Support the Police, Beat Yourself Up – FUNNY POLITICAL BUTTON

Support the Police Beat Yourself Up – FUNNY POLITICAL BUTTON

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This is a great political design for the Occupy Wall Street movement.  This is another great design that fits Top Pun’s goal to create serious, funny, and seriously funny designs.

This political design is serious because police brutality is a serious reality.  Police officers are trained and work in an environment where criminality and brute force are concentrated.  Naturally, we would expect that police officers would be trained to deal with violent criminals.  This may be the case, although police brutality is certainly not a rare occurrence in the United States.  Of course, in nonviolent social movements like the occupy movement, the police are confronted with an unusual situation that they are not necessarily particularly well-trained to deal with, and that is very much outside their normal culture.  First, they are often faced with large numbers, which is a little unusual considering that most of the criminal encounters they have are with individuals or very small numbers of people.  Second, though perhaps the most obvious for those of us in the movement, is that the persons they encounter are committed to nonviolence, and often trained in nonviolence.  Given the large numbers, police often overreact with overwhelming physical force.  Thus, police often come with the expectation and equipment for riot control.  This can be an inviting setting for police to overreact to nonviolent demonstrators.  Police may not be well prepared for dealing with political action, direct democracy, and civil disobedience.  Hopefully, they will get the chance to become a lot more experienced in the near future as the occupy movement grows worldwide.

This design is funny because it plays with the idea that nonviolent demonstrators are actually committed to helping society.  While this may involve civil disobedience, civil disobedience is rooted in the commitment of nonviolence, transparency, and taking personal responsibility for one’s actions, meaning accepting the consequences for violating a law that gets in the way of justice.  Actually, this typically involves respecting the police for the role they play in civil order. One can actually support the police while confronting an even opposing that which they see as their job to protect. Of course, asking or expecting a nonviolent demonstrators to beat themselves up is an absurd proposition — that’s why it’s funny, seriously funny!  I think we should leave the beating up of demonstrators to the police.