And a community being destroyed by new developments and whose protests are brutally suppressed by the police.
But it is not clear why drug traffickers would kill left-wing students whose protests are mostly against state and local political bosses.
The group, whose protests are in their second week, is calling for an end to the "monied corruption of our democracy" in the U.S. and is borrowing a page from the Arab Spring uprisings that overturned several regimes earlier this year.
Given that Vladimir Putin has shown no hesitation in violently dispersing, and tarring as traitors, small groups whose protests are fairly restrained, who knows what the president would do to people who fired so much as a popgun in anger?
Their small statement of protest put them on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and earned them a Diane Sawyer interview, something that could not be replicated by any rock or pop or movie star whose protests are frankly expected.
Those who live outside the system; the outlaws in the forests or those whose protests are never covered by the press, or the well-behaved dispossessed, who go from tribunal to tribunal, bearing witness, giving testimony.
Women whose protests were seen as trivial, hormonally inspired, and "counter-revolutionary". Women who were told, over and over, that in the interests of progressive change, we had to subordinate our demands to "larger" causes.
"The 'shame on you's' that greeted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as he arrived for the hearing on June 6th, shouted by battalions of hotel chambermaids who knew nothing of the actual case and whose protest had been orchestrated and scripted, were obscene," he wrote.
On Wednesday at 8 p.m., the Tunisian singer-songwriter Emel Mathlouthi, whose protest songs were banned on Tunisian radio, will perform at Florence Gould Hall, French Institute Alliance Française, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan; $25, $20 for members.
"My mother was crying when she called me," said Rashad, whose attendance at the protest was his first such political action.
