Olympia, WA: Demonstration Takes Place Outside of Mayor’s Home

This following report back was originally published on Puget Sound Anarchists.

Today on May 1st at 7pm about 30 of us gathered outside the home of the Mayor of Olympia, Cheryl Selby, in the South Capitol Neighborhood dressed in colorful attire. We unfurled a banner reading “Fuck Your Yuppie Bullshit” and began chanting, “Fuck Your Yuppie Bullshit” and other slogans into megaphones and placing fliers on cars in the neighborhood.

Cheryl’s door has semi-transparent glass in it and we could see that she came to the door to see what the commotion was. When the crowd erupted in a chorus of “booooooooo…. Fuck You!” she could be seen grabbing her phone and presumably calling the police. After roughly five minutes of this we decided that due to the intense police presence all over town we should not stay too long and dispersed just as police began to arrive in the area. The first police vehicles to arrive were unmarked minivans that must have been rented special for May Day because they did not have tax exempt license plates like most government owned vehicles do. Pigs in full riot gear carrying pepper-ball guns piled out of the minivans and began awkwardly trying to run after protestors. The crowd dispersed without any arrests or injuries, though police including dozens of bike cops, followed and harassed many in the area.

The authors of this report back can only speak for ourselves, but we gathered there to celebrate May Day and to bring attention to the ways that the city prioritizes wealthy business owners and screws over everyone else. But also, we took this action to say, “Fuck You,” to the mayor where she lives. Mayor Cheryl Selby maintains a progressive veneer to gloss over the fact that all she really cares about is protecting her class interests: that of the other yuppies.

This year the city of Olympia pulled out all the stops [4 jurisdictions of police and even a plane circling overhead were involved) to prevent any kind of protest from occurring on May Day but we managed to take action in broad daylight right on their doorstep. They claimed in their press release that they would not interfere with protests so long as they were nonviolent. But this action was by most definitions of the term, “nonviolent,” and the police still showed up in overwhelming force to repress it. Perhaps what they meant was, “we will allow protests so long as they remain irrelevant and far away from us.” The people like Cheryl Selby who control our lives and administer the environmental destruction all around us have names and addresses. They are not faceless robots and they should be made to answer for the harm they inflict upon their subjects.

The Text From the Flier:

Eat your pheasant, drink you wine. Your days are numbered bourgeois swine.

Mayor Cheryl Selby pays lip service to the houseless community, yet acted as a decision maker in defunding the InterFaith Works Warming Center in downtown Olympia. She has stated that “We strongly believe that Olympia must do its part in the fight against climate change,” but refused to take a public stance against the Port of Olympia’s shipping of fracking proppants. Selby is a sleazy politician and business owner who claims to care about members of her community, but the only real stance she has taken is her pro-business agenda. This is the dark underbelly of progressivism.

Cheryl Selby, as mayor of so-called Olympia, is supposed to represent a population of over 50,000 people. Our highly varying and individual opinions, needs, and desires cannot be represented.

The fate of our home should not be at the mercy of someone in power who is completely removed from the every day experiences of the rest of us. This is why we cannot accept any politician; because they inherently seek to control us, speak for us, and thus rob us of our autonomy.

This neighborhood exists on Nisqually/Squaxin land. Thirty-percent of houses in Olympia’s Capitol neighborhood are owned by lobbyists and corporations. This neighborhood is the home of the political class that has for centuries, since the genocidal reign of Isaac Stevens, continued to thrive off the subjugation of other people and the land.