Pepper spray for your convenience

[phantom power]

To discussing the woman-pepper-spraying-a-Wal-Mart issue. On social networks and on blogs, I saw most people react to this story with knee-jerk anti-materialism with a side dose of bemusement that anyone would be lured into Wal-Mart with the promise of really low prices on electronic doo-dads and the latest kid's toy. At least a few did try to be better than that, by offering consumer education information, by pointing out that the bargain goods are sold out immediately and the whole point is to lure you in so you buy something else in order to justify the time and hassle of shopping. But I was surprised to read not one blog draw a parallel between this woman's behavior and the dramatic upswing in police using pepper spray and taser guns as weapons to control and subdue (instead of, say, fight crime). Even at Hullabaloo, where Digby has spent years blogging about incidents where the police have pepper sprayed and tasered innocent people for everything from having inconvenient seizures to being school children who graffiti desks focused mainly on the consumerism when addressing the incident, and not on what I think is the most fascinating aspect, which is the normalization of casual torture of people for not bending immediately to your most childish will in our society.

Maybe it's not obvious because until now, most of the people wielding pepper spray on crowds have been cops? Maybe it's because many people haven't really been paying attention to the fact that the OWS crack-down is an outgrowth of the increasing militarization of the police (including pepper spraying for jay-walking)? Who knows why people haven't figured this out. What I do know is that by becoming accustomed to the idea that outsized force is acceptable for the police to get their way, we opened up the door for ordinary citizens to believe that they get to be violent to people who irritate them by being rude, being strange, or, in the case of the pepper-sprayed Wal-Mart, having the nerve to get to the limited bargain good before the woman wielding the pepper spray could get there.

I believe that the biggest problem with Black Friday is not people's desire to have goods at cheap prices (though god knows a more economically just society would de-escalate the situation as more people's time would be worth more than getting up at 3AM to buy a toy), but that we allow our corporate gods to play such an obvious con on the public. A little legislation to rein it in---for instance, by outlawing sales that last only a few hours and requiring any store advertising one to have a salesperson specifically hand out rain checks to anyone who got there after they sold out----could go a long way. But even if the excesses of Black Friday were curtailed, I think the pepper spraying incident is a harbinger of what has become of this country. One day it's a person of color caught jay-walking. Then it's protesters sitting peacefully at UC Davis. Then it's a crowd of bargain-hungry shoppers on Black Friday. What next? Are we all in danger of being doused with pepper spray for having the nerve to be in line in front of someone at the coffee shop? Are we going to see someone whip out the pepper spray on a retail worker who they want to move faster? The notion that inconvenience can be met with physical violence, as long as it's packaged in a neat weapon that keeps your hands clean like pepper spray, has been introduced to our society. And this incident at Wal-Mart suggests it's going viral.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/pepper_spray_for_your_convenience

[lbrtbell]

1. Most pepper spray owners are responsible

Much like guns, it's the crazies who get all the attention.

[phantom power]

2. No doubt, but there seems to be an uptick(*) in The Crazy, which raises the question of why?

(*) And I suppose one could question the premise, which would be a separate discussion.

[customerserviceguy]

3. It's a lot easier to get pepper spray

than it is a gun. It's use in anti-rape training has legitimized it as an everyday weapon, much the way the six-shooter was on the Arizona frontier a century or so ago.

[Union Scribe]

4. When people see cops, the supposed models of societal conduct,

using a chemical weapon like it's no bigger a deal than a stern word, then people feel much more free to casually use it too. Then you've got the media calling it a food product, so people don't think of the potential harm they might cause.