Harnessing the Power of the Crippled Protester

If you’ve got a hankerin’ to organize a protest march (and who doesn’t these days?), here’s a tip: recruit as many cripples as you can and put them right at the front of the line. This will go a long way toward neutralizing the cops. Trust me on this one. I’ve been to enough protests to know that some cops are terrified of cripples. They’re terrified of the optics of being seen duking it out with a bunch of cripples. I can tell that a group of cops is feeling particularly worried about this when they adopt a strategy of playing a game that I call grab-a-walkie. They move in to arrest the protesters but they walk right past the crippes and grab the nearest walkie to arrest. This is very amusing to watch because the cops act like they’re all proud of themselves because they think they’re the first ones to think up this strategy. But I’ve seen it a million times. I don’t know what the cops are hoping will happen. Maybe they figure that the only way that cripples could be doing something so uncripplelike would be that a bunch of walkies must’ve put us up to it. And maybe if they snatch the walkies away it will render the cripples rudderless and we’ll just go away without them having to arrest us. So the best way to defuse that strategy is for all of the stubborn cripples to remain steadfast in their stubbornness and tell the cops that if they want us to go away they’ll have to haul us away, too. But that doesn’t always work because some cops have such a bad case of the willies when it comes to possibly being seen hauling away cripples that it’s nearly impossible to get them to arrest us. We practically have to set their vehicles on fire before they’ll take notice of us. Therein lies the power of the crippled protester. We can be human shields because our presence often makes cops a lot more reluctant to move in quickly and try to break things up. I suppose I should be dismayed by this. If this was a more just world, cops would be just as unflinching about busting a cripple’s head as they are about bustling anybody else’s head. But they are not and that’s rooted in the type of ignorance that sees all cripples as too fragile to function in the outside world. I shouldn’t be reinforcing this oppressive silliness but I’m willing to do it as long as it’s for a good cause. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI