If you’re new to actions with an arrest risk and you don’t have experienced protestors with you, there’s stuff you can find online about having a legal team, writing the name of a lawyer on your body, saying NOTHING to the cops except the name of your lawyer, etc. That’s all good advice.
But let me give you a bit of advice that is just as essential as all that:
If one of your comrades gets arrested, and you know they can be held for 6, 9, 12 hours, depending on where you are, you get a group of people together and you wait outside the police station.
You may be tired, you may be stressed, it may be freezing, you may need to take turns, but you take whoever can still physically and mentally bear it and you go to that police station and you wait for your comrade. You can spend the time taking care of each other, drinking hot drinks, doing whatever gets you through, but you wait.
And when your comrade gets out, you make sure they do not walk home alone in the dark thinking about the fucked up experience they just had, you make sure there’s a big fucking crowd of their comrades there to greet them with hugs and hot drinks and a cigarette if they smoke.
And whether the arrested comrade that just got out is happy or sad or pissed off, you take that for what it is and give that space and you support that. And you get them a hot meal and you hang out with them and you offer to let them stay at your place or you stay with them so they don’t have to spend that night alone with their thoughts.
You do this every damn time, regardless of whether you really like that comrade and regardless of how you feel about the thing your comrade got arrested for, regardless of how often they’ve been arrested. Because you never know how shitty their experience is going to be in there this time.
Trust me. This is absolutely essential. Once you’ve been arrested and have felt the difference between walking home alone or having your friends waiting for you, you’ll understand.
Be good comrades
I can’t stress how important this is. When my father and I were arrested in Seattle some years back for agitating for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, we were greeted outside the jail by the event’s organisers. They cheered us, had cokes and munchies for us. They drove us to our car and, during the drive, asked if we wanted to stay the night in Seattle with one of the organisers, they filled us in on what had happened after our arrests, they asked about and listened intently to what we experienced from arrest to release. They did so much so well that when another call went out for potential arrestees, we were amongst the first to raise our proverbial hands.
Read the post. Re-read the post. Remember it. And, when the chance comes, do it.
When I was arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest a few years ago, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice were doing Jail Support when I was finally let out of One Police Plaza at around 6am.
They had gotten a klezmer band to stand along the hill you have to go up to leave the jail, and as I walked to where the volunteer lawyers were waiting (they were there to make sure all 200+ people who were arrested that night would be represented at their later hearings. They also were surrounded by volunteers who had food, phone chargers, directions to all the nearby subway stops, and one of them let me borrow her phone to call my mom when I got frustrated with how slowly my phone was charging) the band played music, cheered and applauded.
Honestly? That band playing klezmer for me as I left jail, cheering me on and making me laugh… it’s a memory I really treasure.
It’s also one of my mother’s favorite stories. Before I told her about that band, she got so upset and agitated whenever anything reminded her of my arrest. She’d freak out, cry, start fussing over me, and so forth. After I told her about the klezmer band though? It became something she’d tell her friends about, over and over again, laughing each time. She stopped calling me to beg me not to go and protest every time she knew a big one was happening, and instead would call to make a joke about how if I want to listen to klezmer she has some CDs I can borrow.
When I think about that night, rather than any of the many many terrible things that happened from the moment the cops grabbed me onward, the first thing I remember is the klezmer, and how it made me laugh, and the popcorn someone gave me as I gave the lawyers my name and info, and the kindness of strangers.
After the dehumanization of even a few hours in police custody, those volunteers made me smile, and gave the night a new fun and funny angle to be remembered from. I actually laugh when I think about that night, thanks to them.
Jail Support is a beyond vital part of protesting. It really really is.
These men are, should you not recognize the type, wide-eyed and
perennially confused. What’s the difference, the male bumbler wonders,
between a friendly conversation with a coworker and rubbing one’s penis
in front of one? Between grooming a 14-year-old at her custody hearing
and asking her out?
The world baffles the bumbler. He’s astonished to discover that he had power over anyone at all, let alone that he was perceived as using it. What power? he says. Who, me?
The bumbler is the first to confess that he’s bad at his job. Take
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who testified Tuesday of the Trump
campaign’s foreign policy team, which he ran and which is now understood
to have been in contact with Russian agents: “We were not a very
effective group.”
…
The bumbler doesn’t know things, even things about which he was directly informed. Jon Stewart was “stunned” by the Louis C.K. revelations, even though we watched someone ask him about them last year. Vice President Mike Pence maintains he had no idea former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was lobbying for a foreign power — despite the fact that Flynn himself informed the transition team back in January
…
…
Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof.
Breaking that alibi means dissecting that myth. The line on men has
been that they’re the only gender qualified to hold important jobs and
too incompetent to be responsible for their conduct.
…
As the accusations of sexual misconduct roiling politics, publishing,
and Hollywood continue to stack up, a few things are going to happen.
The first stage of a phenomenon like this will always be to characterize
the accused men as exceptions, as bad apples. #NotAllMen, the saying
goes.
But the second is that everyone is going to try to naturalize sexual harassment. If there are this many men doing these things, then surely this is just how men are! that argument will go. There’s a corollary lurking underneath there: They can’t help themselves. They’re bumblers.That won’t wash. But the only way to guard against it is to shed our
weird cultural blindness to manipulative male behavior. We must be
smarter than our cultural defaults. We need to shed the exculpatory
scripts that have mysteriously enabled all these incompetent bumblers to
become rich, successful, and admired even as they maintain that they’re
moral infants.We do that by looking at the deliberate, active steps they took to conceal what they did.
1. Get to 51 votes. To start, we need 49 “no” votes from EVERY SINGLE SENATE DEMOCRAT to have a fighting chance. … That gets us to 49. To get to 51, we need a couple Republican Senators. The two most logical targets are Senators Collins (ME) and Murkowski (AK). …
2. Take back the Senate. If we accomplish that first step, that will extend the fight past November. But that’s not enough. In order to actually win this fight, we have to retake the Senate, otherwise Trump will just appoint an extremist after the election. Democrats need to hold all of their seats and PICK UP TWO MORE SEATS. There are 5 pickup opportunities this year:
Defeat Ted Cruz (Texas)
Defeat Dean Heller (Nevada)
Defeat Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi)
Replace retiring Republican Bob Corker (Tennessee)
Replace retiring Republican Jeff Flake (Arizona)
EXECUTING THE 2-STEP STRATEGY IN YOUR HOME TURF
STEP 1: HOW YOU CAN HELP US GET TO 51 VOTES.
Call your senator.
Be patriotic this July 4th recess.
STEP 2: HOW TO HELP US RETAKE THE SENATE
We need your people power to retake the Senate—not just in November, but NOW. Money doesn’t win elections—people do. There are hundreds of Indivisible groups throughout our five target states—Arizona, Mississippi, Nevada, Texas, and Tennessee. They’ve been working their butts off and we need to lend them a hand. If you’re in those states—great! Keep it up. If you don’t live in those 5 states, we need you to pitch in.
So what can you do from where you live? Indivisible is going to be running a GINORMOUS phonebank for out-of-state volunteers to help flip these seats and retake the senate….
CALL Scripts:
FOR ALL OTHER DEMOCRATIC SENATORS
Caller: Hello! My name is ___ and I’m calling from [part of state]. Can you please tell me what Senator ___ plans to do about the Supreme Court vacancy?
Staffer: Hello, nice to talk with you! The Senator plans to vote against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. The stakes are too high.
Caller: Thank you! I’m very glad to hear that. Too much hangs in the balance to let Trump fill this seat with someone from his list of totally unqualified, extreme judges. That includes a woman’s right to choose, the Affordable Care Act, and marriage equality. I want Senator ___ to use every tool at his/her disposal to stop Trump from filling this vacancy with anyone on this list.
Staffer: Thank you, the Senator agrees with you. I’ll make sure they get your message.
FOR ALL OTHER REPUBLICAN SENATORS
Caller: Hello! My name is ___ and I’m calling from [part of state]. Can you please tell me what Senator ___ plans to do about the Supreme Court vacancy?
Staffer: The Senator will support President Trump’s nominee.
Caller: That’s terrible. Too much hangs in the balance to let Trump fill this seat with someone from his list of 25 totally unqualified, extreme judges. That includes a woman’s right to choose, the Affordable Care Act, and marriage equality. I am extremely disappointed with the Senator.
Staffer: The Senator disagrees with you. I’ll make sure the Senator gets your message.
Caller: I hope the Senator will recognize that the people on Trump’s list are way outside the mainstream and not choices that his/her constituents want. Please take down my name and phone number so you can let me know if the Senator decides to stand up for his/her constituents instead of being a rubber stamp for Trump.
Sessions’ ban on administrative closure means that husbands and wives of U.S. citizens awaiting permanent residency could be ripped away from their spouses before they can complete the process. It could mean people not mentally competent to participate in their deportation proceedings could be forced to move forward anyway. And unaccompanied children seeking special protective status could be sent back to dangerous situations before their backlogged visas are available.
The attorney general’s decision to wipe out administrative closure will also contribute to the already massive backlog of more than 700,000 immigration cases, further squeezing the courts and undercutting immigrants’ opportunities to fairly present their claims. Immigration courts are already overburdened and lack important procedural protections. But they have to make critical, sometimes life-or-death decisions about whether immigrants — many of them asylum seekers fleeing persecution or Dreamers with deep roots in their communities — will be admitted or exiled. As Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks has put it, immigration courts are already “doing death-penalty cases in a traffic-court setting.” But with this administration’s policy changes, even that traffic court is turning into a kangaroo court. Mistakes and due process violations will inevitably result.
…
This is just one of many changes Sessions is imposing to make immigration procedures less fair. He is planning to weigh in on an immigration case that could make it much harder to get a “continuance” — another important tool in immigration judges’ toolkit that allows immigrants more time to get a lawyer, prepare their case, or await the outcome of an immigration application. And earlier this year, Sessions’ Department of Justice announced that it would be putting in place ambitious case completion goals on immigration courts and imposing quotas on individual immigration judges.
More than 1,000 female activists marched through Washington Thursday to protest the separation of children from their immigration parents at the US-Mexico border.
US Capitol Police arrested approximately 575 individuals with unlawfully demonstrating, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington.
…
The protestors chanted “abolish ICE” as well as “where are the children?” as well as other chants that are hard to hear within the building.
The activists sat on the floor of the Senate building with emergency blankets to demand Congress act to end the Trump administration policies that criminalize and detain undocumented immigrants and separates their children from them.
Congress is set to leave town for a week-long recess without passing any legislation to address the situation at the US border. On Wednesday, the House failed to pass legislation that would have address in part several high-profile immigration-related policies including border wall funding and an eventual pathway to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
I’m not kidding when I say that every single one of you who didn’t vote in 2016 or voted for some stupid third party candidate are just as responsible for today as those who voted Trump, and you can all suck my fucking dick forever. Go to hell and I hope you burn.
Except that the majority of Trump voters were white people across every voter group. All of the 3rd party voters in the country couldn’t out vote the majority (especially with the Electoral college), especially when democrats spent most of their time trying to appeal to them, and made no real effort (outside of grassroots efforts) to protect the poor and non white voters who make up their main voter base. If you want to hold people responsible you can complain about non voters and 3rd party voters (as long as you also acknowledge how gutting the VRA had a role in this), but you also have to come after Dems for abandoning their base, underestimating Trump’s ability to use identity politics, and you have to come after white voters for falling for “Southern Strategy 3.0”.
im so fucking sick of people blaming 3rd party voters! ffs
either admit that voting should be about picking the person who best represents your personal interests, or admit that voting is only beneficial when the votes go the way YOU think they should.
FUCK YOU. I don’t give a fuck what you think voting “should be.” There is no fucking “should be,” you absolute twerpfaced asshole. There is what voting is, which is doing your goddamn motherfucking duty as a fucking citizen of this country—a duty that others in this country can’t fulfill—and pick one of the two people who will win the election, rather than whatever bullshit unicorn you’ve decided is more in line with your pet causes. Because while you’re making a fucking statement or whatever with your inane third party vote, the guy who you know is worse, the guy who has done irreperable harm to our country, our citizens, and the world in a record year and a half, won the election.
And no, “the Dems” (whatever the fuck you think that means, I guess just “old ladies I think are ugly and kinda like my mom”) did not abandon “the base” (which is not, contrary to what you think, you and your best pal Noah who would’ve totes voted for that bitch I mean Hillary except she just abandoned you and your vewy pwecious ideals). The base, which is Black women, turned out. They showed up. It was you who pouted and stomped your feet and couldn’t get off your fucking entitled asses because something you’d read in Jacobin convinced you Hillary owned slaves or was friends with a KKK leader or whatever bullshit you fed to yourselves, all to give yourselves cover for fucking up an election that has cost us… I don’t really know what. Fifty years of progress, give or take? But sure, it’s your mom’s fault–I mean the Dems’ fault.
And if you want to come at me with “voting is only beneficial when the votes go the way YOU think they should”—yeah you’re fucking right that I don’t think the votes should have gone the way they did. Are you seriously trying to tell me that this is a lesson I should internalize? Assholes, I turned up. I voted. I helped my dad vote. I volunteered and donated and did my best to get the best candidate elected. You didn’t do anything; in fact you discouraged others from voting because that bitch who kinda reminds you of your mom or that mean manager you hate didn’t lick your ass quite hard enough during the elections. I mean, for all you know maybe she did—it’s not like you dicknozzles ever actually read any of her policy papers or listened to her speeches. You just kept checking The Hill for whatever latest dirt there was on her emails. And now you want fucking credit, for having such high and lofty ideals that you couldn’t lift a fucking finger to prevent all of this?
This is why I’m angrier at you than I am at the Trumpists. This blatant lying, right here, that you have any kind of actual principles other than “I don’t want to vote for that icky lady.” You didn’t vote third party out of any conviction. You voted third party, or didn’t vote at all, because you don’t care about any of the shit you pretended to care about here on tumblr.com.
The Trump voters are hateful, vile, bigoted shitstains who are already salivating at the overturn of Roe. But they were honest about what they wanted. They said “I want to hurt Black and Brown folks, and gays, and uppity women, and Muslims, and everyone else who isn’t exactly like me.” You guys told us over and over again that you were better than us because you wanted economic justice, you wanted free college and no corporate PACs and universal healthcare. And then you did absolutely nothing to bring it about. You couldn’t even be bothered to the one candidate who would have listened to you once she was in office (because newsflash you moosenuggets, she would have had to, as you should have known if you’d listened for ten goddamn minutes, because she would’ve been banking on getting the House and Senate back in 2018 and to do that she would have had to go hard left, DUH, HOW DID THAT NOT MAKE IT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING SKULLS).
No, you decided that looking personally pure was worth the suffering of millions of people. You lied about every one of your goals, because you ensured that none of that shit will ever happen in your lifetime now. None of it. Our generation is fucked, and yours, and your kids’ generation. And it’s your fault as much as the Trumpists—but they didn’t lie to my face about what they wanted.
Hearseeno 