I pretty much go along with Matt A's comments up at the top.
As for shinypenny's quote about the unruly locals: It seems to me that there's some room for middle ground here.
Maybe those particular police guarding that bridge had a racist belief that letting black people into their neighborhood would be bad and/or unsafe. Maybe some of the people in the crowd were also behaving in an unruly manner. Maybe the bridge was also potentially unsafe for pedestrians to cross. Maybe those particular police were scared and exhausted and had inadequate communications and had heard about rioting looters and felt they needed to be hard-line to protect themselves and their city. I don't think those various stories are mutually incompatible.
I wasn't there; I don't have good enough data to know what happened. But I suspect that "what happened" was not one solid monolithic story in which all members of each group behaved identically for identical reasons, and everyone agreed about what everyone did and why. I suspect that if you asked everyone who was there for their version of events, you'd get three to five major versions of What Happened, each with a dozen minor variations, depending on who you talked with, and I suspect that most of those versions would be more or less factually accurate. Think _Rashomon_.
Relatedly: maybe the cop at the station lied to the crowd (about the buses) to get them to leave; or maybe he had received false information; or maybe he had received rumors of buses and he exaggerated their reliability to get the crowd to leave; or maybe there was something else going on. My understanding is that there were very few conduits of information into or out of the city; in those circumstances, it all turns into one big game of Telephone. Rumors get distorted and exaggerated and turned into Facts. And of course the behavior of one police officer, or even all the officers at a particular station, doesn't imply that The Police all felt or behaved the same way.
Just to be clear: I am not doubting any of this very sad and distressing account. (And thank you, Teresa, for posting it.) I'm quite willing to believe that everything happened pretty much as Bradshaw and Slonsky said it did. But I'm also willing to believe that others who were there might have seen slightly different things, perceived the same things through different filters, put different interpretations on events, remembered things differently afterward.
I've been in plenty of situations where I compared notes afterward with others who were there and found that their perceptions of what had happened and why were very different from mine.
Of course, it's also possible that Scheer is just lying. I'm just saying that his version of events and Bradshaw & Slonsky's version are not entirely mutually exclusive.
Side note: Mary Kay wrote: "I still find it hard to believe that it was that easy to get a large group of unrelated individuals to behave in a unified fashion." Note that the group size changed a lot during the course of events. They started with 500 people; when they left the police station for the bridge they were down to about 200; that crowd grew as they went to the bridge, but then the crowd dispersed at the bridge, leaving a "small group" to settle on the freeway; that small group eventually grew to 80 or 90 people. So it sounds like the most cooperative behavior (on the freeway) happened in a group of a few dozen people, not the 500 they originally started out with. (But I don't mean to downplay that cooperative behavior; I'm very pleased and impressed that it happened regardless of group size.)
Continuing the Waldrop aside, if anyone hasn't read "Mary Margaret Road-Grader," you can read it by following that link. (We reprinted it at Strange Horizons a few years ago.) It's the one that starts out "It was the time of the Sun Dance and the Big Tractor Pull."
I wanted to belatedly mention that the abovementioned Pogo CD can also be acquired at the iTunes Music Store -- I was astonished to see it there, and almost bought it, but now I can't decide whether I want the booklet that comes with the CD or whether I'm willing to settle for just the music (and instant gratification). At any rate, if nothing else it means you can listen to 30-second clips of all the songs if you want to see what they're like. (If you have iTunes, of course.) Even includes Walt Kelly singing.
...Hrm -- sorry if the above sounds like an ad. I'm not associated in any way with the Pogo CD or the iTunes Music Store; just thought other Pogophiles might be interested.
I can't find the font-related movie clip I wanted to post, so this'll have to do: Helvetica Bold Oblique Sweeps Fontys (from the Onion a few years back).
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 2 |
Total: 5 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jed Hartman:
Show all comments by Jed Hartman.