connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by Nomine UK)

Man, so much for the old campus cop cliché: “Stop! Or I’ll say stop again!”

I agree with Navaho — these students are a bunch of bitches. I don’t know how anyone could just stand around and let campus cops do this to another student.

UPDATE: Apparently, UCLA Chancellor Norman Abrams backs the action of his rent-a-thugs.

UPDATE II: It turns out that the abused 23 year-old student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, is Iranian-American. His lawyer is saying that his American born client was targeted because of his appearance (in the video you can hear Mostafa screaming about the Patriot Act). Meanwhile, UCLA students protested outside the UCLAPD office, demanding accountability for the police abuse.

As I strolled home from having coffee downtown this afternoon, I paused before crossing Arlington at MLK, as two cars were already there — one a single woman in an SUV, the other a police car with a male officer driving and a female officer riding shotgun.

After eyeballing both drivers and getting the vibe back that neither were in much of a rush, I continued across the walkway.

Big mistake.

The female cop all of a sudden started screaming and pointing at me (I thought behind me at first, I couldn’t hear her), so I picked up my gate and — after landing safely on the other curb — turned around to see what the problem was. Greensboro’s finest then rolls down her window and yells, with attitude:

“You may not be in a hurry, but we have to be somewhere! Move!!”

Before I knew it they were gone, hanging a right and flying down MLK into the distance. I looked over to the SUV driver — thinking maybe she was thinking the same thing as me — but she just shrugged her shoulders and slowly turned in the opposite direction.

Cops. In a rush. No turn signal. No siren. No nothing, except for a frantic, bitchy scream of authority… in my neighborhood.

I didn’t even have enough time to give her the obligatory Jersey response of “fuck you.”

Just the other day I found myself on a 10 hour trip home from New Jersey. Normally, the drive kills me, but thankfully, I had hours upon hours of Echo Chamber Project podcasts sitting to my right. When I made it home at 3:00am (I missed the damn turn at 85-440), I plopped on the couch and fired off a note to Kent Bye, thanking him for the virtual company.

Well, Kent got back in touch the next day and asked if I’d like to chat over Skype. Here’s the result (part of the audio becomes scrambled for 30 seconds, twice).

When I have a week like this one (sorry, no details for you), I often turn to the covers of a James Baldwin novel or essay to keep my head on straight. Why? Read the following snippet of “The Fire Next Time:”

“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering — enough is certainly as good as a feast — but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth — and, indeed, no church — can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.

This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be bourne.“

James Baldwin, 5 foot something, a buck something dripping wet, would have banged Shaq straight out of the paint.