Jeff Koopersmith on the long, ugly lead-up to that horrific gassing of college students of Friday in Davis, California.

I was in college, it seems, a hundred years ago.

My sentence at undergraduate school stretched from just after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, through the Black Panther era, and on toward the ending of the Vietnam War.

While I supported my peers – mostly middle class kids from 17 to 24 years old – I got involved in protest only after Jeff Miller,a hometown boy from our small Long Island hamlet, was assassinated by the National Guard at Kent State University.

For me, that day was bursting not only with heartbreak, but with a gut-gathering call to end what seemed like a creeping Gestapo cloud attempting to smother us, not so gently, toward Hell.

It was then that I became a campaigner for political truth – not a liberal or a conservative. In those days conservatives were defined by harmless miserly jokes and their penchant to fight first and ask questions later.

Jack Kennedy was about to destroy this march toward a new brand of bigoted oppression when he was gunned down at Dealey Plaza in an appropriate locale: Texas, USA.

Make no mistake. Kennedy had already been made more cautious after his friendlier New York City brush with Fidel Castro and later learned the foulest lesson: even good men could play with the Devil when America turned her back on competing societies by labeling anyone with a social conscience a “commie”.

Castro made a blunder which – to this day – has cost Cubans a great deal of freedom and many periods of grief. Yet as Cuba’s door now stands ajar it seems ironic to take a peek and notice that they seem happier than one might expect while still driving around in circa 1950s cars glued together with love, pride, and hand-forged replacement parts while celebrating their national culture with unbridled glee.

Go figure.

President Johnson quickly recognized that American youth – white or minority – would destroy the nation’s domestic markets unless more attention was paid to our Constitution, especially those portions relating to equal protection under the law. By 1966 it foolishly seemed to me that the worst was over for American blacks. It wasn’t.

While institutional discrimination was denied its day, social racism was alive, well, and growing sub rosa until race riots which continued sporadically around the nation culminated in Los Angeles in 1992. It was seemingly the last gasp of mass black and poor riot-protest, and our first televised-live notification that there was no room for organized dissent in America.

Once the country was rid of Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet and Bush the Elder, we saw Bill Clinton keep everything fairly quiet and temporarily exchanged hatred for others with laughter at his Don Juanesque peccadilloes and the folly of those men and woman deluded enough to believe that his sex life would destroy his career.

Most of those idiots are dead, dying, or forgotten, yet the handful that remain or hide in the cultural shadows are grasping and gasping with delight at the new Police State they have created. This time they celebrate the beating, gassing, and pepper-spraying our own children and grandchildren who dare to question the unbridled greed of western business, nearly two generations after President Eisenhower warned us that corporate war makers were raising their ugly heads and grasping for more and more power with each passing day.

America fights on two fronts:
• against our children and the poor, and;
• against some vague enemy labeled “Islamic Terrorists” who are in fact fed-up poor people in a world controlled by, yes, the 1%, be it the al-Sauds, the al-Assads, or the al-Kochs.

American college kids – individuals who are entering young adulthood – are now labeled “socialists” and “communists” trying to destroy “our” world-wide marketplace.

The reality, of course, is that we no longer have one; it is the “communists” – who long ago dumped their volumes of Marx and Little Red Book of Chairman Mao to make shelf space for their subscriptions to The Economist, Harvard Business Review, and FT – and robust socialist nations that have inherited “our” earth.

Irony makes some smile.

But not me.

I knew this past Friday was coming.

Friday afternoon, at one University of California campus, this is what happened – and what the world witnessed thanks to the blossoming of social networks and instant media on the Internet:

A policeman who brought with him a family-size pepper spray machine first waved it at the crowd as Mohammed Ali might shake his gloved hands to spectators, then aimed.

And this:

The policeman, calm as a fellow watering his begonias, smothers the kids - linked arm and arm to stop his progress and their terror– spraying a yellow terrible burning cocktail into their eyes.

And this:

Our policeman went ‘right down the line’ giving each of them a great big dose of American heroism from what has become an unstoppable American army of soldier-crime squads who are just now training to use drones on this same youngness if they don’t “learn” that public protests are not allowed in the United States any longer if they bother someone – anyone at all – AND as long as they work well for what my generation called “The Man.”

And this:

Bystanders, too frightened to intervene, instead hugging their chests and their cameras to stand witness to this new American dismay.

If you have satellite television or a computer you can watch Russia Today and CCTV9, Al Jazeera English or Arabic, and BBC World, and see them replaying these scenes over and over again.

From London to Beijing, and from New York to San Francisco, people with even half a brain are silently but impressively telling America, “I told you so”, then shrugging and walking away, chuckling.

Believe me.

Here is the entire video of UC Davis students being pepper-sprayed by a blackshirt riot cop: