I have not been particularly sympathetic to the activities of Occupy protests around the country, as the message often is one of self-wallowing pity, misplaced blame, and in some cases, vile rhetoric. The conduct often has been violent.
There is a video circulating of police at the University of California – Davis using pepper spray on non-violent students seated on what looks like a campus road.
I find the image of the policeman cavalierly shooting a voluminous spray into the faces of seated students upsetting, and condemnable.
A few minutes into the clip (@2:55) a girl keeps asking, “Does anyone have water?” For some reason that statement moved me quite a bit.
There’s nothing particular in the words that should have caused me such emotion, except perhaps that it brought forward from my subconscious memories of another statement repeated over and over again in another video shot in a hotel in California in 1968.
While the two events hardly were equal in magnitude or purpose, when I heard that girl asking whether anyone had water, I couldn’t help wondering whether there were any doctors in the house.
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