[Leica] Kyle Cassidy and the NYPD

[msmall at infionline.net (Marc James Small)]

>--- Kyle Cassidy <KCassidy@asc.upenn.edu> wrote: 

>>As the
>> group I was in crossed Church street (the first 50
>> steps of the march), a
>> policeman with a bull horn announced "This march
>> does not have a permit. If
>> you break any New York traffic laws, you will be
>> subject to arrest." 

>> > The NYPD were on guard:  one of their
>> >members was put into the hospital in critical
>> condition by a battering from
>> >one of the "peaceful protestors", after all, and
>> that, alone, would put
>> >every officer on the beat on guard.  And, on this,
>> I am on their side:  the
>> >right to protest does NOT include the right to
>> violence, a minor factoid
>> >generally ignored by the US media.
>> 
>> I thought you were a libertarian! (and for the
>> record, "peaceful protesters"
>> don't batter anyone. Thugs do and they should be
>> arrested, charged, and
>> prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.


Kyle 

I go back beyond the middle '60's -- I am 54 and have been politically
active since, well, 1956 -- I have the "I Like Ike" button I wore that year
on my office desk, along with some Nixon stuff from 1960 and my Scranton
button from 1964 along with a bunch of AuH20 ephemera.

I have learned the following realities:

"peaceful protestors" are rarely "peaceful".  I have had fistfights with
quite a few of these Advocates of World Peace over the years, and I am a
yellow-belly who would NEVER pick a physical confrontation -- fortunately,
I always got the best of the fellow assailing me.  Lenin taught that you
send your most physically capable agents into protests, a lesson that seems
to have escaped the US arm of the Comintern.

We did have a confrontation during the Kent State era (Spring, 1970) at
Washington and Lee University in front of Lee Chapel.  We had three or four
hundred "protestors" on he far side of the barricade, and two or three of
us on the inside  I got into a shouting match with the Student Body
President Swede Henborg, who had just been selected as a Rhodes Scholar.
In the end, I simply advised this assembled mass that they would all sell
out to society in the end and that I would be the last to sell out.

I read my Alumni Journal with delight.  These guys have ALL sold out:
those who have remained "anti-society" only do so when they receive large
salaries, and the others are now all employed in senior posiitions of great
merit in major banks, major law firms, and the like. 

Abnd here I sit, making $30k a year, taking on hopeless case after hopeless
case simply because even the worst loser deserves capable representation.
But I am happy for the all of it:  I certainly can sleep with myself at
night, knowing that I have provided a sucker an even break.  Those other
guys who were clamoring for a "just society" and the like?  They will not
even discuss those days but want to speak of their contributions to the St
Charles the Martyr Episcopal Church and defend their "liberal" tendencies
by noting that they believe that homosexuals ought to be accepted into
Church membership.  Wow.

I can gang on and can proceed to show the hypocrisy of all of this but I
shan't do so.  Simply acknowledge my personal experience that most
"protestors" are, in the end, shallow hypocrites who will eschew their
activities once they finally get hired to a real job.

Kyle, you should have listened to the police.  Your failure to abide by
relatively simple instructions makes you suspect in this case.  I long ago
adopted a policy of never disputing anything with a fellow who has a loaded
pistol on his hip:  even if I can outshoot hm (and I probably an) the
process is a non-starter.

I see no acts here that were improper.  I do see a photographer who decided
to eschew journalistic neutrality and to enter into "combat
photo-journalism" by adopting the side of the protestors.  And this is not
only improper, as it is also weird, given the disgusting nature of the
"protestors".

You are certainly fee to take pictures of these terminally skewed
individuals but, in the end, WHY woul you want to doso?

Marc

msmall@infionline.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!