Flag-waver's arrest tells us we have something to fear

by Ruth Holladay

related stories - Bush protester won't accept bond by Jim Walker

May 20, 2003, IndyStar.com

Be scared. Be very scared.
You live in a city that harbors a "violent" flag-waver, a man so subversive that he "separated from the group" of his fellow demonstrators -- talk about a radical! -- during President Bush's visit here last week. This crazed fiend then jogged along the sidewalk, "violently" waving his United Nations flag, according to an Indianapolis Police Department report, while the commander-in-chief's motorcade tooled down 38th Street near the Indiana State Fairgrounds. The result? The nut job had to be "taken down" by an Indianapolis Police Department officer under direct orders from the Secret Service.

Be scared, yes.
But not of Carl Rising-Moore, who has spent the past seven days quietly under lock and key in the overcrowded Marion County Jail.

Be scared that we live in a time when a 57-year-old husband and father who has spent his entire adult life playing peacemaker, who his supporters swear is the epitome of restraint and reason, whose heroes are Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gets busted for waving a flag when the prez is in town.
Be very scared when this arrest draws the scorn of the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, whose peppery "Daily Dish" Web site last Wednesday referenced The Star's account of Rising-Moore's arrest on charges of resisting law enforcement, disorderly conduct and popping a policeman.
Sullivan -- who supported the war in Iraq and is typically bullish on Bush -- minced no words on the incident: "This is getting creepier all the time."
"This" refers to our somnolence regarding a growing erosion of protesters' rights -- think of those who went to Washington, D.C., to object to Bush's inauguration and were carefully regulated to confined areas out of the president's (and camera's) eye. Think of the Texas woman who protested the all-male golf club in Augusta, Ga., and was ordered by that city to stage her objections a half-mile away.

Whatever is going on here -- fallout from the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in 1999? Or an extension of laws that dictate abortion protesters keep their distance at clinics? -- it's a mindset compounded by our post 9/11 paranoia.
What's really creepy for Hoosiers is that this flap took place right under Indianapolis' collective nose, and nobody has raised a ruckus.
It was hardly a ruckus in Criminal Court 10 on Monday, when 30 or so supporters, friends and family members of Rising-Moore tried to persuade Judge Linda Brown to reduce his bail from 20 Gs to zilch.
It was an anti-ruckus, in fact: It was 11 people talking quietly about Rising-Moore's principles, describing incidents in which he had calmed down explosive situations. It was powerful testimony -- but what do you expect from people of the cloth, an IU law professor, Quakers and other Christians, an Air Force veteran bearing an American flag on his lapel, and a few sober-looking students?
Actually, the quiet sincerity of Rising-Moore's defenders was decidedly more persuasive than sound and fury.
Even more persuasive are three affidavits gathered by Rising-Moore's attorney Greg Bowes from witnesses to the arrest, challenging the Indianapolis Police Department's report.

That will all be hashed out in court.
What needs to be hashed out in the court of public opinion -- before it is too late -- is the role protest plays in a free country.