Police vs. Buddhists

We sat, stood, and walked with firm and stable intention. Sue circled the group wearing an “Ask Me” sign (that's her above, between the meditators and the police), and she distributed a flyer with meditation instructions. After about half an hour of our meditation, a phalanx of bicycle police moved in on us. Some insisted we leave immediately (see Extra). Others were less aggressive and seemed willing to walk around us rather than "sweeping" us away. About fifty of us held our ground and remained still and silent, ignoring the police. A few who happened to be sitting near the more aggressive police were forced to leave. As the rest of us continued to sit, the police loudspeaker kept repeating a message that we were blocking bicycle lanes and interfering with marine traffic (neither of which was true), and we continued to sit. We had planned to sit for an hour, but after about forty-five minutes, our leader ended the meditation with a series of bells and then a final circle of gratitude for each other’s practice. It felt right to end the meditation under our own terms.

As we packed up the tarps and signs, smoke began rising from an area about thirty feet away, where many protesters were. It was impossible to tell whether the smoke was released by police or by protesters, but the smoke made breathing difficult. Sue and I both donned our new face masks and were glad we had them. 

As we walked to the bus to go home, we passed police headquarters and saw a group of young women antifascists who had been arrested and were having their eyes flushed out by police officers. We were struck by the fact that while many of the protesters were male, all the arrestees we saw were female. At home we heard reports from friends that police used rubber bullets and that a 67-year-old woman was hospitalized after being shot by police when they fired rubber bullets into a crowd. One of our friends posted a video of police tackling women antifascists and brutally slamming them to the ground. The young man who voluntarily printed our flyers for us was filming the police later in the day when he was body-slammed on the concrete. He is bruised, scraped, and sore. 

There are reports of violence on the part of fascists in Vancouver, WA, where one of the Alt Right people with a Confederate flag on his car drove that car into a group of antifascists, but the only violence we saw was that of the police. They were armed with military weapons, as they always are. One of the men who meditated with us wrote on Facebook this evening, “I was sitting with the Buddhists, peacefully and silently meditating when the bike cops surrounded us and demanded we leave. The cops were just itching for a fight and instigated all the violence I saw today. Disgusting.”