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kalikshama -> RE: Oakland PD puts ANOTHER vet into the ICU... (11/5/2011 7:00:05 AM)
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http://www.eurasiareview.com/04112011-iraq-veteran-scott-olsen-beaten-by-oakland-police-becomes-symbol-of-occupy-movement-oped/
In seeking to understand who Scott Olsen is, Reuters conducted interviews with his “friends, relatives and childhood acquaintances,” which can only reinforce his significance as a symbol for the movement — an ex-military counterpart to the many college-educated and unemployed young people who are also key to the movement’s powerful claims that Western societies, as they are currently configured, have lost touch with many of their own people, and are slaves of Wall Street and corporate interests. As Reuters described it, Olsen is someone “whose personal journey reflects many of the social dynamics that have given rise to the Occupy movement.”
Born and raised in Onalaska, Wisconsin, Olsen “didn’t really want to go to college,” according to Deanna Wolf, the owner of a sandwich shop where he worked for three years, and where his co-workers identified him as “a quiet kid who loved skateboarding, computer games and classic rock, and had a quirky sense of humor.” Wolf added, “He just didn’t think it was the right choice for him,” and explained that he was “drawn to the military” instead, because it apparently “offered him the opportunity to get paid to ‘do what he enjoyed,’ which was playing with computers.”
He served two tours of duty in Iraq, where he worked as a technician rather than being engaged directly in combat, but, as Reuters explained, “he soured on military life,” establishing a short-lived website, “I hate the Marine Corps,” which “served as a forum for disgruntled servicemen.”
Around two years ago, he received an “administrative discharge” from the military, and, although the exact reasons for this are unclear, it is obvious that, after his discharge, Olsen found himself becoming first of all “a critic of America’s wars,” and then an “anti-establishment activist,” not because of any “specific searing experience in Iraq, but rather from a more subtle evolution in the way he saw the world.”
Keith Shannon, who served with Olsen in the Marines, told Reuters, “He started a bit before he got out [but] he got really into it right after he got out.” Deanna Wolf agreed. “When he came back, he had a different perspective,” she said. “He seemed to be very passionate about everything. I guess having seen what he saw it had just given him another perspective. I just saw a change. He had been a funny kid, with a witty sense of humor. He was more serious.”
After he left the military, Olsen worked for a while as a computer network administrator in Illinois, where he “became increasingly involved in the peace movement, and his political activism deepened.” In a Twitter message in March 2010, he wrote, “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people” — a message that is central to the “Occupy” movement.
Olsen’s uncle told Reuters that, after attending a few peace group meetings in Chicago, he joined the hugely influential protests in Madison, Wisconsin in February, when protestors against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s disgraceful proposal to remove collective bargaining rights from public sector unions suddenly discovered that, inspired by the people’s uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, there was a widespread interest in collective resistance to injustice — whether it was from politicians, bankers or corporations, as I noted in articles at the time (see here, here and here).
He then moved to San Francisco and took up a a job at a software company, while also maintaining his interest in activism, and those who met him at this time noted that he “did not seem to suffer from the kinds of emotional and psychiatric problems that afflict many veterans.” Aaron Hinde, an Army veteran and friend of Olsen’s at Iraq Veterans Against the War, “He just showed up at one of our monthly meetings. It was a real surprise to have a new face just walk in. He just sat down and introduced himself.”
Emily Yates, a musician and another Army veteran, who met Olsen when “he came to her first concert at a neighborhood bar,” said that he helped her “broadcast her show live on the Internet,” and explained, “It’s the fact he has a good job, he can maintain close relationships, which a lot of vets have trouble doing. That’s a litmus test. If he’s dealing with stuff, he’s dealing with it in a healthy way.”
Most recently, when “Occupy Wall Street” began, soon spreading to other cities, Olsen started camping out with protesters in San Francisco, while traveling to work in the daytime, and when police attacked activists in Oakland on October 25, he and other veterans decided to join the Oakland protesters as they sought to regain access to the plaza in which they had been camping. Matt Howard, a friend and former Marine, who is now a student at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “They came out to show support for the occupiers and protesters,” but Olsen, of course, ended up hospitalized, along the way becoming a symbol for the “Occupy” movement as a whole. As Reuters explained, with the attack on Scott Olsen, “Police brutality and the plight of veterans have joined joblessness and income inequality as key issues for many in the movement.”
Reuters also noted that some Conservative bloggers “have called Olsen a traitor, citing his anti-Marine website and his online support for WikiLeaks [and] Bradley Manning,” the former intelligence analyst in Iraq who is accused of providing WikILeaks with the documents — the Afghan and Iraqi war logs, the diplomatic cables and the Guantánamo files — that it has been releasing since last year. However, his friends from Onalaska were not convinced.
Christy De Ruyter, who worked with him at the sandwich shop, and who said she cried when she saw the video of him after he was injured, said, “I was not surprised that he was at a protest, speaking up. Scott had gotten older, he’d grown up and gotten a voice. He wasn’t a completely different person when he came back. He’d just seen a lot things. And I was proud of him, standing up for something he believed in.”
She is not the only one. And I do hope that Scott Olsen recovers fully, so that we can hear more about his beliefs — and his hopes for a better world.
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