When the images emerged from Davis of a police officer casually pepper spraying unresisting protesters, I told my wife that the officer in the photos and videos would never again be able to work on that campus.
It wouldn't matter that he is, like any other officer, reasonably tough and armed with several types of weapons. He would be the single most disliked ;person on campus, and his day would be filled with examples of the disdain the student body and faculty, probably even the custodial staff had for him.
And the disdain would be toxic to anyone else. No one would want to be seen even as a friend to this guy. It wouldn't matter if he sang in the church choir every Sunday, volunteered with orphans, was a decorated military hero, and a loving husband and father.
He defined his life in a single act. This may or may not be justice, it may even be terribly unfair, but it is the reality.
Whatever he chooses to do in the future, it will not be on the UCD campus.
More after some squiggle.
As my sig line says, Orwell was an optimist.
George Orwell was prescient about a lot of aspects of modern society, correctly predicting that governments would institute video surveillance and use overwhelming force to control the populace. He predicted doublethink and re-defining words to hide their meaning. He predicted revisionist history and, "We have always been at war with [Saddam]." I could go on, but then I would end up citing the entire work, "1984."
What Mr. Orwell did not predict, and indeed could not have from his perspective, was microprocessor technology that puts image capture in everyone's hands, and networking technology that allows the images to be distributed worldwide, in minutes, independent of government control. His grim future required the possibility that citizens could be isolated one from another. He could not know that actions could be coordinated across vast spaces, among thousands of individuals, in numbers so vast that even if the government read every word of the plan, it could not be stopped.
Those thousands of individuals become a community that can shun those who harm its members.
I have no idea what the future of the Occupy Movement might be, but the images of an important person walking between long rows of silent people was an example that will surely resonate. I hope to see it become a common tactic.
I'm reminded of Glenn Beck's diatribe entitled, "We Surround Them." Paraphrasing an old joke, "What do you mean by 'we.' [other ethnicity] man?"