issues that were very pressing in the neighborhood. We had the beginnings of gentrification. We had a real problem with drug-dealing. We had violent crime. We had violent police brutality, which was something that you really had to live in a community of color to really understand. White people back in the ’80s did not know this was going on but everybody in the black community and the Puerto Rican community knew this was going on. So we started working around those issues in the community.

I got involved in the squatters movement, which was seizing abandoned buildings and renovating them to make affordable housing for people. I don’t use the word “affordable” in the way that the state used it where they can categorize almost any level as affordable. I mean that people could actually afford to live there. [Laughs] Of course, this was being done without cover of law. Webster’s dictionary definition of squatting is “without title or right.” We were a squatters movement. That very quickly came under attack. It came under attack culturally by changing the usage of public parks and spaces by saying people could not be there after midnight and then physically under attack by attempts to evict the buildings. For about three or four years, there were riots every couple months on the Lower East Side.

I became a house member at a squat called Umbrella House. Although I did not give up my rent-stabilized apartment, which was controversial to some people. I defended that squat against an eviction attempt with several other people. I got very involved in squat defense. I was arrested about 20 times. I got my nose broken by the cops. I also got my nose broken by another activist in a fist fight. It was a very complex, difficult scene organizing all those people. There were a lot of cultural differences, there were a lot of political differences. We didn’t always get along with each other. In the end I decided to give up my key to Umbrella House and move back into my apartment and work on my own artwork. That was when I decided to make “War in the Neighborhood.” I felt I had a pretty significant life experience. I’m not normally an autobiographical cartoonist, but I felt I’d been involved in something significant enough that it ought to be recorded.

It was more significant than I realized because a few years after I began writing the book, 13 squats in the Lower East Side were legalized and are now the property of the people who live in them. They had gone from being squatters to homeowners. It was, in fact, an effective movement for some people. Although it sure took a lot out of everybody. That was the basis for “War in the Neighborhood.” Between the amount of time it took to live it and the amount of time it took to draw it, it was about 10 years of my life. It’s probably the most extensive project I’ve ever worked on and maybe the most extensive project I ever will work on.

As someone younger who grew up in the 1990s and did not grow up in New York City, I became aware of this like many others did, because of the musical “Rent.”

There were always a lot of artists and musicians in the squats. Considering how many artists there were, I’m still surprised how few graphic novels there are in print about the squatters community on the Lower East Side. I knew eight different cartoonists or visual artists who were pretty close to being cartoonists who lived in those buildings. And tons of musicians. This was the Lower East Side and particularly in the ’70s and ’80s — more than now — there was a feeling you had to go to either New York or San Francisco or LA if you wanted to be an artist. There was a lot of music that came out of that scene. Missing Foundation was a very politically active band and had a very important role in the 1988 riots.

That was the Tompkins Square Park Riot?

Yes. Well, the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot. There was one in ’88, several in ’89, and definitely one in ’91. There was more than one Tompkins Square Park Riot.

And of course the famous 1874 Tompkins Square Park Riot, which was an important moment in the workers movement.

There you go!

“War in the Neighborhood” was your first graphic novel, but your second, “Len,” came out a few months which is about the lawyer and activist Leonard Weinglass.

“Len” is a very different sort of project, but the tie-in is the Yippies. The Yippies had very important ideas. I think in a lot of ways they’re not understood in terms of their ideas. They’re understood in terms of style of clothing, taste for certain drugs, a type of theatrical style of politics, but they’re not really understood for having a body of ideas. The idea the Yippies had is that it’s possible for people to leave the society and become a different society. That it’s possible for people to essentially secede from contemporary industrial society and become a counter culture. That’s an important idea whether you agree with that idea or not. It was a central idea to the movement that happened in Tompkins Square Park in the ’80s. Most people would not have wanted to call themselves Yippies or be identified with the Yippies, but they did a lot of similar things. Did you read Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zones?” It was a very popular political book and it informed the anti-globalization movement and Burning Man and other things, but the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone is a very sophisticated way of describing Abbie Hoffman’s Festival of Life. I thought we invented the slogan “it’s our fucking park” in 1988. I thought I saw the invention of that slogan by Gerald Wade and Uncle Don Yippie on the streets of Manhattan, but in fact that slogan goes all the way back to Lincoln Park in 1968. At the same time, the yippies had a lot of problems. I wouldn’t want to imitate the Yippies, but there are certain ideas that are important.

Besides the Yippies, I would argue that the heart of both books is depicting not just the idea of activism, but the work of activism.

Activism is something you do — not some abstraction or some ideal. There are a lot of books on politics, but very few of those books give you much information about how to do politics. They give you information about theories, they give you information about ideals, and they give you information about history, but they don’t really deal with the brass tacks very much. I always felt at a loss for that information when I was younger. If I uncover that, I want to put that in my work. I was very interested in the actual work Leonard did with his clients and the actual work his clients did in the neighborhoods. I thought that was really important to describe that process. Also to describe the process by which the courts work, the process by which the police work, the process by which the prison system works.

We did a lot of work in the past few years with Magdy El-Shafee, who’s the author of “Metro,” which is considered to be the first Arab language graphic novel. It was banned under Mubarak and when I interviewed Magdy I asked him what was it that got the book banned? According to Magdy it was that he described a situation — a fictional situation — in which the ruling party paid local thugs to sexually assault protestors. Even though this was a fictional piece, Magdy said that they were upset because they were actually doing that.

The most radical thing is to explain the process by which things work. How things actually happen. Because people don’t have that information. Look, you can make your own value judgments about things. I can tell you for 50 years that you should be for this and against that, and if you don’t believe that, you’re not going to believe that. If I let you know how things work, you can make use of that for whatever it is you want to do.

Before “War in the Neighborhood” had you mostly done shorter work?

When I started out, I wanted to be able to work fast and I wanted to be able to do work for whatever was coming up. I was very impressed with Keith Haring and with the mural art in the Sandinista period in Nicaragua where a faceless simplified figure represented the masses. I tried to do a kind of iconic simple art that I could produce very quickly. I was also very impressed with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. They had a very stylized figure and because they had a very stylized figure, they could produce work very quickly and get whatever they needed to get out. Most of the work in my book “Survive” is from the ’80s and is that style of work.

In ’89-90, I had real experiences with people and people are complex. People are not stick figures, people are not Keith Haring simplifications, they are complicated. I started to look at the idea of a more traditionally representational style that could represent these more complex stories with characters with individual faces and individual stories. I was also very impressed, I should say, by “Watchmen” and somewhat impressed by “V for Vendetta” and with the fact that you could do a somewhat radical view of the world in a traditional narrative style. I said, OK, let me try and tell this story of the people I know and the things I’ve seen in a traditional narrative style where people have faces where you have details on buildings and structures. Where I go out and get massive photo reference, where I go out with a sketchpad and have people model for me, and interview with them with tape recorders and get their sides of the story. This level of detail that isn’t in my eighties work. I tried to develop a more conventional but also more thorough narrative style rather than a kind of modernist simplified approach.

I still don’t know which is actually better. I think the stuff from the ’80s works really well. But I wanted to expand what I could do. “War in the Neighborhood” was my attempt to do that and “Len,” in that sense, grows out of “War in the Neighborhood.”

These two books are the two big projects of your career to date.

They are. I think I’ll do more. It’s not just that they’re long but they’re very journalistic. They involved studying a situation and getting as much information both visually and textually as possible about that situation.

When we were setting this up, you mentioned that you were going to be at anti-Trump protests in New York. Having lived through the ’80s and opposed Reagan, what’s your take on what you’re seeing happening on the ground right now?

The worst thing about the ’80s was not Reagan. The worst thing about the ’80s was how many people went along with it even though they knew it was terrible. They felt there was nothing you could do about it. They felt that nobody would listen to them if they criticized. In the end I think they began to feel that it was stupid to criticize because it wasn’t going to produce anything. They became acquiescent and conformist. There were a lot of people who developed a kind of ironic detachment. It was very hard to get anything going in the ’80s. I don’t see that happening right now. I see that people have become mobilized very quickly to oppose what’s going on. Younger people are very politicized. They’re not apathetic. They’re not giving up. I see that as a very positive difference. That people are going to fight.

On the other hand I should also say that we’re very far along in a crisis already. We’ve got the ocean washing up on our front step. We have an economic crisis all over the country that has been present since the beginning of the century. We have had an enormous expansion of the power of the state. The things that Nixon did that were illegal, a lot of them are now being done all the time. Like targeted assassinations by the government. Obama insisted on continuing to have that power and now that power is being handed over to Trump. That’s why we were so against it. I don’t care how much you like the guy, the government should not have the right to kill somebody without putting them on trial. We have a government that has reserved the right to launch a drone at anyone they damn well feel like. And now it’s Trump who gets to make that decision and that’s scary.

This is a rough situation and I’ve seen all kinds of people really getting very upset about it. My partner and I are constantly hearing from people saying, “How can I get involved, what can I do?” They’re very panicked by this — which they should be. Hopefully people can mobilize against some of this and prevent the worst possible outcomes.

What do you think of the role of the artist in terms of activism?

Let me start by saying that I did not adopt art or adopt comics because I thought it was a good political tool. I have been drawing comics since I was in what is now called middle school and what we called junior high school. There are maybe three years of my life when I wasn’t drawing. I tried to stop drawing and do something else and I was extremely depressed when I did that and much happier when I went back to it. So I didn’t adopt this as a tool. I’ve always had some awareness of politics because I grew up in a family where politics was discussed. My father was conservative, but he was an intelligent conservative and he encouraged us to argue with him, which I give him credit for. I was aware of politics as an important area of life to be explored and understood.

Any human activity if it’s central to their survival, it’s going to show up in their art. I mean the cave paintings were about hunting because people were hunting. If people are struggling with their environmental situation or political situation or class situation, then art is going to be produced that reflects that. That’s natural; that’s normal. Art goes hand in hand with a belief system and a belief system goes hand in hand with a set of practices. Art history tries to separate the Michelangelo painting from the Sistine Chapel upon which it is painted. I think that’s false. One of the things that really blew my mind traveling to Europe was being in Ravenna and seeing paintings that had been in my art history books in churches and seeing little old ladies lighting candles in front of those paintings. I realized that painting was for that little old lady to light a candle in front of — it wasn’t painted for a bunch of art critics to sit around talking about the anatomy. It had an actual social function. There’s a sense in which the fine art world has kind of damaged art by removing it from its social function and saying its social function was irrelevant. That art existed by itself. I don’t think it does.

I feel like my art is very tribal in a sense. For certain people, these symbols are important. I realize for other people they aren’t, and that’s OK with me. I am not having a heart attack that I am not rich and famous. The art that I’ve done has a function in the lives of certain people; they’ve told me so. That’s a great thing to hear. That somebody picked up your magazine and that influenced decisions that they made and they carried that through in their own life. They gave that art meaning. They made my art better by expanding on that with something they did. They improved my work by doing that. That’s the way I look at it. When I was a kid was I was a big comics fan and I would go to comic book conventions and talk to professional comic book artists. Some of them would be very nice but some of them would be very contemptuous of people who loved their art. I started to think, if you think I’m stupid for liking your art, maybe I am. Maybe you’re telling me that your art isn’t very good. So it means a lot to me that when I meet someone who likes my art, they’re usually an amazing person doing really interesting things. There might not be a million of them, but the people I meet are really high quality people. They’re making films, they’re doing organizing, they’re active in their communities. I’m like, wow, these are my fans. I should be reading books by them.

“World War 3 Illustrated” #47 cover

There’s a new issue of “World War 3 Illustrated” out. What’s in this new issue?

We started this issue a year ago with our focus on climate change. We’d all been really impressed with the great climate march in New York City. As we were working on it, a lot of other things came up. The Black Lives Matter movement came up and if you studied our work, you know that we’ve always had a very strong position on police brutality. Our position on police brutality seemed weird to people in the ’80s and now seems to be a position everyone has. We recognized police brutality, we knew it was an important issue, we did art to protest police brutality. The Black Lives Matter movement made a lot of sense to us. As we were working on environmental issues, fossil fuel infrastructure issues, we became aware there was a lot of racism involved in those issues. For instance people don’t want a pipeline next to their house, but that’s going to mean that oil is going to travel on trains. Where are those trains going to go? Through the part of your town where there are railroad tracks. You have these explosive trains full of fossil fuels going through low-income communities. They’re poisonous to be next to and they often blown up and kill people. What happened at Standing Rock really clinched it for us in terms of our analysis.

I’ve been a part of the anti-fracking movement and I’ve been a part of a number of protests where people were arrested because they were trying to block the building of a pipeline. All of what I’ve seen has been very civil and very respectful. Even the police and the court system were respectful of those people and their concerns and didn’t abuse them. Then I see the photographs and films of the dogs at Standing Rock with human blood on their teeth. Those Native American people were not doing anything different than people all over the country who don’t want a really toxic structure built in their backyard were doing. Middle class white people are allowed to object to that and that’s seen as being a good citizen, that you don’t want something poisonous on your block, but if Native American people do that, that’s some kind of horrible uprising that’s got to be put down with brute force.

I think that clinched it. The issue we produced deals with the environment but it deals with the environment through the lens of environmental racism. Also I went to Cleveland and Philadelphia and did sketches of the protest activities outside of both conventions. Steve Brodner also did some material about Trump, so did Peter Kuper and we have a really nice piece from Robbie Conal. I’m really proud of this issue. Peter Kuper did a great job helping me edit it. I owe a lot to Peter on this issue.

We have a story written by Mumia Abu-Jamal, who’s written for us a lot over the years. Usually he illustrated his own stuff and his drawing style is amateur while his writing is superlative, of course. Mumia is now very physically ill in prison and he can’t really draw anymore so I was going to draw the Mumia piece and Pete said, no, you’ve got to get Sue Coe. He was right. She did an amazing job on it. It’s some of the best work Sue has ever done in my opinion. I’m really happy with this issue.

Donald Trump art by Seth Tobocman.

I suppose we all know where you’ll start with the next issue.

It’s sort of inevitable, isn’t it? It writes itself at this moment. I mean I was hoping I would never have to say the words Donald Trump again. I guess that was naive of me.

I know Pete did cartoons about Trump a lot in the ’80s and ’90s. Peter saw Trump as a really important and dangerous political force. I have to admit I never did. I always though, “this guy’s a vaudeville act.” Peter always saw that there was something about Trump that was really important and dangerous and he did a number of pieces on Trump and it was Peter who said, you’ve got to keep Trump in this issue because he’s really important. I’m really glad he said that.

Trump was a horrible figure in New York City politics. The kids who went to prison for the Central Park jogger incident have been found innocent after 17 years in prison. He helped put five kids away in order to make a name for himself and create a public spectacle and stoke people’s fear and to present himself as a protector of people. They were innocent. DNA evidence shows they were innocent. He still insists they’re guilty even though there’s DNA evidence that shows someone else did it. This guy is a scary, creepy guy and it’s unbelievable that he can be President. On the other hand we used to think that it was unbelievable that Reagan could be President. A lot of people thought it was unbelievable that Hitler could be chancellor of Germany. We’ve underestimated Mr. Trump, this is for sure.

The other thing about Trump is he stole a very important issue from the left, which is the de-industrialization of the Midwest. Which is something the real people on the left have been talking about forever, but the liberals abandoned this issue. The labor unions were the base of the Democratic party at the end of World War II. The Clintons abandoned that and I think it was a really terrible mistake. Just like they abandoned regulating the banks, which was a Depression-era legacy. That’s the result of what happened in the Reagan era, I would say. In the Reagan era people said, these conservatives are popular, there must be something to it. I was very disappointed with the Clintons when they came in. I didn’t vote for Bill Clinton the first time he ran for office. I voted third party in that election because I thought, we went through Reagan and this is what we got? He was so watered down, it was disturbing. I thought, this guy has absorbed too many attitudes of the Republicans.

I mean, Clinton did some good things, but he did some really damaging things. I think we’re still living with the legacy of those things, and I think that undermined the ability of the Democrats to hold onto the White House this year. In the piece I’m working on right now I take certain speeches by Bernie Sanders and certain speeches by Donald Trump and they say almost the same thing. It looks like the thing you did when you were in high school where you read some article and you rewrote it a little bit to make it “yours” to pass your test. The speeches he made in Ohio and in the Midwest and in Michigan are Bernie Sanders speeches. He was able to steal that issue because the Democrats did not defend the working class base of the Democratic party the way they should have. That’s a real problem. Hopefully through the process of struggling against Trump maybe new leadership will come up in the Democratic party who will not be so compromised.

Hopefully, all the people who are concerned about the political situation go from being concerned to being active in one way or another. Different people will do different things, but everyone can do something. It’s when the population is engaged that the government starts to act as it should. That engagement is what I hope for and what I advocate in my art.

The post Cartoonist Seth Tobocman on Art, Activism and Advice in the Age of Trump appeared first on CBR.com.

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lodelss · 4 years ago

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“All Hell Broke Loose.”

Kishon McDonald, 39, originally of Cleveland, Ohio, poses for a portrait in his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

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Law enforcement officers clearing protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2020.

Derek Baker

****

Gabe Schlough at his home in Denver, Colorado.

Jimena Peck for the ACLU

****

Toni Sanders, 36, poses for a portrait at her home in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

****

David Ryder for the ACLU.

****

Jared Goyette stands in front of the remains of the Minnesota Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Brandon Bell for the ACLU

Jared Goyette moved to Minneapolis five years ago to be close to his daughter. As a journalist, he’d covered protests over police brutality before — first at the Mall of America during the Ferguson uprising, and then later after the killing of Philando Castile. Over the years, he’d developed ties to the city’s activist community, and in the hours after the video of George Floyd’s murder was released, his phone began to buzz. “I started getting texts from different Black activists in the Twin Cities,” he said. Goyette could tell that Floyd’s killing would lead to unrest, and before long national news outlets began reaching out to ask for his help covering the story. On May 27th, two days after Floyd’s death, Goyette heard the sound of helicopters buzzing over the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct. The Precinct had already become a flash point for demonstrations, and Goyette decided to head to the area to see what was happening. “When I started surveying the scene, it was entirely different from anything I’d seen in my previous years of covering protests against police violence in Minnesota,” he said. Several hundred people had surrounded the precinct, and officers in riot gear were standing on the roof firing tear gas and rubber bullets at them. Goyette had his camera and notepad with him and, along with other journalists there, was visibly covering the standoff in his role as a reporter. He saw that a young man had been shot in the head with a ballistic projectile, and moved towards him to try and see if he could do anything to help. “He was just writhing on the ground in clear, severe pain,” he said. “People were screaming, ‘Call 911.’” Goyette noticed that his ten-year-old daughter had texted him to ask where he was, so he moved off to the side to text a response. Suddenly, he was on the ground. “There was a searing pain in my eye,” he recalled. “It wasn’t like I was hit and then I fell, it was like I’m standing and then wait, I’m not standing and everything is black.” Goyette had been shot in the head with a rubber bullet. His nose was bleeding and his eye was swollen and black. People moved towards him to help, but tear gas began to flood the area. He managed to woozily make his way to safety, and after gathering his composure for a few minutes, found his car and drove home. Initially, he didn’t think he needed medical attention, but his girlfriend told him he had to visit a community clinic. Health workers there said that if he’d waited longer for treatment, he might have lost sight in that eye. He says he thinks it’s unlikely that officers didn’t know he was a journalist when they shot him. “I wasn’t running, I wasn’t chanting,” he said. “Protesters aren’t normally dressed in a dress shirt and slacks.” Goyette wasn’t the only journalist who was targeted by Minneapolis police that week. Many documented being pepper sprayed despite clearly identifying themselves as reporters. Others were arrested, gassed, threatened, or ⁠— like Goyette ⁠— shot with rubber bullets. In a clip that went viral, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television, despite the fact that he was accompanied by a full news crew with cameras and sound equipment. “I worry that the sort of ‘fake news’ doctrine is leading to journalists being targeted,” said Goyette. “And this is the first time that I think we saw that at a systematic scale.” On June 3rd, the ACLU filed suit against the City of Minneapolis over the attacks on journalists that were carried out by MPD officers. Goyette is the lead plaintiff in the case. “I don’t want this to come out wrong, but I feel angry, and a little bit afraid,” he said. “The Police Chief made an apology to journalists who were fired upon, but there wasn’t anything behind that apology. No promise to investigate and hold people accountable, nothing other than a sentimental gesture. And I fear that people are just going to move on.”

Published June 23, 2020 at 07:12PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3eu2a5Y

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lodelss · 5 years ago

Text

ACLU: “All Hell Broke Loose.”

“All Hell Broke Loose.”

Kishon McDonald, 39, originally of Cleveland, Ohio, poses for a portrait in his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

****

Law enforcement officers clearing protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2020.

Derek Baker

****

Gabe Schlough at his home in Denver, Colorado.

Jimena Peck for the ACLU

****

Toni Sanders, 36, poses for a portrait at her home in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

****

David Ryder for the ACLU.

****

Jared Goyette stands in front of the remains of the Minnesota Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Brandon Bell for the ACLU

Policing the Press: A Journalist on the Frontlines

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police…

Listen to this episode

Published June 23, 2020 at 11:42PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3eu2a5Y from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Vfg5p8 via IFTTT

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lodelss · 5 years ago

Text

ACLU: “All Hell Broke Loose.”

“All Hell Broke Loose.”

Kishon McDonald, 39, originally of Cleveland, Ohio, poses for a portrait in his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

****

Law enforcement officers clearing protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2020.

Derek Baker

****

Gabe Schlough at his home in Denver, Colorado.

Jimena Peck for the ACLU

****

Toni Sanders, 36, poses for a portrait at her home in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

****

David Ryder for the ACLU.

****

Jared Goyette stands in front of the remains of the Minnesota Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Brandon Bell for the ACLU

Published June 23, 2020 at 07:12PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3eu2a5Y from Blogger https://ift.tt/382roGo via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

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