Joshua Trujillo, from the Seattle PI, took this picture of 84 year old Dorli Rainey who had just been pepper sprayed to remove her and others from Occupy Seattle.
It’s raining today. It’s a God-awful cold, oppressive rain, the kind that feels like a million John Gaults pouring down from the smothering gray. I know each drop is a false prophet sent from FOX News. Miniature Gaultians all boasting and blustering, but few produce grand machines or wet us with brilliant self-reliance or teach kids to read. It’s a kind of rain that drowns us with mortgage-backed securities and horse’s-ass-race politics. It’s a trickle-down kind of rain.
It’s just the kind of rain that soaks kids and old women and priests holding the lines at Occupy Seattle. It’s the kind of rain chilling those in Occupy Portland. It’s a rain full of police truncheons. A rain that smells like pepper spray. It’s a window-pounding rain rapping in a staccato “Zuc-cot-ti Park” “Zuc-cot-ti Park” rhythm. And this damp night cadence that reminds me that kids and women like Dorli Rainey, pepper sprayed at the age of 84 for holding her ground, for being an age at which one knows that dignity comes from endurance, no longer have tents tonight. Tents. Tents are too much to ask when regular people are exercising their First Amendment rights. Our Supreme Court sprinkled corporations with our rights as if those rights were holy water anointing medieval kings. So endorsed and blessed, these corporations exercise their First Amendment from the comfort of leather boardroom chairs and attorney luncheons.
But our kids and old women like Dorli continue speaking truth in raw sopping cold. How much I owe them. And, God, I do hate November rain.
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