Hey there Steemians!
Last night I witnessed a perfect example of Fascist America.
A woman was arrested at the library for sitting with her eyes closed. I was blown away. She arrived and sat in a big comfy chair just across from where I was working on a post for Steemit.
After a few short moments of sitting there the library security guard arrived and told her she couldn’t sleep there. She was not sleeping. She had sat and shut here eyes, but she definitely wasn’t sleeping. It took only a couple of minutes for the librarian to come over and harass her as well. I believe at this point they had been threatening her with arrest. So she knew that the police would be called.
Imagine for a minute that the library was nearly empty, there was no line of little old ladies waiting to sit down in the comfy chair.
Also imagine that she was just sitting there. It’s not like she had been sleeping or snoring or engaging in any form of disruptive behavior. She was just sitting with her eyes closed.
We now live in a country where the act of sitting with your eyes closed draws the attention of private security guards. People will call the police if you refuse to move when you are warned about the rules around behavior in the library. Again she wasn’t being disruptive or harmful to the peace in the library, she wasn’t sleeping.
The point is that poverty stricken people don’t have safe places to be.
The library is considered public property, but only so long as you obey their code of conduct. However that code of conduct is not equally enforced. The librarians and security guards are biased against the poor and homeless. They consistently discriminate against the underserved class of society. Even though the library is considered public property, it is reserved for the people who have wealth and influence. The poor are regularly excluded from public places based on the bias of people who are put in place to lock out the undesirable portions of society.
Elderly, children, and people who are generally tired should have safe spaces to gather their calm. The fact that sitting with your eyes closed is enough cause to exile a person from the library is a sad statement about the type of society we live in. The public’s spaces are policed by people who want to prevent “eye sores” from cluttering up the place. They use threats and intimidation to make people shuffle on. Again the woman wasn’t being disruptive or in anyway harming the calm of the library. She definitely wasn’t sleeping.
It turns out she is a lawyer and graduate from Oregon State University.
She is actually a respectable member of society with an advanced degree. She is the type of person the security guard typically protects the library for, not from. Because she was carrying a backpack and appeared to be homeless she was singled out and arrested. The case goes to court in the beginning of June.
Thanks for reading this far!
If you enjoyed this post you may like one of the other blogs I have written.
You can find them here, or here, or here.
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