Dead Prez Valentine's Day Riot @ Evergreen State College

Primary articles and writings for reference:

• Evergreen State College divided after riot.
• Peter Bohmer: Reflections on the Dead Prez Concert and Events After Concert.

(TESC is an acronym for The Evergreen State College.)

This is an open letter reply to Peter Bohmer referencing his writing Reflections on the Dead Prez Concert and Events After Concert, and using the Seattle Times news article Evergreen State College divided after riot as my main source of information.

Peter Bohmer,

I am a TESC alumni, graduated with a Bachelor of Science in August 2003. Between September 2000 and June 2003 I was a resident of the TESC dorms. I was politically engaged on campus, putting up posters for a Capitol fountain gathering/rally reacting to Bush's gaining of the White House with a suspicious vote count, and also was in the TESC delegation at the NW student's anti-war conference in January 2002. I give all this info to allow for some credence in what follows.

My opinion is, TESC needs police. The extreme and absolute way in which the students ( from the stage: "*Expletive* the police!") and yourself have labelled police activity on campus is the problem.

Yes, I am sure somewhere in America, likely on a Louisiana highway or West Texas town, a police officer is harassing a good and upstanding member of the community. This is horrible and we need colleges that are incubators of dissent, or better yet, the legal acumen needed to crush that kind of police abuse. Unfortunately, voices like yours, and the resonating student sentiment, want an easy fight where the war is not taking place, you want it conveniently on your own campus and away from where the danger and evil truly lives.

Your "Reflections..." commits a few errors. You set up the hierarchical structure of campus governance as the source of its illegitimacy, making the campus police an easy subsequent illegitimacy. You then use a softer looking form of hierarchy, your own cult of personality, in the request that students and faculty keep this entire issue in-house and stay mute to police investigation. You even admit that there are students and faculty that, of their own volition, want to talk or cooperate with the police ("Let us also oppose the collaboration of the Evergreen administration and some students and staff with police agencies"). My god Peter, thanks for showing us where, when and how abuse of power, the dark side of solidarity in secret societies, and the like take place in flat-hierarchy movements. Class A work there, buddy.

The other error in "Reflections..." is the distortions that occur near its closing statements. Wars, growing militarization, police. It is unfortunate the montage you present as an ultimate justification mixes up good guys and bad guys. The police officers in Olympia, and especially on TESC duty, probably hold extremely progressive world views. I've sat next to the Sheriff of Thurston County and had email exchanges with the TESC police officer while I lived there. Nice people judging by everything I saw. I don't believe they are causing any of the very real problems in our world.

This brings me to a subtle analogy on yours and a massive amount the TESC student body's values. I believe the police are recipients of stigma much like the untouchable class in India. That class in India has several middle class occupations that receive the stigma. It is hardly an analogy, but more like a direct truth that faculty such as yourself, and maybe a majority of students, see the police as an untouchable class. These police officers can commit no good act, nor offer a dialogue that assures us of their progressive values, that would wipe away the irrational and eternal hate many on the TESC campus have for them.

This dovetails back to us needing campuses that are incubators for positive change in our society. The incubation at TESC is becoming more renowned for Earth Liberation Front cells and cop hating, not a real return on our money or our faith.

Moving away from the murky world of values and intent, to immediate pragmatics in an imperfect world. Once during my residence on campus I was one of only five or so students who witnessed this event: a naked student, possibly high on something, had jumped on a moving car and bashed his head in the windshield. I saw him walking, naked, along the soccer field road. The police came up behind him, asked him to stop, he didn't respond, and they wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away without a scratch from their wrestling that I could see. This was a real incident, not conjecture. What would a police-less campus have done? I venture to guess, too little or too much.

Yearly the US has one or more shootings on a campus resulting in many people shot dead. Here is where your polemics meet a stark dose of reality: A guman is killing 5 people per minute on the TESC campus. What then, cop haters with no guns? What then?

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: An Intentional Community

Our Intentional Community on the outskirts of The Dalles, Oregon.

Seven years ago, in 2008, twelve of us were hired as data center technicians at the world's largest and most important server farm, the Google Data Center in The Dalles Oregon. (see the original job posting we answered here). We decided to create an intentional community to help share child care, operate a fish catching boat, and share the cost of home based server and telecom equipment.

Recently higher fuel and food prices have been a challenge. Alongside economic hardships the nation-state has collapsed in its ability to provide services, and anarchy is on the rise. Our commune has grown to 37 people total, and we decided to put more intentional in our community.

With some under the table money from one of the town's larger data centers, we began to outfit our intentional community designed for warring and trading (Viking means "warring and trading"). We decided warring and trading is fundamentally an informational economy, so our protection of the Google Data Center and running our home telecom fit perfectly well with 21st century viking.

Our vehicular arsenal includes an old bio-diesel Unimog, seen in the photo transporting one of our 10 cargobikes, and an assortment of diesel motorbikes. We have a varying amount of junk off-road four-wheelers we recast as drones with self-detonation or fire-spreading as their main mission. We finished off the dorms ( full of anti-technology students destined be powerful bureaucrats working for peaceful homeostasis ) at Reed and Evergreen State driving these drones with mouse/keyboard from this desk.

While we harvest protein from the Columbia River, we need vegetables and other food stuffs. The Northwest abounds in pacifist, luddite, vegan intentional communities, and we have little resistance taking food from these people. We abide by the rule of any good tribute system, and allow them enough sustenance to live on to grow us more food. These communities are off-grid anyway, so essentially no longer equals or constituents in the informational economy. We occasionally get representatives of European human rights organizations staying in town and asking about our activities. There are no pure humans working in town, only bio-robot hybrids strongly allied with our ethics. The Old World humans are easily contained.

In our early years, before the collapse of the nation-state, we read this and this for inspiration. Of course the ultimate inspiration is always the Google cloud infrastructure.

Thanks to Antioch University in Seattle for inspiring this meme.