As They Choke On Fumes In Pittsburgh, the World Sits in Ignorance
September 26th, 2009 by Jon Robinson
Where do you think these pictures were taken? In a war zone perhaps, or a unstable Eastern Bloc country? What if I told you that these pictures were taken on a college campus in a location four and a half hours away from our Foggy Bottom? This is the scene from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where as world leaders discuss greater economic cooperation and political understanding the Bill of Rights is being trampled on. If you don’t think these pictures look 1984/Minority Report-esque or militaristic enough, then maybe these videos from University of Pittsburgh News website Pitt Briefly will do a better job of telling the story of the insanity taking place in the streets of the Steel City:
The testimonial coming out of Pittsburgh is just outrageous. What began as a peaceful march during the day had escalated in the afternoon as groups of anarchists and more radical protesters took to the streets, causing small disturbances and vandalizing parts of the city. The police then began to step up their presence, and turned the situation upside down. Even though students had been warned by text message and email to stay in their places of residence due to police presence on the campus, students nonetheless being curious and in their every legal right to venture outside of their buildings became the victims of one of the worst cases of mass police brutality in recent memory.
These people were not protesters or anarchists breaking windows and wreaking havoc on the streets of Pittsburgh, these were people in regular everyday clothes living the life of an everyday college student in Pittsburgh. These are the casualties of the City of Pittsburgh police. These are the innocent bystanders. These are our peers who are stuck in the middle, the collateral damage.
Officers ventured into dormitories to contain protests, and unleashed mace and teargas on students socializing and taking in the amazing political event taking place on their front doorsteps that weekend. Here is the testimony of one Pitt student featured one of the CNN IReport videos:
A Pittsburgh police officer shot a freshmen University of Pittsburgh student in the face with some sort of non-lethal projectile, and I was caught in the situation after police teargassed me while I was trying to help the student. Tear gas was deployed on the dormitory patios, blocking one of the only entrances police hadn’t physically blocked.
I was forced to jump down a 10-foot wall and hide in an alleyway to avoid injury or arrest by the police.
Can you imagine sitting out in front of Thurston and being chased back into the building by a dust storm of pepper spray and tear gas? Can you imagine watching a situation from the H Street of the Marvin Center and having to be forcefully removed by police overstepping their bounds? Can you imagine mulling around in University Yard and being routed by power hungry riot squad members taking the law into their own hands?
There are 100 people in jail due to the protests on the University of Pittsburgh campus and thousands of others are sitting in their rooms tonight anxious as to what will happen next.
As college students we should be very scared at what can happen when the stakes are high enough. Imagine if chaos had erupted during the Presidential inauguration, many of us would have waded into the fray to catch a glimpse of history in the making. We survived that ordeal, with our civil liberties still intact…but our peers in Pittsburgh have much to worry about, and so should we, that is if we value the 1st or 4th amendments very much.
To get the latest on the happenings in Pittsburgh visit http://www.pittnews.com/g20/.
- Jonathan Robinson is Executive Chair of the Jewish Progressive Political Association