It’s defining our moral outrage, Slade Sohmer writes, so why not?
Originally appeared at HyperVocal.
What started out as a joke has become an increasingly real proposition: Even though it’s not a “person,” we must now begin to debate whether Pepper Spray should grace TIME’s most discussed cover.
No person, place or thing has come to define the absurdity of 2011 more than the “food product, essentially,” this suddenly ubiquitous lachrymatory agent/chemical weapon.
Pepper spray, essentially, gave birth to the national media’s recognition of the Occupy Wall Street movement when NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna cowardly pepper-sprayed some unwitting young women. Without his depraved indifference to the freedom to assemble and the freedom of speech, the national media, and by extension the nation, might never have begun to discuss income inequality in earnest.
The pepper-spraying incidents then moved west: The notoriously corrupt Tulsa police department doused some eyes while evicting the Occupy protesters in that city, then Seattle police sprayed 84-year-old Dorli Rainey as she checked out the protests there. Portland police continued the Pacific Northwest trend, and the instantly iconic image of a young woman taking it in the face went viral.
And who can forget about the breathtaking nonchalance of Lt. John Pike, who callously pepper sprayed nonviolent protesters on the UC Davis campus? That gave birth to two amazing memes: Pike spraying things and people throughout history, and FOX News’ Megyn Kelly’s speciously defending the tactic byequating it to something you might put on a salad. Mmm, tastes like deceit.
Then came America’s favorite holiday, Black Friday, which saw two such incidents: A Southern California woman used the product to gain some sort of discount shopping advantage, while in Kinston, North Carolina, off-duty officers used pepper spray to make an arrest at a local Walmart.
Now we can add several more incidents, the first at a New York City high school.
A 14-year-old Harlem student blasted her classmates with pepper spray Tuesday, sending eight students to the hospital with minor injuries.
Education officials are investigating the incident, which occurred in an Academy for Social Action classroom around 2:30 p.m.
Eight students who inhaled the noxious chemicals were rushed from the W. 129th St. school to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, Education Department spokeswoman Margie Feinberg said.
Police who responded to the incident issued a summons to the student.
Also, at a protest of an American Legislative Exchange Council meeting in Phoenix:
The protesters for the most part were orderly, but at one point, police used pepper spray to move a group of about half a dozen people who were not clearing an area in front of an entrance.
There’s also been recent reports of pepper spray incidents at Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx, a high school in New Haven, Connecticut, and Vancouver’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Between Black Friday and these latest episodes, it’s clear that civilians have picked up on the trend, one that’s evidently more dangerous and disturbing than planking or Tebowing. In our monkey-see, monkey-do culture, a world filled with copycats, it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last of such incidents.
This year is not without its quality candidates: Clear cases could be made for Occupy Wall Street (and TIME could get cheeky with “The 99%” or “The 1%”), Anonymous, Steve Jobs, Casey Anthony, Arab Spring protesters, Herman Cain, The Fukushima 50, Gabby Giffords and others.
But has anything come to define our collective moral outrage and societal decay quite like pepper spray has in 2011? Pepper spray, in fact, has acted as the mirror held up to our faces, even more so than Occupy Wall Street. Is this the era in which we live now? Have our local (and campus!) police departments become so militarized and apathetically insensitive as to treat nonviolent protesters like lab rats? Have some citizens taken it upon themselves to use it as a weapon in everyday life?
The employment of this chemical weapon has gotten so out of hand that the expert who helped the FBI develop it in the 1980s and set the guidelines for its use by police, Kamran Loghman, says he’s “shocked” and “bewildered” by what he’s seen lately.
Think about the iconic moments of the year: Osama bin Laden’s killing, the Arab Spring revolutions, the Japanese tsunami and nuclear scare, some high-profile weather-related tragedies. Now think about the iconic *images* of the year. Perhaps it’s because they’re more recent, but doesn’t your brain go to UC Davis, an elderly lady in Seattle, a Walmart shopper and the madness of it all?
Here’s your cover right here:
Or maybe this one:
If TIME can give a lifetime achievement award to Mark Zuckerberg for his role in developing the social network, surely they can honor pepper spray, which is clawing at our social fabric.
Originally appeared at HyperVocal.
Slade Sohmer is co-founder and editor-in-chief of HyperVocal. Tweet him @hypervocal.
—Photos AP
How about physically preventing the police from leaving an area peacefully? Does that count as moral decay too? Or are the police expected to let protesters who vastly outnumber them to control their freedom of movement?
I don’t understand the whole “moral decay” argument, because it assumes that there was a point where riot police were nice to people and everyone was able to protest peacefully without incident. I’m having trouble locating moments in American history where peaceful demonstrations were never met with excessive force. It’s morally wrong, but it’s not necessarily all that new. If it’s a process decay, it’s been rotting for centuries or millennia. Spraying old ladies with pepper spray is reprehensible, but depressingly not all that new in the grand scheme of history. Do you think the old lady suffragettes in the… Read more »
Remember that TIME magazine chooses people for “Person of the Year” who are influential, not because they are “good people” or heroes that we’re supposed to emulate. It’s not unheard of for the magazine to choose a reprehensible person to be Person of the Year. Former “TIME Man of the Year” honorees include Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. It’s about effects, not about goodness.
How hard is it to understand that if you don’t listen to them, you get pepper sprayed ?
The members of the tulsa movement ? they refuse to leave the park and where they are located.
The protest at the resort ? the group was trying to push through the police line.
The protesters on the UC Davis campus ? they refuse to leave and lock themselves together by the arms.
How hard is it to understand that when you pepper-spray peaceful protestors in America, you get condemned and despised–and rightly so?
How yes because that’s what police should care about, the public approving everything they do.
It doesn’t matter if it’s peaceful, you’re still breaking the law.
Weren’t they pepper sprayed because violent protesters were arrested, and these people were blocking the police from being able to take these arrested people or something? I’ve heard so many stories about this particular picture that I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Pepper spraying has gone from isolated necessary police or military tactic, to isolated unnecessary and cruel police tactic, to widespread unnecessary and cruel police tactic, to global internet meme, to civilian shopping tactic, to ubiquitous media fodder. It is not often that you see what amounts to insanity so dramatically sweep the country and affect the national consciousness, or so painfully embarrass the United States of America in front of the world. It fully deserves to be Times’ “Person of the Year.” Nothing could fill me with greater shame, and that’s as it should be in 2011.
I love the righteous indignation in this article – it’s about time people starting getting angry and doing something about the mass insanity that is currently dubbed “business as usual”.
Great idea! You go get angry, I’ll keep working on my career and finish my graduate degree. We’ll see who’s better off in 10 years time. What’s the average salary for “revolutionaries” again?
Oh yeah, that’s right – I have two university degrees and work full time. What are the assumptions of sheeple again?
I should mention saving up money to go back to school to get another degree. Whatever work we do we can do consciously – I used to be a geologist working in the oil & gas and mining sectors at one time – in ten years time perhaps by your definition I’d be “better off” and meanwhile probably sustaining ulcers and other health problems. But hey, it’s your call as far as what you want to consider “better off” for humanity. The only problem is that our species is pretty much both smart and stupid enough to off ourselves if… Read more »