© MotherboardThe banner and atrium in question via Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance.
It's understandable that, as the location of one of the worst act of terrorism in American history, Oklahoma would have strict laws against even threatening a terrorist attack. It's just hard to understand how glitter falling from a
Hunger Games-themed banner as it unfurls looks anything like terrorism.
Last Friday morning, a group of protestors from
Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and Cross Timbers Earth First! entered the 50-story Devon Tower in downtown Oklahoma City. They were there to protest the building's namesake, Devon, an energy company that is involved in fracking for oil and natural gas in both the United States and Canada, and their CEO sits on the board of directors at TransCanada.
Two protestors locked themselves in a revolving front door using a bike lock and two others went to the second floor and, from a balcony, unfurled two banners: one in support of indigenous activists protesting energy extraction from their land in Canada and another that had the
Hunger Games Mockingjay emblem and the phrase "The odds are never in our favor."
As the banner unfurled, glitter - referred to by the police as a "black substance" - fell from it onto the ground. One of the activists, Eric Whalen,
told KWTV 9 that the "black substance" in question was "simply glitter to make for good pictures and video and to make it pretty."
A spokesman for GPTSR said that a janitor came out and swept it up, while building security asked the protestors to leave, which they did, with the exception of the two who were locked in a revolving door. The fire department had to come to get them out. All in all, pretty normal sounding end of a protest, complete with some cuffing and trips to the police station.
Comment: Gaza has steadily devolved into an open air extermination camp, not simply an open air prison, due to ever-worsening conditions being imposed via the illegal, brutal Israeli military occupation and blockade (clearly in violation of international law), destruction of most of the smuggling tunnels, lack of basic necessities like clean water, essential medicines and food, combined with ongoing fuel shortages and daily power outages currently at 18 hours per day. Gaza is ripe for an epidemic as filthy disease-causing conditions remain unresolved. Sewage-flooded streets, no electricity, in conjunction with the onset of winter are daunting enough for anyone to contend with, but the lack of international response to this crisis provides an even chillier portrait of our global society: a mostly silent world that continues to sit idly by while innocent people are being picked off, singled out, and collectively punished, tortured, killed, via bullets, bombs, tanks and now, via environmental genocide - this begs the question, yet again, what kind of people are we in this world that allow such inhumanity to happen at all, let alone, to continue?