At the height of the Occupy Sacramento protest March 5, there were around 200 people in the Capitol rotunda and more than 100 in neighboring halls. I was in the rotunda from when the California Highway Patrol officers closed off access to it at 1 p.m. until the last arrests were made after 8 p.m.
There were several moments, when people were chanting and dancing in circles, that I was genuinely moved. Outside of a sports game or concert, it’s rare to see a large group of people gathered together with a common purpose. Their motivation was not entertainment but to try, in their view, to change society for the better. It was inspiring to witness.
It’s easy to caricature a political or social movement by taking the image of one loud extrovert and say he or she is representative of the whole movement.
For example, at one point someone climbed the statue of Queen Isabella in the rotunda and put his crotch in the stone lady’s face while a woman next to me yelled, “suck it.”
And I rolled my eyes when protesters started chanting “Namaste,” a common yoga affirmation, during the arrests. I do yoga myself, but chanting Namaste certainly makes it easy for people to say the Occupy movement is home to only a narrow slice of Americans.
However, most people I talked to during the preceding march and occupation were not abrasive or easily typecast. They were staff, teachers and students of different ages and backgrounds who were genuinely concerned about higher education becoming inaccessible. I may not agree with some of their proposed policies, but wanting everyone to have the option of going to college is a feeling I share.
But the climactic ending of Occupy Sacramento, the arrests, left me ambivalent about this exercise of civil disobedience.
Frankly, it felt stage managed.
The Capitol officially closed at 6 p.m. and an excessive five dispersal orders were given between 6:20 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Before the arrests, a CHP officer told demonstrators they might want to give their backpacks and personal belongings to friends in order to make it easier for them to get them back. People in the group responded by exchanging pleasantries and laughs with the officer.
A moment like that made chants of “Whose Capitol, Our Capitol” and talk of “state repression” ring hollow. I don’t question the content of the chants or that the blocking of access to the rotunda may have been unjust. But there was a disconnect between the militant chants and the interaction between police and protestors.
All steps were taken to make the arrests go as smoothly as possible. The vast majority of people did not resist in any noticeable way, with only two people having to be carried away by police. The 66 people who were arrested that evening were all cited and released that night.
Finally, the big media presence added to the artificial feeling. The number of reporters and ACLU legal observers outnumbered the protestors in the rotunda.
As demonstrators were led off one at a time and the ring of media took pictures, it felt less like an event the media was covering than an event that wouldn’t have happened if the media wasn’t there.
Civil rights demonstrators were arrested for breaking laws mandating racial segregation. Occupy Sacramento protesters were arrested for not leaving a public building after it closed. Perhaps this type of civil disobedience isn’t the appropriate tactic for this movement.
