They're rising up again.

(Tina Fineberg/AP Photo)

I have a lot of respect for people who take to the streets for their beliefs.

Chicago, 1968

I remember reading about the unrest in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in August of 1968, when 10,000 anti-war demonstrators were roughed up by 23,000 thugs police and National Guardsmen working for Chicago’s dictatorial mayor, Richard J. Daley, who thought denying people permits to protest Vietnam legally would render them impotent. The country was still reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy weeks before and there was a lot of upheaval in Chi-town that weekend.

HBO later showed an interesting program on the “Chicago Eight” – Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale – who were arrested and brought before Judge Julius Hoffman on “conspiracy” and” inciting a riot” charges. Hoffman sentenced the protesters to unbelievable prison terms but the excessive punishments were reversed on appeal.

I also remember watching The Battle in Seattle, a film based on the anti-globalization riots that took place in that city in late November of 1999 during a World Trade Organization conference when at least 40,000 activists took to the streets to protest nonviolently. The New York Times originally reported that protesters threw Molotov cocktails at the police. The Gray Lady corrected itself two days later, stating that protests were in fact peaceful and nonviolent, but the perception of damn, dirty hippies throwing trash cans through plate glass windows and overturning cars remained in many people’s minds.

It’s happening again. Something’s going down in the Big Apple as I write this but you wouldn’t know it unless you were looking real hard for media coverage. Hundreds began gathering in New York’s Financial District on September 17 to “take the bull by the horns” and “restore democracy in America.” According to the “Occupy Wall Street” website, what’s happening is a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the one percent.”

Posts on the website compare the group’s efforts to those used in pro-democracy movements across the Middle East, dubbed the “Arab Spring.” This being the age of cell phone video cameras, one can also view clips of police being overly aggressive with protesters, including one where peaceful female protesters are rounded up in an orange-colored mesh pen by police and sprayed with mace without provocation.

Police are also arresting activists without cause – on silly charges such as “blocking vehicular or pedestrian traffic” – and using tear gas and orange netting as if their lives depend on it. (They clearly don’t.) Activists insist the excessive force has only strengthened the resolve of the protesters and helped to increase their numbers.

My friend and fellow writer Patrick M. Arthur, whose blog is here, is there now. He just wrote a piece entitled, “Occupation We Can Believe In” that explains what’s happening in the Financial District as follows:

What the Occupy movement is actually working to achieve is a principled state of human solidarity, an evolved Democracy for a new millennium of enlightened thought, an alternative social haven where no one must live in fear of the imminent corporate black hole suddenly consuming everything they have left.

I can dig that.

Apparently the corporate media’s modus operandi is to discredit, mischaracterize or squelch coverage of legitimate, nonviolent protests. Apparently Chaz Bono's dancing skills and Ben & Jerry’s latest ice cream flavor are more newsworthy than people literally fighting injustice in the streets of America.

And apparently, and fortunately, the oppressed always rise up against the oppressors anyway.