Really didn’t want this to be true.
Despite everything I’d heard first-hand from my brother*, who is one of the most kind, intelligent and brilliant people in the world, despite everything I’d seen and read and spent hours and hours worrying and arguing and weeping about last week, lacking sleep, lacking rest, lacking the ability to smile, I had just about managed to get myself to think that the person who told him that the pigs had pretty much killed an innocent man must have been somehow mistaken; just about managed to shake off the memories of Jean-Charles de Menezes and Blair Peach and make myself begin to suspect I could believe that it couldn’t be true, that it had all been so confused and unclear that we would never know what really happened and that it must have just been a tragedy and nobody was to blame. I didn’t want this to be true.
Look. Watch. Remember. And act.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
* Here, he explains part of what happened to him and his friends:
Someone arrives with a thick tarpaulin banner of the kind you can use to block truncheon blows (I think it’s the “C(A)PIT(A)LISM KILLS” one, but mostly see it from behind, so it’s impossible to be sure) and we assemble behind it and start pushing forward. By this point, we’ve already been pepper-sprayed, but I’m wearing sunglasses and have my mouth covered so I’m fine. As the two lines meet, our banner gets shoved back, and someone falls over. More people fall over. I fall over. Other people fall on me. The light gets completely blocked out.
Eventually, I manage to get back to my feet. I’m OK, but a cop’s smashed M over the head with a baton. If you remember my previous email where I mentioned a comrade being known for his extreme, saintly generosity and niceness, that’s him. A flashback: In one of those absurdly over-the-top juxtapositions that’re only meant to happen in crude agitprop and not in real life, the night before (when he was out of the room, obv) we’d been discussing how nice he is and how it’s difficult to describe how nice he is, because there are lots of people who can be described as “nice”, and most of them will sometimes put other people’s needs ahead of their own, and sometimes not, but with M it’s not even something that’s ever in doubt, he just seems to do it automatically, so anyone who spends much time with him ends up taking advantage, not intentionally or anything, just because it’s impossible to avoid doing so with someone who’s so consistently altruistic.
And now he has blood pouring down his face as a result of being hit over the head while he lay on the floor.
– my brother, 21, April 5 2009
only alice 