Some thoughts about getting arrested

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 11 April 2007 14:00:03

I'm begining to realise...

There is no thing as an arrestable action.
There is no thing as an unarrestable action.

You can go and sit on a road for hours, psyched up for a night in the cells. Break through the police lines and run to join a group of clowns taking the piss of the riot police, and walk away scot free.
And you can go out on a saturday morning, stick anti-flying posters on shop windows, and spend 5 hours in the cells.

And the whole system aims to crush you.

First, they they play on your confidence. Making little dents. Telling you how stupid you look, how passers by are laughing at you (what? and I walked through the city center with a polar bear because I thought i looked cool) , thinking you are just arrogant and immature. They tell you to ‘get a job' (and the pensioners and school children, the doctors and students...), they assume you are a student (because everyone knows that students are the only ones attending protests). then they tell you you won't change anything. what can one person do? what do you hope to achieve? there are better ways of acting, more respectable protests you should go on - route marches, information stalls...

But you carry on. And you are arrested. Manhandled into a police car, with police telling you how it didn't have to end like this, how you could have prevented it.

Name?
How old are you?
Date of Birth?
Address?
Place of Birth?
Have you lived at this address?
Have you ever got arrested before?
When?
What for?
Have you got any medical conditions?
Have you ever hurt yourself?
Do you take any medication?
What do you define your ethnicity as?

And then the search...arms out, legs apart, a police woman makes sure you don't have anything you could kill yourself with on you (because a pair of tights is less dangerous than a hair bobble).

And then the door slams, and silence.

An eye at the peep-hole every 30 minutes, but apart from that no-one. In a cold, grey room - 5 paces by 6 paces (or 46 fairies footsteps by 69) - with a raised bed, a hard mattress (like the gym mats you had a primary school) and a metal toilet, with no toilet roll or wash baisen.

You run the days events in your head. Then the weeks, then the years...and you wonder about how you got here. The police cells you have known, the arrests, the warnings, the stop-and-search forms, the warning letters...and you wonder why you've done it all. And the work They started back at the demo is carried on. You can't change anything. what can one person do? what do you hope to achieve? there are better ways of acting, more respectable protests you should go on - route marches, information stalls...

Against the G8 in Stirling, climate change at Drax, Trident submarines at Faslane, nuclear weapons and top up fees, wars and George Bush...none of them did any good, not really. We can't really change the world. Not with all the placards, lock on tubes, and glue in the world.

Can we?

And then after getting released, we went for pizza, and walked through the town. Taking a small detour to see if the posters were still there. And they were.

And, just once, I felt like we were winning.

And as long as wars are fought in my name - and in the name of my God
As long as people are detained without charge in my country
As long as asylum seekers have to queue for hours every week
As long as nuclear missiles are replaced and renewed
As long as soldiers are coming home in coffins
As long as children wake up screaming from nightmares
As long as bombs are falling on a faraway country
As long as refugees flee from their homes and lifes
As long as sweatshops exploit women, men and children
As long as the world is divided into the powerful, and the powerless.

I have to act.
Win or loose, its the action that matters. As Alice Walker once said...
Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.