THERE COMES A TIME...

Harry Targ (written three days ago)

 Mario Savio

Speech, Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley

December 12, 1964

 There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

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Bethany Bruner

" Feds join investigation into death of Ohio Black man shot 'multiple times' by deputy"

The Columbus Dispatch, December 8, 2020.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Casey Goodson Jr. died after being shot "multiple times in the torso," and preliminary information indicated his death was a result of a homicide, a coroner in Ohio announced Wednesday.

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Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon

 “Fla. Home Raid Alarms Researchers,” 

USA Today Network, December 10, 2020.

 Brevard County Fla.

Images of state agents drawing guns as they raided the home of the fired Florida Department of Health data scientist Rebekah Jones on Monday were met with alarm by fellow researchers and academics across the United States.

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Rebekah Jones

https://twitter.com/GeoRebek 

There will be no update today. At 8:30 am this morning, state police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech. They were serving a warrant on my computer after DOH filed a complaint. They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids..

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Johnny Magdaleno

"AG Curtis Hill joins Todd Rokita in call for Supreme Court to hear election lawsuit"

 Indianapolis Star, December 9, 2020

Indiana’s attorney general-elect Todd Rokita is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a lawsuit by the state of Texas alleging that election practices in four battleground states where President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.  

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 I get up in the morning, turn on the news on the radio, and skim read two newspapers. Increasingly the same morning ritual is stimulating a sense of anger that I don’t remember feeling for a long time  (despite years that included police violence, exacerbation of hatred of people of color, efforts to stifle the freedom of women, gays, and anti-Semitism, economic inequality, environmental devastation, and violence and war).

It is not that these outrages have not occupied my mind over the last fifty years. They have. And like millions of activists, I have joined organizations, hit the streets, written diatribes, and even had the opportunity to be interviewed and given presentations on these subjects. But there was something about the stories today that led me to the laptop. I had to have an outlet for my anger.

First, a young African American man was shot multiple times in Columbus, Ohio and subsequently authorities jockeyed to cover up the shooting. Once again, a totally innocent person (not that anyone could be justifiably shot) had his life snuffed out by murderous and racist police. And the investigation of the alleged causes and resulting consequences of this murder will take months or maybe even years.

And looking elsewhere in the paper, I read that Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents invaded at gun point the home of a data analyst who had been fired from that state’s Department of Health last May for “insubordination.” She claimed she was fired for refusing to manipulate state data on the incidence of the corona virus. Such data might have conflicted with the Florida Governor’s desire to open public facilities despite the spread of the disease. During the home invasion these armed police confiscated her computer, hard drives, and phone.

And the last straw, just today, was a story in the Indianapolis Star that the outgoing and incoming Attorneys General of the state of Indiana have joined a suit to be heard by the United States Supreme Court that would invalidate the presidential election in four states won by President-elect Joe Biden. (Since this article was written the Supreme Court denied the motion, which had been endorsed by 106 Republican Congress persons, but thousands of protestors hit the streets on December 12 in Washington D. C. demanding that the election be ruled invalid).

And so today, I am reminded, as I am more and more these days of Mario Savio’s statement of outrage at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. There are times that the operations of government become so odious, that they must be stopped; that our acquiescence to injustice and threats to democracy constitute complicity.

However, fifty-six years of political work, since Mario Savio’s speech, has taught us that the outrage must be channeled into education, organizing, and agitation. Outrage is the start but not enough to bring about change. As these examples of racism and police violence, censoring the disclosure of uncomfortable information, and efforts to stifle democracy suggest, the struggle must continue. And particularly after the pandemic is under control and we can meet and mobilize again, we must rebuild our organizations, work together, and transform our political institutions and criminal justice system.

Perhaps a twenty-first century analogue to the Savio statement is the declaration: “Enough is Enough.”