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National Guardsman Supports Occupy Wall Street 100%
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/10/national-guardsman-supports-occupy-wall-street-100/
by Pham Binh / October 28th, 2011
An active-duty black National Guardsmen in uniform showed up in Liberty
Plaza less than two days after Oakland police brutalized a U.S. marine
Iraq war veteran in the crackdown on Occupy Oakland. He allowed people
to take his photo and quite a few people made it a point to personally
thank him and shake his hand.
This is remarkable. It is against military regulations for active-duty
troops to attend demonstrations in uniform, although standing in a park
surrounded by dozens of tarps and tents in the middle of a cold rainy
afternoon without a sign or banner in sight probably does not count.
During protests against the Afghan and/or Iraq wars, active-duty
personnel who attended them made it a point not to appear in uniform
because of these rules.
“I support this movement 100%,” he told me. He would have come down
before today if he hadn’t been busy with National Guard training. He was
bothered by what he described as the government’s “imbalanced” approach
to fiscal issues; namely, massive tax cuts for the 1% while social
services for the 99% saw their funding slashed to the bone. Shelters for
homeless teenagers faced cuts, and he feared what kind of trouble these
kids would get into with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. As we
spoke, a young Hispanic guy asked him if the military would help him get
his G.E.D. (the equivalent of a high school diploma) and how the
training was.
I asked the Guardsman why he joined the military. He said he chose the
National Guard so that he could go to school part time (he committed to
six years of part-time duty so that he could attend school at the same
time). When I asked him about the military’s health care benefits he
chuckled and told me that he had to pay into the system known as
Tricare. He noted the irony of being forced to pay into the military’s
health care system when it was his life and limb that would be at risk
in a future military deployment. Meanwhile Congress had no problem
voting to give themselves raises every year.
British activist Richard Seymour reacted to the crackdown in Oakland by
asking, “How can you uphold your right to protest when that right is
gainsayed by tear gas, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds?”
U.S. Marine sergeant Shamar Thomas showed us how a few weeks ago when he
single-handedly shamed and stopped 30 cops with flex cuffs on their
belts from arresting peaceful Occupy protesters at a massive Times
Square demonstration.
A thinking soldier, a soldier with a conscience, is the 1%’s worst
nightmare. If the rank and file of the U.S. military become aware of the
fact that they too are the 99%, they won’t have enough cops in the
country to stop us.
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