Maude C. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Ohio–
The machines of capital are reloading, and the necessity of street medic training is on the rise to protect the oppressed from the oppressors. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the armed wing of a deportation apparatus that serves profit, is set to spend $50 million on a grotesque arsenal of chemical grenades, CS (chlorobenzalmalononitrile) and OC (oleoresin capsicum) foggers, ferret rounds, and rubber-scatter projectiles. 123 distinct ways to maim; a quarter of a million canisters; 13,000 distraction devices that scream at 175 decibels, louder than a jet engine, hot enough to kill hearing tissue.
“Less lethal” weaponry is state-managed injury, calibrated to break bodies without always stopping hearts, though, as we have seen from Portland to Los Angeles, sometimes it stops those, too. A jaw wired shut. An eye gone dark forever. A uterus cramping and bleeding from chemical exposure long after the protest ends. Such are the fruits of “less lethal” weapons.
This is not an aberration. It is the logical conclusion of a system that treats human beings, especially the unemployed, the homeless, the migrant, the protester, as disposable obstacles to capital accumulation. The police, in all its branded forms (CBP, ICE, DHS), is the enforcement arm of private property under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
“Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.”
V. I. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” 1918.
When the rich feel the ground shake, when workers strike, when the oppressed refuse to vanish, the state does not negotiate. It fogs entire neighborhoods with tear gas. It buys ferret rounds designed to punch through walls, and through bodies, without a second thought.
This is where we come in as street medics, as volunteers with a stop the bleed kit, and as concerned community members ready to step up and fill in the gaps.
Street medics have been trained to pack bullet wounds, cinch combat action tourniquets, and apply chest seals, not in a hospital or in a sterile classroom with mannequins and fluorescent lights, but in the heat of the moment where we are needed. We learned on our knees, hands buried in synthetic tissue, out of necessity. We learned to triage mass casualties by touch and instinct, who gets dragged to the transport van, and who cannot be saved.
We are there for the undocumented worker who cannot walk into an emergency room because the nurse will ask for ID and an ICE agent will be waiting at the discharge door. We are there for the unsheltered neighbor whose infected wound no doctor will examine because they assume addiction instead of agony. We are there for the protester shot in the face with a sponge round, like Kaden Rummler, who lost his left eye in Portland, who knows that if an ambulance arrives, he will be arrested before he is treated.
There have been street medics who camped for weeks at Standing Rock, treating tear-gas inhalation and rubber-buckle fractures under prairie stars. Medics who worked the southern border, not to patrol it, but to provide hydration and wound care to migrants abandoned in the desert by the very agency now buying twelve thousand ferret rounds. Medics who visit encampments every week, treating trench foot and abscesses and withdrawal, because the system’s answer to poverty is to criminalize it and make arrests for free prison labor.
Street medics do this without $50 million. We do it with donated gauze, expired saline, and our own exhausted, trembling hands. We do it because we have no trust in the institutions who claim to protect and serve: we only trust each other.
The proletariat will liberate itself. The state will not send help, only more rounds. The state will purchase 242,000 grenades and call them “specialty munitions” as if they are collectible coins instead of instruments of trauma.
They reload their arsenal. We restock our gauze. We build community networks. Until the gaps are closed. Until the arsenals are melted down. Until there are no more wounds to pack on a street corner because there are no more cops to fire the rounds.
“The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.”
William Z. Foster, “Toward Soviet America,” 1932.
So I ask you, comrades, will we rise in opposition? Will we blockade, document, treat, and testify until their arsenal is answered by our collective refusal? Or will we let them fog the streets while we patch the wounds in silence, over and over, until we run out of gauze or hope?
They have chosen their weapons. What will we choose as ours?