DURING THE RECESS
While the scheduled meeting was being held, most of us went out in the hall for a recess and discussed matters among ourselves. Some of us were studying photos which had been taken that day, and others were looking at a video from that morning which was now being shown on the small side screen of the video device. On it I could see the police attacking, and then suddenly the picture spun off as though the camcorder were suddenly dropped. "Was that where you got hit?" someone asked the videographer. She nodded and said, "Yes."
It was only now, a full day and a half after the event, that I was really beginning to comprehend what had happened behind police lines. But it was more than just the enormity of the shootings; I was impressed by the courage these people had shown during that hour and a half under fire, regrouping each time to set up another picket line. Just not giving up. "Shock and awe" was a term coined by speechwriters of the Bush regime to describe their military tactics in Iraq, and it certainly applied to what the police had done here in Oakland, but it seemed to me that the most downright awesome thing about the shock and awe of April 7th was the fact that it had just flat out failed to overwhelm my companions.
I spoke with several of these people who'd been fired at on the previous day. Among them were two young women who looked to be around 19 or 20; both had been bruised. One of them was wearing a tank top which displayed a large triangular shaped design on the back of her right shoulder. It was about six inches across, and interwoven with red, black and yellow lines, in a way that I at first thought was some bizarre tattoo.
She'd been hit by a concussion grenade, she said, and showed me a piece of it which she'd retrieved from the scene. It was a black rubber cup, about the size of a baseball. From the description she gave, it seemed to be the same as those explosive devices that had made the loud airbursts I'd witnessed.
A third woman was a video photographer for the National Lawyers Guild who'd been hit in the leg by a wooden bullet; she was the one who'd been showing the videos. Nevertheless, despite their injuries, all three of these women had been among those of us who'd marched downtown the previous day, at one place forcing their way through a police line.
On hearing their stories, I just gasped and said, "Do you people realize how brave you were?"
"At the time I just did the only thing I could," said one, whose name was Jessica. "I didn't think I was being brave."