AB Visits the Hoosegow!

An 18-Hour Adventure, Nine Years, Six Months and Some Change in the Making

 

By: Aaron Brown

 

 

 

Friends, the unthinkable has finally occurred. Unanticipated of course, yet extraordinarily cathartic. Yours truly, known under a bevy of nicknames and monikers, like Mormon Rockwell, The Biz, A-Bizzle (as the Coss-man still calls me), and so forth, has at last received stark legal validation for almost a decade's worth of unique, original, peaceful liberal activism. What follows is an accurate, moment-by-moment accounting of the events that took place concerning one Aaron Samuel Brown on Friday, July 27^th in the Woodlands, Texas, starting at 5:30pm CST.

 

Two days earlier, on July 25^th, through an email from friends, I learned that uber-Republican South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and former half-term Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin would be in my neck of the woods to support TX senate candidate and Tea Party up and comer Ted Cruz at an official campaign rally. Naturally, as an almost 10 year veteran of peaceful public protests literally all across the country, I was beyond elated upon hearing this news. Having eyes and ears, I had heard of Sarah Palin in the past and was very excited to get to see her in public for the first time. I immediately began plans to show up on the day in question, about 15 minutes early (as I traditionally do), to engage in my 1^st amendment freedom of speech rights with regards to protesting persons and a group of persons that I strongly disagree with. Through my non-profit activities of recent (Foundation Against Religious Extremism, or F.A.R.E.), I now cart along with me to every public demonstration the following core items: various signage, a rolling battery-powered portable PA system, a 50W megaphone, and a fold up camping chair or small collapsible stool. I keep the stool folded up on the side of a medium-sized Camelbak® backpack. In addition to all of that, I use a shoulder mounted, collapsible camera rig, held in place and secured to me by the straps on the backpack. I had the rig on this day in question, but as I had not begun my activism at the time of the arrest, the camera was not attached and not rolling. Lastly, there were two signs I brought to the Palin/Cruz rally, the smallest of which featured a knock off of the almost 20 year-old iconic image from many of the Westboro Baptist Church's most famous picket signs. It is a black outlined stick figure image of a man standing, with another similar image of a man bent over in front of him, tacitly depicting sodomy. I created this sign months ago to use during my protest campaign against the WBC and that very same sign was used and featured in parts of Texas, Los Angeles, Kansas, Missouri, and even the District of Columbia with not even one slight incidence of law enforcement objection. It has no swear words on it whatsoever. On one side, the standing man read "Sarah Palin" and the bent over man read "American Decency". The reverse side was the same image, the standing man read "Common Sense" and the bent over man read "The Tea Party". The larger, more offensive sign was a newer creation, first used back in May at three different locations in Brownsville TX. This sign read on both sides, "Fuck These Assholes" in black, slim lettering. Beneath the text were two red omni-directional arrows, which the sign holder uses to direct the attention of the message as the situation progresses.

 

On July 27^th, at about 5:10pm, I left my home with the gear to make my way to a parking garage near where the event was being held. Also learned throughout years of activism, in many cases, it behooves one to park far enough away from a potential situation. It does add for a long hot slog with a lot of heavy equipment, but ultimately it is worth it, and I have been employing this tactic safely for over five years. After loading up and beginning to exit the parking garage, it was now about 5:35pm. I walked across the street to the side my destination was on, and preceded to walk with all my stuff towards the location. It is now 5:41ish. I was about 50-100 yards from reaching the venue. From where I was stopped, it was around another corner, so I was not even visible to most or all of the attendees and staff. At this moment while walking, I noticed in the car traffic to my right coming towards me a Montgomery County (MoCo) Sherriff's officer in a cruiser pulling up into the driveway area of where I was walking through. He is obviously coming over to engage me, and stops his car with his driver window next to me. I naturally stop to wait for him to exit and question me. Oddly enough, he doesn't exit, or roll down his window to communicate with me, for about a full 3-4 minutes. I kept standing there, politely motioning to him I was ready to speak with him whenever he wanted, yet he kept sitting there, looking me over, looking around him, and talking on his radio. Finally he gets out and asks right away for my ID, which I gladly handed over. Due in part to my activist past, but also my love of the TV show Cops, I know how one should act and ask questions when speaking with law enforcement. I politely asked why I had been stopped, to which he replied he had received "complaints" of indecency on my behalf, based on the offensive nature of the signs I was carrying and (this is important) "yelling of swear words" as well. It was obvious he saw the megaphone swung over my back and so his initial statement was that in addition to the offensive words on my signs, the caller/s reported me shouting obscenities in addition. Friends, I needn't tell you this was 100% false, as I was still dozens of yards away from the protest spot. In the same way very few of us would ever slam a burger and fries in the parking lot before going INTO a McDonalds, I never before, did not that day, nor do I have any future plans, to start a public protest BEFORE I get to where I'm going. For one, it is hard to be actively engaging and performing if you're carrying a lot of heavy gear. So in this instance, and all others in the past and future, my stereo was off and my megaphone was off and on my back.

 

Again, in a polite but assertive manner, I refuted the claim of the verbal cursing and insisted I was breaking no laws carrying signs with offensive words on them, to which he indicated I was to the contrary. At this point he runs my license back in the car and I am standing outside in front of the cruiser over to the side with all my stuff. With my arresting officer in the squad car still, officer Haines rides over to me on a bicycle patrol as he was passing by (or perhaps he was called over, still unsure at this time) to asses the situation. It is during this time, a middle aged white tall man and his blonde wife are walking to the event and they pass me. He slows down then stops to look at the sign and read it. He mutters something to which I non-confrontationally replied, "It says Fuck These Assholes". The man instantly became irate saying, "did you just tell me to go fuck myself asshole?" I immediately and calmly replied back, "I was just reading you my sign". Incredibly, the man as he is accusing me of this, is moving angrily towards me, as if to start an altercation. Officer Haines even had to restrain the man and move him away from me. After maybe 20 seconds of more aggression and taunts, he and his wife turned back around and continued (I assume) walking over to the event. As best as I could tell, my arresting officer, still inside the car, did not witness or certainly did not get involved in this particular instance.

 

When my arresting officer finally came out of the car, he had a small, cheap silver digital camera with him and asked to take pictures of the signs. I instinctual inquired as to what they were for, but he told me he would tell me in just a moment then asked again for permission, to which I granted him. Finishing, he asked to take a photo of me, and again, I complied. Then he informs me of the situation. Based on the complaint calls, I'm under arrest for disorderly conduct and I am being taken to jail for processing. For a moment, I erupted slightly into laughter, basically having a small, comical freak-out about how absurd this is that I'm being arrested right now and I never even made it to the event I was supposed to be protesting! At one juncture, I speculated that Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin had paid this guy off to stop me (and strangely enough, that might not be totally far from the truth). He loaded my stuff into the car, me next, and we traveled to the local MoCo satellite jail, about 6 minutes away. When we got there, the station officer came out to begin the process. A few snippets of importance, I heard them chuckling about my signs, openly talking about how it was obvious I was breaking the law in their mind.

 

Inside, while I'm in a holding cell, I distinctly overheard one officer say, "Is that one of those fucking Occupy people?" I then heard my arresting officer (who I presume the other officer was talking to) say, "Yeah, he was sure gonna go down there and try to disrupt things". I'm not a simple unfrozen cave man lawyer, per say, but that sounded to me like a little bit of bias. At the very least, this implies my arresting officer took the law into his own hands, because he said, "try", meaning he knew I hadn't yet arrived at the protest or done anything illegal. One final point of hilarity here. When you are arrested, everything you have on you at the time comes in with you and is checked away. 99% of people come in with whatever is on them, in their pockets, or sometimes with a jacket or coat or purse or bag. I obviously came in with a bunch of crap. The officers file every personal item and write it down line by line as a report, and you initial by each item to confirm everything, and then again when you leave and get everything back. In my official protest backpack, I keep a lot of strange items. For example, I have a painters face mask (in the event of a riot or teargas), an emergency poncho, eye drops, spray sun tan lotion, and of course, a condom. The last item there is a throwback to my old days. The condom was almost expired in my defense, forgot it was even in there. My arresting officer filled out the report with all my items. Guess how this fatter, more pathetic looking version of Wilford Brimley spelled "condom" on the report? "One Condum". C-O-N-D-U-M. Condum. This officer of the law unabashedly misspelled a six letter, Middle-School-level vocabulary word. If that doesn't give you a better picture of the man who arrested me, than nothing will. One cannot fictionalize genius that well, even if you tried. 

 

My incarceration lasted roughly 18 hours; the first 6 were spent in a concrete and metal bench holding cell and then I was transferred (along with others) to the MoCo county detention center, a few miles up the road in Conroe. Here, I would again wait 10-11 hours in three different but similar concrete and metal bench only holding cells before being finally released. To hammer home the point, I understand we are all being viewed as criminals in the eyes of the law at that particular juncture. However, the law does state "innocent until proven guilty", as it has instructed for over 110 years. But at the same token, none of us had actually been convicted yet, only charged. And based on that distinction, the conditions of our holding cells were not just cruel and undeserved, they bordered on 3^rd world prison conditions. The last thing I had to eat was around lunchtime on Friday. My next full meal came the following day, July 28^th at about midnight when I woke up from resting after the whole ordeal. For the first 13-14 hours in our holding cells, we were offered nothing more than the warm tap water from the prison sink attached to the sometimes full of shit and piss prison toilets. No water or anything like that even during "breakfast". They served us this yellow, banana coconut Tampico® nasty stuff. I took one sip and almost threw up. The "food" was about 100 times worse than the free meal I got a Dallas bus station a couple weeks ago (even longer story). Overhead, in every single holding cell, the row of bright halogen lights stayed on the entire time. The first room I was in with some shade or darkness since Thursday night wasn't until I woke up Saturday night at home. At one point in the holding cell, I look over to see an inmate using a half roll of toilet paper as a makeshift pillow, because literally, there is only concrete floor and wall, and a long metal bench. I tried balling up my socks as a pillow, but that didn't work either. Across the way, over in the general population by comparison, convicted criminals are sleeping soundly on beds, with a pillow and blanket, and their cell lights are off, and they aren't packed into one single cell by the dozen, like human sardines. How's that for fucked up?

 

At the first jail in the Woodlands, I shared a small cell with two other men 90% of the time. In the county lockup, I was in full capacity cells (8-16 persons, depending on the size) the entire time. The very last holding cell had a max capacity of 16. During the final hour, as many as 18 of us were all jammed in there, with barely enough room to sit or stand. It is not my intention to get every single hard working, honest member of MoCo Sheriff's office in trouble, yet, the ones who are clearly acting either illegally or otherwise morally reprehensibly, should in fact have their employment terminated. Again, not every officer I encountered was a total jerk. I actually joked with one younger gentlemen towards the end of the ordeal, even asked him if he'd seen the new Dark Knight movie, to which he replied he was waiting for the crowds to thin out, then he would go see it. I even made some jailhouse chums, Brian and Brent. We were released at the same time so we fortuitously all shared a cab back to Brian's house, which was near the parking garage with my car. These gentlemen, myself, and the other inmates, no mater what they and I were accused of, were definitely victims of a dysfunctional, sometimes illegal county office.  That, above all else, is the bottom line and was unmistakably evident.

My Lunch-Date With Lunacy:

The ongoing exploits and insights of Occupy The WBC

The many thousands of miles we've traveled while road tripping through the midsection of the country these past few months has imparted one severe and now obvious fact never truly comprehended before. Above the many other excellent moments and realizations one routinely experiences whilst driving long distances, this particular observation stands alone as primarily the most significant and illuminating truth; OF COURSE the Westboro Baptists are bat-shit crazy - have you ever driven through Kansas?

This is not meant to be a slight on the whole state and its greater populace. I'm speaking specifically about the terrain. Starting along the northern border of Texas and essentially going upward a few states (stopping in South Dakota), it becomes unmistakably evident that Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska exist in almost an exact-center-of-the-Pacific Ocean style emptiness and desolation. To put it mildly, Kansas is like my date for the sixth grade junior high school dance; a flat, harsh unmanageable succubus, vacant of all life and vibrancy. They call Montana "big sky country," so it would stand to reason Kansas should be called "ONLY sky country" because, seriously, it's just earth and air in every direction for further expanses than one would hope for.

When you understand that topographically, Kansas is vapid and vacuous, it becomes easier, more plausible as to how some of its citizens can suffer the same fate intellectually. We are all affected by the nature of our surroundings. The children of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, whether they acknowledge it or not, are a prime example. Raised in a Branch Davidian style compound, what was really there, beyond those wooden fences, had any of them actually attempted an escape? The answer is nothing. Total and absolute nothingness, for as far as the eye can see. And the situation would remain this way until the tender teenage years, when the onslaught of puberty leads to rash decision making, dismantling of established guidelines, and ultimately the cessation of other previously-valued indoctrinations, at which point the desire to experience all that is on the other side of that fence becomes too great a prospect to continue to ignore. If the parenting is relentlessly strict enough, much of this significant transformation can be quelled, but never entirely or categorically in all cases. So it should come as no surprise that even the hardcore, fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church continues to shed membership like a sickly cat shedding on your favorite duvet cover. And if the rate at which their children leave the church appears to be ascending, that's because it most certainly is.

There has been roughly three times the number of people fleeing the WBC in just the last eight years as compared to the number that left over the previous 30 years. Playing the role of devil's advocate, what could possibly account for this uptick? I'm no detective, but thankfully the conclusion remains so obvious, even an untrained sleuth such as myself could understand it. For centuries, the unforgivingly hellish environment of Kansas and its daily celebration of the devoid and barren persisted mostly uninterrupted. But then, tragically (at least from the indoctrinator's viewpoint), there came about the technological age, bringing with it not just cool new gadgets, but devices of pure symbolic freedom at the touch of a button. It is one thing to be stuck in Kansas in the 1950's and read about the Eifel tower or see a grainy black and white photograph next to a caption. It is an entirely different thing to be able to call up a live-streaming, high definition video image of the actual Eifel tower over the Internet on a small hand held device in literally a matter of seconds. The resulting effect has been nothing short of constant connectivity and perpetual consumption of stimuli, a new way of living better and smarter for many, while conversely for its opponents, a frightening unpleasantness, responsible for exposing to the youth everything that could once be excluded or considered unattainable. The seemingly infinite, unoccupied rolling horizons of Kansas, proudly designed in the image of isolationism, have now been reduced to its opposite. The greater technological explosion of the last few decades is the real "Great Equalizer", turning a once remote and cut-off environment into one where any piece of information from around the world can and does become conveniently accessed.  In the simplest terms, Fred Phelps effortlessly exuded control over his own children back in the day, but his children's children, through no fault other than the forward progression and advancement of time and space, find it increasingly impossible to shelter, manipulate, and indoctrinate their offspring.

Innumerable hours of well intentioned training and preparation to serve their church takes a back seat to ideas, interests and concepts now in the forefront of their lives thanks to the digital age. And it will only get worse. The beauty of the WBC is in their flagrant idiocy. Sure, family elders must traverse the country with the children actively participating, shouting and singing at strangers on busy street corners - but at what cost? Had you kept them like human veal calves, entombed and motionless forever inside the fences of the Topeka compound, you might have had a chance at keeping them engaged and blissfully ignorant. But then, that's the trouble with ignorance; it's only blissful up to the point when you realize there's an alternative. The Amish choose not to live amongst what they call "the English" in our vast cities, rather, they occupy small corners of rural America, so as to not be influenced or tempted by mainstream society. Pastor Phelps and his followers HAD one part of this equation locked down through living in Kansas. However, by constantly engaging the public, on their own turf no less, they lose the larger argument, and expose their sanitized progenies to the very elements they claim to abhor and defend against. Imagine if the Amish traveled by wagonload year-round, witnessing with extremity in every small to enormous community in our nation? The end result would be a mass exodus from that faith, not unlike a raging kegger during an already wild Rumspringa. Kids want to live, love, learn and grow. This has been unaltered throughout history. What has changed are the societal conditions, and so, like the Amish, if you don't like what we're selling, you don't have to subscribe. The children of the WBC are in danger of discarding their faith, and will remain in danger every day they are ferried into the "English world" and made to dance and perform for the unwashed masses, who, as they are preached to, carry the fowl stench of sin and depravity. Have their parents no fear that the stench may waft, infecting and transforming their precious kin?

I will only aide to hasten this transformation. The work of Occupy the WBC, and the untold, incalculable number of counter-demonstrators all around our nation will only serve to enhance and facilitate this drastic change they fear and work so hard to combat against. Shirley Phelps and the other pathetic parental units of the WBC will have to deal with our shit, metaphorically speaking. Crazy religious fundamentalists are a dime a dozen in this country sadly (I'm looking at you, Utah) yet the good thing about the vast 99% of them is their refusal to interact regularly with secular society. But make no mistake, some of them would become little Phelps's, so to speak, and go on whirlwind tours of cities and towns hyperbolically evangelizing to everyone, were it not for their overwhelming fear they may somehow risk exposing their young to the temptation of modern American life, and jeopardize losing them to godlessness in the process. This is what I love about the Westboro jerks; they are too stupid to realize the truth. They are that glorious 1%, so hell-bent and motivated by irrational rhetoric that they recklessly gamble their most priceless assets, the next generation. And so it is because of this gross miscalculation, the reliance on formerly safe, sterilized, secluded living situations, and the sheer ignorance that impressionable minds thrown into the lions den time and again won't come out with even a smudge of barbarism, we at Occupy the WBC will ALWAYS have the upper hand. We hit 'em with sleaze, kill 'em with kinkiness, we expose these narrow-minded mouth breathers to the very essence of freedom, of uncensored, unbridled, raw, and sometimes offensive artistic expression they otherwise try urgently but futilely to avoid. In doing so, we will always be victorious. How do I know this for certain? The younger members started engaging me at our counter protests months ago, almost from the beginning. Hell, I'm even chummy with a few of them. Jael Phelps always blushes, and a tall young man I nicknamed "Seacrest" (for his douchey similarity to the reality television icon of the same last name) and I are practically buds. He gave me a nickname too: "JewFag."Priceless. So right there, in just the primordial act of engaging in my antagonisms, the youth simply cannot help themselves. If we keep up this level of intensity on a consistent basis, there's a real shot at getting one or more of them to crack. For this is genuinely what Occupy the WBC hopes to accomplish. By chipping away slowly at the barrier their families have created, the opposition can undoubtedly seep in. After all, "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree'"?

 

Yours considerably,

AB

Everyone Please Check out a breakthrough! We hit the Press!
#1 Protesters, counter protesters — the best action at the TicketCity Bowl was outside the stadium
#2 Occupy the WBC: Air Guitarist Mormon Rockwell Leads Protest of Westboro Baptist Church's Oscar Protest
#3 Occupying the Westboro Baptist Church's Protest at the TicketCity Bowl in Fair Park
Check Out all three!

check out our website

Check out our new social media additions including a Youtube Channel and our Flicker.
We should have our website updated by the end of tonight. Keep posted for our upcoming events.

occupythewbc's photostream

occupythewbc's photostream on Flickr.

check out our new photos from St. Louis and L.A. feel free to share your own.

Blogs are on their way!
Stay tuned for more information...