The Great Speckled Bird Vol 2 #29 9/29/69 pgs. 2-5
Sunday in the Park September 20, 1969
All the classical elements were present in Piedmont Park Sunday: the cops—some juiced up at the prospect of jabbing a hippie cunt, some restrained by-the-bookers, some clearly hesitant, avoiding action as best they could. The people: the ideologues, digging the harvest of this super-naked repression; the innocents (“give peace a chance”) in battle for the first time and therefore as ideologically hamstrung as the “militants”; the pure music freaks who split before the first teargas canister told us what was coming down; the liberals who looked on in voyeuristic horror (and who later confirmed what we knew then-a police riot); and those who could neither throw things at the cops nor agree not to, who saw a community getting its shit together and could not leave until the police did. And the capitalist press, scurrying about in quest of the “balanced view” they come up with when (and only when) the police go berserk. But this time, it was US and not our brothers Amerika saw on the Sunday night news.
Our liberal friends will assail the individual overt acts of “police brutality”: the unnecessary beatings, the spontaneous attacks upon people, the revolver fired into the crowd. That’s fine, but what we face involves not just the violence freaks who make up a slight minority of the Atlanta P. D (and the cops showed more restraint for a longer period than 1 saw in Berkeley last May), but the system-generated and -reinforced predisposition with which every white cop walks among us. We are, in some vague, ill-defined way, not human beings. Their commitment to protect the citizens of Atlanta evaporates when the police patrol our community. They create violations of unconstitutional laws (“occupying a dive,” “loitering”), ferret out our violations of legislated Puritanism (dope). The easiest way to create a “fascist” state is to pass a plethora of laws which are then selectively enforced. Mr. Business Suit waits for a bus; a freak loiters. Dope is illegal; so is padding defense contracts. – Identifying for your friends an undercover police agent is not illegal; but that is the bust which the community resisted to the extent of 23 arrests, dozens of tear gas bombs, several injuries, and the guerrilla action that happened Sunday.
The V-sign “third force” (“Forgive them for they know not what they do”), one of whom offered to testify “against the people who threw rocks at the policeman,” would have us keep our park “privileges” through asskissing; they have not understood that the city “gave” us the park for our music because we are powerful enough to convince them that it is in their interest to do so.
A park cannot be liberated by permit, cannot be “free” just because freaks come together to dig some fine music. Sunday was about what comes down when, in the course of being who and what we are (NOTE: not in the course of tearing down the Amerikan Empire), we transgress the constricted lifestyle that is acceptable in and to this rotten country.
George Nikas, in the great tradition of Paul Revere, advertised the coming of the nark. The rock thus overturned, what crawled out busted George for “interfering with an officer.” And a community that knows bullshit when it sees it said so. Loudly. And the battle was joined.
Translate. Picture your father being arrested for any thing; imagine the guys in his office putting up the massive, together. group resistance that we generated Sunday. 1 cannot. We are different people, a qualitatively distinct species, and we deny our distance from our parents at the peril of every thing we believe in, stand for.. dig, and (most important) arc. Bust one of us, we said Sunday, and you deal with all of us. This is the lesson for the gentle ones who flashed V’s and begged the crowd to “stop.”
Sunday’s resistance was not “revolutionary antics,” The work of “agitators.” Sunday was a defense of the kind of life we have chosen to live. That life includes music; it includes dope; but more significant, and of revolutionary impact, is our self-perception as a people acting in unity. That is new, that is what makes us who we are. To then fall back to a love-and-peace stance which quickly becomes a hate-the-bottle-throwers posture is to fragment the solidarity that saw politicos and culture freaks standing side by side.
Tactically, rocking the cops is for me of dubious battle; but those rocks, bottles, and empty tear gas canisters responded to an invasion of our tribal celebration. The police brought to bear on us their first priority: the bust. We responded with a different priority: solidarity. There are only two sides in the framework. On one side stand the musicians, the trippers, the rock throwers—”- on the other stand the cops, and the dividing line is not gentleness..
Joni Mitchell sings, “I can be cruel, but let me be gentle with you.” Gentleness is a factor in our uniqueness, but when we are not allowed to be gentle, we can be cruel, we must be cruel, or we will not survive. Amerika’s zoo, stop # 14 on a Grayline tour-these the city fathers may allow us to be, as long as when their push comes to our shove, we gently retreat across the playing fields of Piedmont, out of the park, and re-atomize into the individualized, competitive trick bag that keeps people from getting together in gentleness.
Sunday made us “Panthers”; like them we fight now, not for a cause, but for our own survival. And the time comes to speak of “genocide.” On the day of our battle, the narks got 1,000 pounds of grass in Riverside, California. In “A Litany for the American People,” read at People’s Park, Tom Parkinson put into the mouth of “The Governing Forces of the United States” these words:
We will impose unjust laws and chaotic order on all the citizens we hate.. .all males with peculiar sexual mores, all with hair on their faces, all with long hair growing out of their heads, all artists and poets and musicians and honest scientists, all women who are proud and happy with their naturally beautiful hair and bodies and have lovely sexual ideas, and we will cut and shave and tear out their hair and condemn them to endless oppression and allow only one style of life… and we will put in prison anyone who smokes the mild benign weed called marijuana. to which he has “The People of the United States” respond, “COUNT ME OUT, COUNT ME OUT, COUNT ME OUT.”
The deal is this: if we insist on smoking grass, digging our music, thinking our thoughts, making love the way we choose, then Amerika offers us only prison and firebombing. To avoid a hassle, cut your hair, lay off grass, buy your music from “the containment industry,” accept the sexual standards of this society, and shut up.
Choose. And after you choose, dig that resistance to genocide grows only in solidarity, the refusal to be tricked into rejecting others for whom the same choice means throwing rocks at cops. And at this point, wily Ben Franklin’s advice comes once more to mind: we will hang, he reminds us—together or separately.
-greg gregory