Illustration by Cody Angell

I spent this weekend in that great bastion of freedom and democracy known as Washington, D.C., doing the only thing I could bring my bleeding little liberal heart to do: protesting the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. As I lay ferally curled about my backpack on the floor of Baltimore International late Saturday night, desperately trying to sleep for the first time in days, I reflected upon the educational value of the day's events and came to a couple of conclusions.

Lesson 1: The good fight isn't a fair one. It's a rout, and the soldiers are thousands of cops decked in riot gear, gas masks holstered menacingly about their well-shielded hips. We flashed peace signs and homemade banners; they flashed toothy sneers and burnished steel batons.

On one occasion, 650 protesters were blockaded into a park, ordered to disperse, and arrested ÷ through shouts of, "We would like to leave this park peacefully!" ÷ when they were unable to do so. Two friends of mine were beaten for linking arms and sitting down with other protesters.

Lesson 2: Democracy is alive and well. That is, if by "democracy" you mean "the police state" and by "well" you mean "debilitating." Ours was a permitted protest ÷ legally legitimate ÷ and yet every effort was made to containing its movement and message. At every point in the march we were funneled down cleared streets between deep columns of cops, and no one was allowed to enter or leave the procession.

An unsettling portion of the law enforcement was comprised of military police. It is not now, nor has it ever been, the job of the military to enforce the law within our own borders. Protesting is not a terrorist act, but a democratic and Constitutionally sanctified one. Beyond that, vocal, visible dissent is a basic human freedom, a right which supercedes the need for documentation.

The suppression of thought is the trademark of a tyrannical state. If our message ÷ a plea to end economic apartheid worldwide ÷ was such a sinister one, then there would have been no better way to demonstrate it than through the open, free exchange of information. If we were just a bunch of misguided, whiny, nouveau-riche brats ÷ as we were portrayed in the mainstream media ÷ then why was there such a concerted effort to ignore the message and hype the image? Why, beyond the fact that radical viewpoints are hard to reconcile with our binary vision of truth, are our grievances never addressed by a media that professes to examine "both" sides of every issue? Which brings me to my last little revelation.

Lesson 3: The media plays along. Despite all my cynicism, until this weekend I was still clinging to a faint but nevertheless naive hope of a principled news media. That is, until I picked up a copy of The Washington Post on Saturday morning to read about the alleged escalation that led police to arrest those 650 protesters the previous day. Protesters were portrayed as a bunch of hot-blooded hooligans, which couldn't have been further from the truth. When I realized that the only source from which the Post gleaned its statistics was the Washington chief of police, my confidence was shattered.

The truth is that bureaucracy, the corporations it supports and the media outlets those corporations own are as intimately linked as the three heads of a grotesque hydra. The truth is available for download on any number of independent media Web sites, but will never spawn from that trinity of Orwellian mind control we tap into every evening via our eternally flickering televisions. It is a grainy, raw truth recorded as our only means of self-defense.

Allow me to break from my rhetoric-laden rant and speak plainly: These are real issues that need to be addressed. Police brutality, militant statism and media bias are not liberal concoctions; they are matters of fact that I witnessed firsthand. No amount of spin can turn the beating of unarmed civilians into a justifiable act.

No corporate smear campaign can completely obscure the truth ÷ that voices of dissent in this country are being deliberately and systematically silenced.

As long as this type of repression is taking place, the evolution of our state will be painfully slow. It is our duty to educate ourselves and demand an autonomous media, and responsible, democratic government.

If we stand up together, all the cops in the world can't keep us down.