The Revolution will be [Live Streamed]
The day I took these photos is the day the previous version of this website died.
I’ve been shook to write this blog post for almost 3 years.
Where should I begin…
So it all started when I got a DM from someone that was at the peaceful rally earlier that morning. I had moved on from activism for the day, or so I thought, and found myself shopping for swim trunks on the boardwalk. I was probably on vodka lemonade #2 or #3 of the afternoon when I saw the message, and decided it wasn’t too late to switch back to activism mode. (Narrator: it was.)
I arrived on the scene and this is what I saw.
An ENTIRELY different situation from the morning’s protest. Same protestors, with the same signs, wearing the same clothes. But this time instead of an officer or two keeping an eye on the crowd, there was an army. They were dressed like an army, acted like an army, moved like an army.
I really wanted to capture the contrast in attire in these photos. Street clothes, in some cases beach clothes, against the police/military super team dressed for combat. I was in my new swim trunks, not even a couple hours old. Didn’t realize it at the time, but these are the shorts I would spend the next 22 hours in.
Once 6 o’clock rolled around, it became super hostile. This was the imaginary line that the police department had drawn in the sand. An ‘emergency curfew’ for the city of Myrtle Beach.
You see, it had been rumored on some small circles of a very specific section of the internet that “ANTIFA” was bussing down rioters by the hundreds to Myrtle Beach. This made it all the way to the police cheif (pictured below) who, along with the mayor, interpreted this as a threat of violence. From where? Who knows. To do what exactly? Well violent riots, of course. What can we do? Set a curfew, bring an army. Can’t have civil unrest in a tourist town, especially on the weekend in-season. We must show them we mean business.
This was, of course, news to us - the people that actually showed up. We weren’t bussed in from anywhere, most of us walked from where we lived. I know this because these are the people I went to jail with that day, in our flip flops and Hawaiian shirts - the official uniform of ANTIFA Myrtle Beach.
Hell I didn’t know even know about the curfew until it was twenty after 6. Too late.
But this was our small slice of a larger conspiracy, one peddled by our governor and president that whole summer. The department put out a press release citing ‘credible threats’ but gave no other info.
A credible threat, apparently.
The pictures below were the last pictures ever taken on that camera. The card worked of course, so I was able to restore all these images. But I’m sure they were too - they had it for almost a whole day and likely took a spin through it for possible puzzle pieces to their imaginary ANTIFA jigsaw. They found a bunch of beach pics instead.
What happened next, in hindsight should have been avoided. I got too close and too brash. The vodka lemonades must have still been cookin. I was on IG Live, getting too cocky for the audience, who would soon wonder if I was going to be ok. The department moved their line forward in synchronized military style, and picked up the pace quickly. I took a terrible angle and kind of cut off one of the officers. He got ahold of one arm, and I was able to breifly resist before three others joined. They threw me down into “you’re under arrest” position, breaking my camera and phone screen as they slammed me to the pavement. The phone remained streaming as it pointed towards the sky, the officer arresting me slightly in the picture.
You see me there in a black t-shirt and those new trunks, and if you have the volume on you can hear the crowd reaction to the tackle.
As you can see, I went in in May and got out in June. 20+ hours in a shockingly cold Myrtle Beach jail cell. It’s one of the things that stuck with me over the past couple of years, how cold that cell was. I ride with hoody in my car at all times now, literally in case I’m pulled over and wrongly (or otherwise) arrested.
It was the heart of Covid and here were 26 of us in that cold cell with no masks on (the protest was outside - they arrested us and put us inside with no masks. Criminal in hindsight.) There were about ten blankets and one guy had half of them. No one seemed to question that, which means that guy probably wasn’t to be questioned. I was freezing and time was crawling.
I understand that it’s largely a thankless job to work in a jail… but I will never, ever in my life forget the heartlessness shown in that building that night. None of the men in that cell were bad people, mostly protesting a just cause, and probably having the worst day of their lives. Yet we were all treated like less-than-human prisoners, and worse, there seemed to be a smug joy about doing so.
Take, for example, the concept of time crawling. You try to keep track of it in your head. How many hours have passed? How many until court in the morning? There’s no clocks, no windows. If you ask someone what time it is, and they tell you 2AM, you believe them. You have no reason not to. Why would anyone lie about that? So it’s 2AM, I got 6 hours until court. I can do that.
An hour goes by, or so the human brain guesstimates. 60 seconds, 60 times, give or take. It’s 3AM. 5 more hours. We can do this.
The same guard comes by, another man asks for the time.
“It’s midnight” he says.
Panic shoots down the body, out the arms and into the fingertips that grip the cool metal bars separating us.
“Wait a sec, I thought it was 2 an hour ago?” I speak up.
“I must have read the clock wrong” he says, as a smug grin spreads slowly across his face. He did that on purpose. This is what evil looks like.
8 more hours til court.
I don’t know if you can fuck with a person’s brain much more than that. For all intents and purposes, he just added 3 hours onto my jail sentence.
Although this was my first visit in Myrtle, I had been under the roof of a jail before - for much less noble causes - and I didn’t let the panic set in. Doesn’t matter what time it is. I have people that love me waiting on the outside, and I will be out of here soon.
The guards delivered breakfast at 4am, hoping to catch everyone sleeping so they could tell them they missed it when they woke up. More evil.
The night turned to day, some non-protestors joined and we had to get shuffled around. They broke us up into two cells and I ended up making more friends in the next 6 hours than I did in my first 6 months of living in Myrtle. These were my people. I finally found them.
We exchanged names, instagram handles, addresses. Anything we could force into our memories to find each other on the outside. We made plans to help each other if someone got behind. We memorized, coordinated and supported. Hell, I even offered one kid a job.
When all said and done, it was nearly 3pm before I saw daylight again, one of the last ones to make bond. Probably went alphabetical. Time was done crawling. I had a ride waiting in the parking lot with snacks and positivity. It seemed like this was over.
It was not.