Author: Rocky Neptun

Most stood and spoke with pride and respect, cradling their cause reverently, boldly, while others barely concealed their rage with fiery speeches. They told of being knocked to the ground, punched, the burn of mace in their faces, shoved against concrete walls, brutally dragged to police vans, being booked into jail on outrageous felony charges; all in retaliation for using their U.S. Constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech and free assembly.

Forty citizens gathered at the San Diego Citizens’ Review Board on Police Practices, Tuesday evening, January 25, pleading with its 23 members to investigate not only the San Diego Police Departments continuing harassment of the Occupy San Diego movement but the SDPD’s frightening new policy of allowing police officers to change, modify and make new laws on the spot.

Middle-class housewives, small business owners, veterans, an attorney, college students, even downtown employees passing by, victimized by the sustained police violence in the Civic Center Plaza.

Julia Glover pulls on her knitted gloves, wraps her scarf tighter around her shoulders as the chilly breeze whips through San Diego’s newly named Freedom Plaza. Fixing her eyes grimly on the costumed patrons of the ballet in tuxedos and firs as they line up for the annual Nutcracker presentation at the Civic Theatre, across the square from the Occupy San Diego base camp, she shivered and said sadly, “there they go, the fools of empire, the subsidiaries of the 1 percent, they will never understand, much less appreciate what Bradley Manning did for us.”

From Florida, she was visiting a friend in San Diego and was determined to spend her 68th birthday marching for Pfc. Manning on their shared birthday, December 17th. As she waited for the Saturday march to begin, listening to San Diego Occupiers discuss strategy at their daily General Assembly gathering in the plaza, she commented “we need to occupy Ft. Meade; all of us, thirty or forty thousand from across the nation, marching upon the base, requiring our government to release this young hero.”

In spite of the 51 arrests early Friday morning, Occupy San Diego managed to hold the Civic Center Plaza, what some young people are calling ‘Freedom Plaza,” through the night and into Saturday morning. After a tense standoff with about 30 police officers over one of the two arrests during the night and a noisy march through downtown, occupiers meeting at their nightly General Assembly split evenly over whether to continue to occupy the plaza, but since there was not a single block on the action, about 75 OccupySD folks stayed.

Tuesday, Oct 25:After spending almost an hour discussing an illegal scheme to transfer even more wealth to downtown hotel owners using taxpayers’ money; the San Diego City Council literally turned tail and ran from the council chambers when a coalition of community groups joined the Occupy San Diego movement in asking council members to support their rights to free speech and assembly within the city.

About 60 citizens marched from Children’s Park just before the 10 a.m. Council session and met up with the several hundred young people camped at the Civic Center Plaza. Ignoring the police demands to stay on the sidewalk, protestors took to the streets the entire route.

From Tehran to Scotland, from Hong Kong to the always fiery, militant youth of Rome, the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread across the globe. Tired and angry over decades of corporate owned capitalism, where wealthy stockholders and huge multi-national corporations set the agenda for political and economic policy decisions, plunging millions of middle-class families into poverty, exacerbating the conditions of the already destitute, and forcing millions of youth into either wage slavery or no future at all; the world’s 99% have taken to the streets.

Handed a printed ultimatum late afternoon Thursday, October 13 to either remove all tents by midnight or get arrested, the 150 Freedom Occupiers at the San Diego Civic Center held a democratic general assembly and decided to peacefully resist the assault on their rights of free speech and assembly.

The occupiers, mostly youth , many of color, had been camped near City Hall since Saturday to proclaim solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protests nationwide and to begin a movement of youthful confrontation with local injustice.

Close to five hundred people gathered Sunday, May 7 in Tijuana’s Zona Rio to call on President Felipe Calderon to end Mexico’s “failed” war on drugs. Converging beneath the city’s Monument to Two Cultures, which honors U.S. and Mexican society with two scissor shaped columns, protestors divided into two distinct groups.

“Why do you people hide in the park?” one person asked me.

“Do you think that you are going to change a damn thing?” another asked. “Obama promised to end the wars if we elected him and he lied, just like Bush” she continued.

What is peace? Is it merely the absence of war? Or, like Switzerland and Costa Rica, the refusal to use aggression as national policy? Is it micro or macro; harmony in the family or tranquility in our nation’s inner streets? Is it a noun or a verb? Something one has, like a bank account or a house, or is it something one does, a way of life?

In that town called San Diego when the workers try to talk, The cops will smash them with a sap…

Serra Mesa, San Diego: To kill the Beast or not, was the question. Has it grown into an enormous creature…

The greatest threat of the 21st Century is not terrorism or religious fanaticism or nationalism….. it is concentrated power – both political and economic – within the corporate state. That very power, concentrated in an elite, an oligarchy, whether national or local, is an interlocking system of wealth, politics, media, and corporations whose sole purpose is to destroy the ability of individual citizens to organize together for the common good through the mechanism of government.