Family Values

Excerpt from a mother's account (by filmmaker Susanna Styron) of trying to find her daughter after she was arrested during the police round-up of Occupy Wall Street on November 15:

But I didn’t expect that she had thirty-two hours of jail time ahead of her, and I had thirty-two hours of trying, mostly in vain, to find out where she was and what was going to happen to her. . . .

[After her daughter was finally released:] On our way home, Lilah told me that when she was arrested, she had simply been standing in the street. She was asked to move, but she couldn’t, because it was packed with people and there was no room. She was shoved backward with a nightstick poke to the stomach. Then she was pepper-sprayed. Then she was forced to the ground, zipline cuffed, and pulled by her wrists so hard it felt as if her shoulder was about to dislocate. She was given no information about her charge or her status for the thirty-two hours she was in custody—not a thing, not until she walked into her arraignment.

After we got home, Lilah went to the doctor. She has nerve damage to her wrist. She’s wearing a wrist brace. She has bruises all over her arms. So she has her battle scars. Lilah’s great-grandmother marched as a suffragette, her grandmother marched against the Vietnam War, I got arrested protesting nuclear weapons, her sister has attended every OWS protest in New York. We’re a traditional family.