Bad Night to Be in Oakland

I was down at Endgame tonight, as is common on Wednesdays.

We first noticed the police in riot gear around 7pm. Aaron and Chris assessed things and decided that there wasn't an immediate threat to any of us. I heard nothing more over the course of tonight's game playing (Nefertiti, Amytis, Galaxy Trucker) and so was very surprised when I left around 10pm to see rapidly moving police cars whizzing up Broadway. Fortunately, I've gotten pretty familiar with that part of the city, and I was able to avoid the BART stations at 12th and 19th, where I assumed the problems were.

(As far as I can tell from the reports I've read since, the police were holding a line at 14th & Broadway, so I did well avoiding my normal thoroughfare, which takes Broadway to Telegraph.)

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It all dates back to a BART police officer shooting a passenger on the 1st. After being arrested for being unruly, the passenger was lying on the ground cuffed, apparently still resisting arrest, and the cop shot him in the back.

Now, I have every belief that it was an accident. I mean, c'mon, if you're a bad cop are you stupid enough to shoot someone in front of a huge crowd, many of them with video cameras rolling? Of course not. The BART police started being issued stun guns a couple of weeks ago and I'd lay odds that in the confusion and panic he thought he had his taser out.

The unruly passenger wasn't at fault, at least not for getting killed. But neither was the BART police.

The problem is instead a society that arms police officers with guns. Sure, they should have access to them when they really need them, but having every police officer armed with weapons on the street all the time is just stupid. That's what needs to be corrected, and that's what won't be.

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Now what was going on in Oakland tonight was stupid too. You had people protesting in front of various BART stations, including (eventually) 12th Street.

That'd be fine if the protest didn't turn into a riot, with people setting cars on fire, breaking windows, destroying community businesses, and doing all sort of things that should make them ashamed to be human beings.

When people came out to protest their cars being destroyed, their businesses that they'd spent a lifetime building up being gutted, they were told that they were lucky they hadn't been killed.

Classy.

A classy bunch of assholes stupid enough to become mired in a mob mentality and thus forfeit their right to call themselves humans.

Of the folks involved to date--the police officer, the guy who got shot, and the mobs moving through Oakland--there's only one group that I find fault with, and it was of course those people out tonight.

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On my way home I duly cursed not have a phone number for anyone at Endgame, so that I could tell them that they might want to consider a way to get home while avoiding the 12th Street BART. Hopefully they had it reopened by the time people started heading home.

Ironies about the "Protest" (Riot) in Oakland Last Night

1. Unclear on What They Were Protesting

So these knuckleheads started out at Fruitvale BART, then eventually made their way to 12th Street. That seems pretty good so far. They bounced from BART station to BART station. One presumes that the goal was shutting down BART stations, inconveniencing passengers, hurting BART revenues, and thus causing BART to take action. Though interfering with other peoples' commerce and movement like that clearly falls on the civil disobedience side of things, that would have been protest I could respect.

But then they start burning cars on and around Broadway, and I mean average peoples' cars, not police cars (though they of course attacked those too). And there you have the biggest irony of this dumbass "protest".

Because, if you destroy peoples' vehicles, how do they then get around? Yep, that's right, public transit. Like BART. So they inconvenienced BART by forcing more people to use it.

2. Unclear on Who They Were Protesting

By the time they got to Broadway, the "protesters" were screaming epithets at the police, daring them to shoot, attacking their vehicles, etc.

Of course, it was BART police involved in the original shooting, not Oakland police. In fact, Willie Brown claims that Oakland has no jurisdiction since it was a BART shooting in a BART station (though he since seems to have kicked off an investigation, contradicting himself).

But in any case, the protesters decided any police officer could be used as a stand-in ... or more likely, most of them didn't even know that it was BART police originally involved.

3. Unclear on Who They Were Protecting

And this I already bitched about last night. These idiots (at least some of whom originated here in Berkeley, from what I've read since, as there were "Revolution Book" banners all about) claimed to be protecting the rights of average people against the fearsome police state, and their answer was to destroy the property and livelihood of average people.

It's this sort of thing that gives protests and civil disobedience a really bad name,

Tai Chi Visiting

I have a little bundle of fur visiting me this week:



Tai Chi is my sister Melody's cat. She's visiting the folks in Hawaii, and she really didn't want to leave the cat alone, so I was happy to take him for the week.

For the moment he's being kept isolated back in my office/sun room. We had so much trouble bringing Lucy into the household, that I'm afraid to just let him go free and visit with the other cats. On the other hand, we don't have to worry about screwing things up here: if we did let him roam free and the other cats decided they hated him, it's no big deal.

So, I may try and let the cats mix later in the week, now that he's had a few days to settle. For the moment, they've just seen each other, and our cats (of course) have hissed. Even little Lucy who I thought would be thrilled to see another playmate.

Tai Chi is a cute little cat. He's very talky, always saying hello when I come into the room. He also is very happy to let his displeasure be known verbally. He seems to pace a lot. I think he might feel confined in these two rooms of space, which is one of the reasons I'd love to give him the run of the house if at all possible.

In any case, he seems relatively happy at the moment and comfortable with me. And, unlike the last cat I catsat, I don't have to give him shots every day. Double plus.