Fisher’s
a bookstore clerk, recovering cancer patient, anti-Bush activist and
now another largely unsung poster child for our government’s gleeful
willingness to step all over some of the rights that we’re always
fighting so hard to protect.
You see, Fisher was out one
night hanging anti-Bush posters in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, when two
police officers confronted her, with one supposedly telling her at one
point ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you,’ according to Fisher and an
independent media account.
According to her
statements, as reported by the Cleveland Indy Media Center’s Eric
Resnick, who, like Fisher, is a member of the peace organization the
World Can’t Wait Cleveland, Fisher’s poster-hanging activities were a
call for people to ‘drown out’ the president’s remarks during the State
of the Union address on Jan. 28.
A passing officer told
Fisher that she would be fined $100 if she didn’t take down the sign,
Resnick reported. But before Fisher could take down the sign as
instructed, two officers were asking her for identification and then
were literally on top of her on the ground. As Fisher told Resnick, one
of the officers ground his knee into her back and her face into the
sidewalk.
Fisher apparently only inflamed the officers further by saying, ‘As citizens we have the responsibility to stop the crimes of
the
Bush regime,’ because, according to Fisher’s own statements following
the incident, she was told, ‘I am sick of this anti-Bush shit,’ and
‘You are definitely going to the psych ward,’ by one of the officers.
After she was beaten, the officers
took
Fisher to a hospital where doctors performed psychological testing
against her will. All the while, police refused to allow her to make
phone calls and threatened her friends with arrest and similar
treatment when they finally found Fisher and demanded to see her.
During
her trial, the judge threw out all of Fisher’s witnesses, berated her
directly from the bench for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt to court and
refused to hear evidence that this woman had been beaten by the police,
and not the other way around, as the officers, Daniel Downey and Mike
Frinzl, claimed.
Last month Fisher was sentenced to two
months in the county lockup and two years of probation for being such a
violent troublemaker. Read Fisher’s own account of events and Resnick’s story. For a mainstream media account of Fisher’s day in court by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, check out www.cleveland.com.
Now,
it doesn’t matter if you love or hate George Bush, because if you care
about the state of our country, and you’re reading this, you’re
probably an American, and Americans are guaranteed the right to express
themselves and their opinions without fear of reprisal or violence.
No
matter how you voted, no one wants the police to be out beating up a
54-year-old woman because she voted differently than local law
enforcement officials.
When the government becomes willing to
tell its citizens what to believe, what to do and how to behave and
think, and then demonstrates no apparent problem with using violence to
silence dissent ( especially against an aging, white-haired,
bespectacled anti-war demonstrator battling cancer ( we are no longer
living in a great, free nation but a place where speech is openly
repressed, dissent is cowed with impunity and fear of our government is
commonplace.
That’s a far cry from the land of the free and the home of the brave, isn’t it?