Old Lady in Combat Boots

When you consider how many images we’re bombarded with every day, it’s amazing that we can remember any of them, but we do. The ones that are burned into my consciousness are mostly old, from my college and early adult years in the tumultuous sixties and seventies, recalled because of the emotional responses they evoked.

One image I can conjure up any time contains a snapshot reproduced round the world. In the photo from 1970, a young woman kneels on the ground next to a prone body. Her mouth is stretched open in a grimace of shock and pain. You can almost hear her scream.

Kent State, 1970

The national guard had just fired into the crowd of college students, killing her friend, and three others. I watched, along with the rest of the United States, in horrible fascination. None of us could believe that guns would be used against students.

Another image in my mental archives is an award-winning photo of the uprising at Tiananmen Square, in China. A single man stands in defiance against malevolent machines poised to crush any dreams of freedom the demonstrators might have nourished.

Lone man opposes tanks

Several images from the Democratic convention in Chicago, in 1968, hang out together in my head: cops beating up old ladies and tossing them roughly into the backs of police vans; John Chancellor freaking out on evening news over the magnitude of the oppression: Dan Rather being punched in the stomach on national TV; and frames from the 1916 film by DW Griffith, Intolerance.

Why would images from that old movie haunt me? Perhaps because I viewed a film made by Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS), in which clips of the convention were juxtaposed with scenes of chaos and decapitation in the movie.

These images resonate still, and repeat themselves endlessly. Watch footage from the Occupy movement. View police on horses, bicycles and foot pushing into lines of protestors, spraying them with pepper, clubbing them senseless with nightsticks and tossing them into police vehicles.

One of these recent images has joined my pantheon of pictures. I discovered it when I clicked on a link to a video filmed in Seattle.  I watched as one woman after another spoke out in outrage against Republican attempts to disenfranchise women.  One of the speakers was Dorli Rainey,  an 84-year-old woman. She calls herself, on her website, Old Lady in Combat Boots. How cool is that?

It turns out that an image of her (pictured above) has swept the internet. In the photo, taken after a non-violent Occupy protest in Seattle, she is dazed and drenched in pepper spray, and held upright by two young men.

In an interview with Keith Olbermann, she explains how she came to be pepper sprayed by people charged with protecting her. Have we learned nothing in all these years?