youneedacat:

“For elementary school children on the higher functioning end of the autism spectrum, I usually favor mainstreaming because it is essential for them to learn social skills from typically developing children.”

—Temple Grandin, The Way I See It

[If this is too long for you, scroll down to the final sentence. It’s bolded. Also I just realized people might think I don’t like nondisabled people, or think disabled people can’t bully. Not true. I’m talking about general social trends and hierarchies, not each and every specific person.]

Not singling out Temple. I hear this all the time. But it’s wrong on so many levels. Before I start be aware I’m not advocating special schools. I would rarely advocate any schools.

So.

What exactly are the “social skills” that children learn when forced into artificially age-segregated situations where children are learning social skills almost entirely from people as inexperienced as themselves, in an environment of powerlessness? From everything I’ve seen this leads to incredibly brutal situations.

This is one reason that contrary to popular belief, unschooled kids have better social skills than kids who go to school. They interact with a wider range of people in natural everyday situations and they totally benefit from it. I can’t even fathom the full extent of the damage that forced currently-typical schooling does to a society.

(My dad to this day talks of the trauma of going from a tiny one-room schoolhouse with a wide age range where everyone helped everyone else learn, to regular, more institutional type of school. “Hall monitors? HALL MONITORS?”)

Meanwhile… far from it being that autistic people are the main ones who need to learn social skills. There was an experiment where nondisabled children were taught how to respectfully interact with autistic children. This resulted in sudden “social gains” among the autistic children, that approaching it the usual way (where autistic ones are socially defective and are the ones who need to learn the social skills) wouldn’t work.

Besides all that, what’s all this crap about it being better for disabled kids to learn social skills from nondisabled kids? And what exact social skills are talking about?

From nondisabled kids I learned lots of social lessons.

I learned if you’re different you’re fair game.

I learned you can fit in a little bit by joining in the bullying. I only did this a handful of times and it tore my heart apart.

I learned to hate myself so thoroughly that the first time I saw another autistic kid I felt a loathing and horror unlike any other. I recognized myself in her, different though we were, and being around her consequently made me feel like my emotions were being rubbed with sandpaper.

Put it this way: I understand why a woman with Williams syndrome, mentioned in one of Dave Hingsburger’s books, tried to bludgeon and tear her own face off every time she either saw another person with WS, or saw her own face in any reflective surface. Her face was permanently and obviously bruised, swollen, and damaged all over. When she died, she died terrified and screaming. She said it was because she was going to meet God, and God was the one who made her this way.

She was a product of aggressive mainstreaming. Never ever was taken to any event with other disabled people or people with Williams syndrome. Never had a chance to, at the end of the day, talk with people like herself about the horrific things they were enduring from their classmates. (Dave Hingsburger points out that DD children who attend mainstream school are integrating a school system that doesn’t want them there with virtually no emotional support.) Never saw anyone who looked like herself in a positive context ever. So she learned the social lessons of nondisabled kids well: That she shouldn’t exist and that she should try to destroy herself.

I learned that lesson too. I repeatedly tried to kill myself throughout adolescence. Many of my reasons had to do with never, ever seeing anyone else in my particular position. For a couple short years I thought I’d finally got the knack of making myself invisible. (I hadn’t but that’s beside the point.)

Then the floor fell out from under me. I began losing every skill that made me at least marginally closer to being a person that mattered. I had to stim in public. I had to lose speech and movement and receptive language. I had to experience the world as chaotic swirls and tatters of sensory information virtually all the time.

And having never in my life seen people who looked like that. Except sometimes being led in lines down the sidewalks by institution staff going on “outings into the community”. (Later it was me in those lines.) And realizing where people like me go in this society when we exist at all. I took all the self-erasing to the highest possible level and attempted suicide.

I talk to disabled people all the time who had the same experience. (And don’t anyone kid yourself that among autistic people all our suicide attempts are among the “high functioning”. Not all those “wandered into traffic” deaths are accidental, and most people considered LFA have plenty of awareness of the hatred people have for disabled people.) That’s one reason we freak out about euthanasia: It’s promoted as a rational choice for disabled people (not just terminally ill, not even close). Erase ourselves from humanity — they’d want to in our place. And with all the pressure to do just that. Such tremendous pressure every day of our lives. And with the way we are frequently expected to live and the living conditions we are supposed to just accept as our natural fate.

It becomes so, so easy to just tell a doctor we want to die and make it sound like a perfectly rational response to our “suffering”. Which is all innate to our disabilities, never forced upon us from the outside. All we have to do is talk about the “indignity” of our lives (frequently a code word for incontinence, one of the leading reasons people ask for euthanasia believe it or not) and the “suffering” that we have to endure in having to be forever cared for by others. They won’t question it, even if we are grieving the loss of a relative and have just been left by a spouse and all the other things that can drive nondisabled people to suicidal thoughts just as easily as us. Hell, some doctors even suggest suicide to us and a few outright try to manipulate us into it.

When I attempted suicide, I was prevented from doing so and put in mental institutions. I don’t approve of the kind of things that happened there. But I know that if people knew I had a progressive condition that would one day require me the supports I need now, they’d quite possibly have treated me differently. Today they could also quite possibly treat me differently, especially if it were legal to help me die. But some people would try anyway, legal or not. Kevorkian, a death-obsessed serial killer who switched from wanting to study state-executed prisoners to promoting euthanasia because the latter was more socially acceptable… some of his patients were both non-terminal and would be considered less severely disabled, and in less physical pain, than I am. (Hell, I have a pain condition nicknamed “the suicide disease” by doctors.) So this isn’t hypothetical. There are doubtless doctors who would much more quietly help me die if I sought them out, legal or not.

That’s why so many disabled people justifiably fear euthanasia. We know that even with “safeguards”, it becomes an acceptable and rational thing for a disabled person to want to die, but nondisabled people get suicide prevention. We know that in places where it’s legal and widespread, disabled people often have to go through huge contortions so that they’ll actually get medical treatment in certain emergency situations. Because it’s just assumed we wouldn’t want it.

Even in America, it’s hard to write a living will that allows you to remain alive at all costs in all circumstances. And your wishes can be overturned by a hospital “ethics” committee. Living wills were created to help people die, not to help people live, and that bias shows. And should you change your mind about wanting to die, after you become sufficiently disabled? (Which lots of people do. The fear of disability in the abstract often makes people think they’d be a whole other person they’d never want to live as. When they realize they’re still themselves, they usually discover their will to live is intact.) They may kill you (“allow you to die”) anyway. Like what happened to one woman after brain damage. She actually ended up being tied to her bed because otherwise she would get up and try to find food and water. They deemed food and water “medical treatment”, and refused to give her any because her living will said if she became cognitively impaired she wanted to die. This is far more common than most people realize, and is done both officially and unofficially depending on if they think it will get them in trouble.

All that to say: Disabled people who fear euthanasia aren’t dupes of the Religious Right. Our fears are horrifyingly justified. Today, with it illegal most places, it happens all the time in the medical system both overtly and covertly, both with and without the person’s apparent consent. And it happens in ways that are disguised as lots of other things. Remember the girl who can’t receive a transplant, even with a donor available, explicitly because she is DD? Don’t kid yourself that it’s not the same thing.

But then what is consent when we live in a world that bombards us day in and day out with the message that we are worthless wastes of space, who cost money and take up resources that rightfully belong to real people? Where other people’s suicide attempts are treated as medical emergencies that must be averted at all costs, while ours are “perfectly rational” and may even be aided by others, even if our reasons are the same as those deemed mentally ill? This is why so many disabled people baffle the rest of the world by freaking out over this rather than responding how others expect us to — “Oh thank you so much for protecting our individual liberties by helping us make death accessible, even if you’re not making life accessible first!”

I’ve come a long way, seemingly, from the topic of the social skills autistic kids learn from nondisabled kids. But I haven’t really. Because one of the biggest social lessons is to die. Both emotionally and physically.

That conference I talked about in my last post, where I saw Dave Hingsburger… it was the only large disability-related event where I had even a sliver of feeling belonging. It was a completely accepting atmosphere. When I told people of having people tell me I should never have kids because they might turn out like me. I expected to be patronized like usual and told this is normal and good and right. Instead, more than one disabled person came up to me afterwards and said “That’s not okay. That’s never okay.” I think it also helped that it was general DD and not autism specific. The DD community has a lot more maturity as a community, as well as fairly uniform kinds and levels of oppression that focus us on ending that, rather than falling into the worst habits of the autistic community. It has its problems, but not the same kind or scope. And this particular community was amazing.

After I got home, I cried so much. And one of the dead parts of me started waking up. This was a part of me that died long before disability-institutions got hold of me. It died when I became aware enough to get a full taste of the hatred that society has for people like me. I was maybe seven or eight. And it wasn’t an easy death, it marked the beginning of severe emotional problems of all kinds.

Before it woke up again, I often believed that my emotions lacked depth and complexity, even though they didn’t really. I still identified with Temple Grandin’s view of her emotions, even though deep down I knew better. And after that conference, the ice began to thaw, and I discovered many things:

I have a tremendous range of depth and complexity in my emotions, and I am a highly emotional person.

Having that depth myself, I could now recognize such emotions working in others. And I had been all along, the dead parts just prevented me from feeling it as intensely.

And that yes — some of the emotion-reading problems that had been attributed to autism, were actually the results of severe emotional damage. And the emotional damage was related to abuse for being autistic.

And that most likely I was not the only autistic person who is believed to have stunted emotions (and difficulty recognizing complex emotions in others) due to autism, when it’s really the result of being up against intense hate as a disabled person.

That, in fact, an an intensely disablist society where autism is often among the lowest in the usual disability hierarchies as seen by nondisabled people. There is literally no way of knowing how much of our social and emotional problems have anything to do with our brains work at all. I know plenty of autistic people with similar experiences so I know it’s true of some of us. But virtually nobody seems to want to go there.

But to sum it up: From typically developing children at school, I learned to die. From other DD adults, I learned to live.

roachpatrol:

Anonymous asked you:

So your writeups on the recent debates are really good! But, I still am wondering, why exactly is it any writers duty to focus on these issues, and if it is how are they suppose to approach it? At times I feel like everyone expects the authors to have a checklist of things that they need to cover, when the author might not be able to relate to some of the issues?

[22:27] roach: shit I did not take a shower again and I am tired and

[22:27] roach: this art is not done

[22:27] biichama: *hugs*

[22:28] roach: and I have all these questions about a writer’s obligation to their society in my askbox

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suddeninevitablebetrayal:

lavender-labia:

iamateenagefeminist:

I’m very tired of hearing that women only make 77 cents on the male’s dollar. It’s not a correct statistic. It should read: White women only make 77 cents on the white man’s dollar. 

That’s the real statistic.

Not all women are white. WOMEN don’t make 77 cents on the dollar, WHITE WOMEN do.

It’s important to remember.

Because every time we repeat that 77 number with no mention of race, we are erasing all women who are not white. 

Black women make 69 cents on the white man’s dollar. 

Hispanic women make 59 cents on the white man’s dollar.

Those women matter. Those women are women.

Women who should be included in feminism, who should be included in our movement.  

So don’t erase them. 

I imagine this gap is every more extreme for trans women, fat women, disabled women, or women with mental health issues. 

Notably, I have yet to find a wage-gap chart with Native women so much as listed.

maggieee:

These are my photos that I shot for my final Photo assignment this semester.

My work is about the exploitation of women.

I was inspired by Barbara Kruger’s work. Similar to her, I used bold text for a saying that is controversial and offensive. I want these to be offensive. These sayings are not necessarily my views but more of how society sometimes views women. I want my viewers to understand how it feels to be a woman. I myself am offended every day when I am told how to act, look, feel, and that I am being “unladylike”. It doesn’t feel good to see beautiful women everywhere you go bringing you down even more because apparently my peers don’t do that enough.

While presenting these in class today I got emotional. I am sad that some women actually try to fit into the stereotypes and do whatever society tells them. I admit, I do some of them too. It’s a rough world trying to “fit” in.
It also made me sad that because I am not thin, don’t sleep around, don’t always look the prettiest, don’t suffice to a man, I feel like I don’t fit in or even to the point that I’m not even a real woman.

But I AM woman. I am strong. I am brave. I DO have the power to fight these stereotypes and be my own person.

I hope you feel empowered. Never forget, a woman brought you into this world. Appreciate that. We have the power and we are strong.

© 2011 All Rights Reserved
Maggie Portzline

jessicavalenti:

Here’s the thing. I get why people want to talk about whether or not Rick Santorum’s wife had an abortion in her second trimester of pregnancy. Santorum is anti-choice like a motherfucker - he’s not just anti-abortion, he’s anti-birth control. So I really do understand the desire to call him out as a hypocrite.

But being pro-choice means respecting all women’s privacy surrounding their pregnancies. It’s none of our business what happened during Karen Santorum’s pregnancy - she had a medical emergency and a tragic loss and we should leave it at that.

Yes, Rick Santorum discussed what happened in an interview almost ten years ago; so there’s an argument to be made that he opened the door for criticism. But as far as I can tell, Karen has not been directly quoted or interviewed - this is her husband talking about her pregnancy (something I’m uncomfortable with in general). Unless I see direct proof that Karen Santorum is okay with the details of her pregnancy being public, I don’t see how she has given up her right to medical privacy. (Even then, though, I would be against discussing it.)

Santorum’s quote, “if it was a choice of whether both Karen and the child are going to die or just the child is going to die..it’s a pretty easy call,” is fair game. He doesn’t support policies that would honor a choice he would want for himself, so it’s important for feminists and pro-choice advocates to call him out. 

But anything beyond that - discussing his wife’s medical care in detail and digging into the nitty gritty about whether or not what happened was an abortion - is just too much. The minute we start to talk about the medical details of one woman’s pregnancy - no matter who she is - we are opening the door for people to talk about any woman’s pregnancy and private medical history. 

There are plenty of ways to criticize Santorum and the ways in which his policies would be deadly for women - so let’s not violate our own ethics to do it. 

whatpath:

Yes, lets imagine a world WITHOUT MUSLIMS, shall we?

Without Muslims you wouldn’t have:

• Coffee

• Cameras

• Experimental Physics

• Chess

• Soap

• Shampoo

• Perfume/spirits

• Irrigation

• Crank-shaft, internal combustion engine, valves, pistons

• Combination locks

• Architectural innovation (pointed arch -European Gothic cathedrals adopted this technique as it made the building much stronger, rose windows, dome buildings, round towers, etc.)

• Surgical instruments

• Anesthesia

• Windmill

• Treatment of Cowpox

• Fountain pen

• Numbering system

• Algebra/Trigonometry

• Modern Cryptology

• 3 course meal (soup, meat/fish, fruit/nuts)

• Crystal glasses

• Carpets

• Checks

• Gardens used for beauty and meditation instead of for herbs and kitchen.

• University
• Optics
• Music
• Toothbrush
• Hospitals
• Bathing
• Quilting
• Mariner’s Compass
• Soft drinks
• Pendulum
• Braille
• Cosmetics
• Plastic surgery
• Calligraphy
• Manufacturing of paper and cloth

It was a Muslim who realized that light ENTERS our eyes, unlike the Greeks who thought we EMITTED rays, and so invented a camera from this discovery.

It was a Muslim who first tried to FLY in 852, even though it is the Wright Brothers who have taken the credit.

It was a Muslim by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan who was known as the founder of modern Chemistry. He transformed alchemy into chemistry. He invented: distillation, purification, oxidation, evaporation, and filtration. He also discovered sulfuric and nitric acid.

It is a Muslim, by the name of Al-Jazari who is known as the father of robotics.

It was a Muslim who was the architect for Henry V’s castle.

It was a Muslim who invented hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes, a technique still used today.

It was a Muslim who actually discovered inoculation, not Jenner and Pasteur to treat cowpox. The West just brought it over from Turkey

It was Muslims who contributed much to mathematics like Algebra and Trigonometry, which was imported over to Europe 300 years later to Fibonnaci and the rest.

It was Muslims who discovered that the Earth was round 500 years before Galileo did.

The list goes on………..

Just imagine a world without Muslims. Now I think you probably meant, JUST IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT TERRORISTS. And then I would agree, the world would definitely be a better place without those pieces of filth. But to hold a whole group responsible for the actions of a few is ignorant and racist. No one would ever expect Christians or White people to be held responsible for the acts of Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma bombing) or Andreas Brevik (Norway killing), or the gun man that shot Congresswoman Giffords in head, wounded 12 and killed 6 people, and rightly so because they had nothing to do with those incidents! Just like the rest of the 1.5 billion Muslims have nothing to do with this incident!

Sources:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-islamic-inventors-changed-the-world-469452.html

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-01-29/world/muslim.inventions_1_hassani-inventions-muslim?_s=PM:WORLD

http://www.ummahedinburgh.co.uk/radio/files/Muslim-Invention-Article.pdf

aforaffort:

kshandra:

alexanderlionheart:

If you have 8 minutes, watch this.

If you don’t have 8 minutes, wait until you do.

Here is a transcript I made for anyone who is deaf/Deaf, hard of hearing, has an auditory processing disorder, does not speak English as a native language, cannot follow the speed of his speech, or cannot play video/audio on their computer for whatever reason. Because it’s that important.

[0:00]

The remarkable recovery of and the message to her constituents from Gabby Giffords, coming up.

First, as promised, a special comment on the events of Monday night on Occupy Wall Street at Zuccoti Park:

For the entirety of the life of our nation, democracy has been protected not merely by the strenuous efforts of those of us who cherish it, but mostly—and most profoundly—by the limitless stupidity of those who would ration it, keep it for themselves and themselves alone, or destroy it.

The protest that ended the war in Vietnam reached critical mass only in 1970, when Governer James Rhodes in Ohio pounded on a desk at a news conference and called the student protestors at Kent State University “unamerican.” They were not “unamerican,” they were unarmed, and the next day four of them were shot and killed by the National Guard; and ten days later, two more were killed at Jackson State. Those protests had themselves had only gone mainstream twenty months earlier, when Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago overreacted with mindlessness and sadism to the massing of demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention.

[1:00]

And the whole world watched.

A century of the institutionalised, codified, legalised, pseudo-slavery that had followed the real thing was fatally stricken only when Governor George Wallace of Alabama used his inaugural address to promise “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever!” Within two years came the marches on Selma and the atrocities of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and ten weeks after the first violence, the President had proposed the Voting Rights Act to Congress.

The mounting paranoia of three decades of the scapegoating of and fear-mongering about liberals only ended when its last “white knight” self-destructed on the national stage of televised hearings, when Joe McCarthy questioned the loyalty of the US Military, and towards one junior attorney he revealed the depths of his cruelty and megalomania, and he revealed at long last that he indeed had no shame.

Pick any moment in our history—our history as a country founded by and invigorated by and reinvigorated by protest—and you will find men like [2:00] George Wallace and Joe McCarthy and Jim Rhodes and Richard Daley. Go back further to men like the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, or the officials who sent the police to the Haymarket Square and the troops to the Poland town [I may have misheard this, I am unaware of this reference], or John Brown, or George Grenville—the British politician who had the bright idea about the America colonies, an idea called the Stamp Act—American freedom has not flourished in spite of these morons in history; it has flourished because of them. Because they overreacted. Because they under-thought, over-reached, under-understood.

We owe them our traditions of protest. We owe them our freedoms. We owe them our very independence. None of them ever understood that, around these parts anyway, suppression always creates the opposite of the effect desired.

Such a man is Michael Rubens Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, and as of today, the most valuable, the most essential, the most irreplaceable man inside the Occupy movement.

[3:00]

Who else but a cliché like Bloomberg could take a protest beginning to grow a little stale around its edges and vault it back into the headlines, complete with mortifying scenes of police dressed up as stormtroopers carrying military weapons, using figurative bazookas to kill figurative mosquitoes?

Who else but an archetype like Bloomberg could claim a group of protesters was “making too much noise in a residential area,” and then choose to try to disperse them by bringing out LRAD audio cannons, machines that send painful waves of sound indiscriminately over the very same residential area?

Who else but a cartoon like Bloomberg could have become rich creating a multi-billion dollar media and news company, and then authorise illegally preventing reporters from witnessing police actions he claimed were utterly legal, and then authorise the arrest of four reporters at a church? 

Who else but a human platitude like Bloomberg could have just gotten back from Jerusalem and the dedication of a 10 million dollar medical facility for which he generously paid, [4:00] and then enable the image of policemen seizing 55 hundred books from the Occupy Wall Street library and throwing them in a dumpster as if the cops were book burners?

Who else but a hypocrite like Bloomberg could have overridden by backroom deal with the New York City Council the results of two separate referendums limiting those in his office to just two terms as Mayor so he could serve a third term, and then have had his police arrest, beat up, and incarcerate a member of the New York City Council?

Who else but a putz like Bloomberg could have insisted that protesters were not above the rule of law, and yet when the courts ruled that he could not seize the protesters’ tents and sleeping bags, nor kick them out of Zuccoti Park, nor keep them from returning with their tents and sleeping bags, who else could have stalled for hours until he could find another judge to give him the ruling he insisted upon?

Who else but the epitome of tone-deafness that is Bloomberg could have better illustrated the fundamental issue of Occupy when he puts the entire weight of the most people-driven city [5:00] in the history of the Earth behind the already crushingly-rich and their efforts to grab themselves still more advantages from those people?

And he himself is the 12th richest man in America.

Who else but a publicity addict like Bloomberg could have enabled the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, and yet two months later, froze it—20 square miles of New York City in gridlock traffic over two days so somebody could film ANOTHER GOD-DAMNED BATMAN MOVIE on the 59th Street Bridge, leading to the inescapable conclusion that if you want to tie up a little traffic during a protest for equality and freedom from corporate domination on a bridge in New York City, you will be arrested; but if you want to tie up all the traffic during a GOD-DAMNED MOVIE SHOOT for the financial benefit of corporate domination, the city of New York will embrace you and give you tax breaks!

Michael Bloomberg: no such a figure, no such a living, breathing embodiment of all that is wrong [6:00] and all that is stupid in the establishment in this country could be ordered up from the works of fiction where the casting calls of that GOD-DAMNED BATMAN MOVIE they filmed the weekend before he ordered the raid on Occupy Wall Street.

Obviously, Mayor Bloomberg, you should resign, and your little bully of a police commissioner Raymond Kelly should go with you. You have overstepped all reasonable interpretations of your rights and responsibilities, and you have made Americans and people around the world realise that you are simply smaller, more embarrassing versions of the tin-pot tyrants who have fallen around the globe in the past year.

But as some of us first thought you might be back on that fateful September afternoon that sadistic cops pepper sprayed four women who had already been trapped inside a police overreaction, as we thought again the following weekend during the arrests on Brooklyn Bridge, Michael Bloomberg, you have now indeed become the symbol of the Occupy movement. You are ready to take your historic place with Mayor Daley [7:00] and Governor Wallace and Senator McCarthy and Prime Minister Grenville, and every other idiot who has made the fateful and fatal mistake of thinking that just because he had power and money that this was a nation in which everything has a price tag on it.

We need you, Michael Bloomberg!

We need you to keep making these mistakes. Tone-deaf, sensibility-offending, world-changing mistakes like the pepper spray and the Brooklyn Bridge and the para-military assault on Occupy Wall Street last night.

Hell, Mike! The freedoms of this wonderful and transcendent nation, corrupted by endless greed of you and the other dozen richest people in it, and the corporations who nevertheless have still managed to own you somehow, these freedoms will not be restored to us in just the next two years.

I’m endorsing you for a fourth term! Your nation needs you, Mister Mayor! Occupy needs you! “Bloomberg now, Bloomberg tomorrow, Bloomberg forever!”

think-progress:

darcibastiaan:

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

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