It is a familiar tactic of the privileged to throw moral discredit on the under-privileged by depicting them as disturbers of the peace.

-E.H. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis

Last summer, I found myself in Istanbul, Turkey, amidst the penance and pleasure of Ramadan, gulping back tear gas and staying out of range of the riot police and their water cannon trucks.

My friends and I had finished a Saturday dinner just a little while before, on a side street leading down from Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul’s famed “high street.” Circassian ravioli, several kinds of feta cheese (did you know there was more than one kind‽), köfte meatballs, and fillo stuffed with vegetables sat fully in our stomachs, and we decided to take a digesting walk up to Istiklal, to see the sights, window shop a bit, and enjoy the night air and life.

Istiklal Caddesi, an obtuse angle running on top of the hill in the old European quarter of the city, runs roughly south-north and connects the funicular at Tünel to Taksim Square. It’s a place to promenade and look, and it resembles Georgetown in Washington or Newbury Street in Boston. Many alleys and side streets run off its sides, tracing their way down the sides of the hill, toward the Golden Horn and the Bosporus, filled with cafes, record shops, acrobatic Turkish ice cream scoopers, and meze bars.

As we came up the hill on Yeni Carsi Caddessi from the Bosporous side, we turned right and went north. It was hard to miss the riot police in helmets with face protector turned up, shields and sticks held casually to the side. They were hanging out at the intersection, leaning against the fence of the Galatasaray School, checking their phones, talking to one another, and doing not much. The striking element wasn’t what they were doing, but that there were fifty or more of them. A few paces further on up the street there were more of them.

The Turkish people on Istiklal appeared pretty unconcerned, and so were we. Over the previous two weeks in Istanbul, we’d actually seen large groups of riot police more than a few times, often at the side of squares and intersections. One really thought nothing of seeing highly armed police at the edges of most public assemblies.

In the summer of 2013, Istanbullus had clashed with Prime Minister Erdogan’s government over plans to transform Taksim Square into a neo-Ottoman-themed shopping mall. When citizens went to the square to protest the agenda of transforming a historic and rare open space into another mall, police forces were sent to clear them out. Peaceful protests quickly turned to riots, leaving many injured and at least one person dead.

I was in Istanbul to teach an undergraduate politics course. I am a college professor, and one of the few perks of the job has been the chance to teach summer courses to some of our honors students in exotic locales like Costa Rica and Turkey. It’s not quite a vacation, because after all, you’re lecturing and teaching for three and a half hours a day, as well as being the head authority figure for twenty or so college students. But it’s not quite work either when the view from your window upon getting up in the morning is the Topkapi Palace and Hagia Sophia.

The university and I were, of course, concerned to keep our students safe. We’d assessed the risks, looked around the Taksim area, talked with our local university contacts, and decided that (at least on weekdays) the situation was basically safe. We wanted to allow the students to satisfy their curiosity about the political circumstances, but we also knew that the dangerous was more attractive than the safe, especially when one is twenty.

Nothing much seemed amiss as we walked up Istiklal. We popped into a record and book shop, perused the special artsy t-shirts at Mavi (the Turkish version of the Gap), and watched the dondurma vendors taunt their customers with acrobatic ice cream tricks.

We began to hear commotion from further on up north. None of the police seemed much concerned, so we didn’t figure that there was much need for us to be also. The smell of smoke wafted to us, but it was probably just one of the ubiquitous sidewalk chestnut roasters, I thought. We kept on going up the street.

But then people started to run toward us.

I was in Istanbul with my husband, who’d come along on the trip, and we had met up with friends of mine who lived in Israel (my friend Dave had immigrated after college). Both of them, husband and wife, had done their compulsory service, and Dave had stayed in an extra year or so.

Dave and I looked at each other. Both of us wanted to see what was going on, that was clear. For me, I was curious to try to understand this situation, to see what it looked like, to see with my own eyes and mind what had only been filtered through TV and internet reporting.

Nothing looked particularly dangerous, just some people running, and fifty feet or so up the street, a small trash fire was burning in the middle of the street about two feet high. So we kept walking, keeping close to storefronts showing baklava, neckties, and magazines, walking in the lee of the rush of mostly young men running the opposite way. We got forty or fifty feet past the trash fire, and the street was mostly empty. Brian and Dave’s wife had just been behind us, but they were now gone.

Then, trundling down from the Taksim end of the avenue, an armored water cannon truck was making its way toward us. My throat began to sting a bit, and faint little clouds of white wafted by. Behind the water cannon stood several ranks of riot-gear-clad police.

A water cannon makes a sort of low thrum as it dispenses its ammunition. Because it’s water, you don’t initially take it as seriously as you should. The cannon operated mechanically, turning toward any grouping of people on or by the side of the street, aiming at their torsos and forcing them into a crouch. It blasted at their feet as they ran, tripping them, and then it hit them in the body when they were down on the ground. As it came near, I could tell that the water hurt by the fashion in which people curled fetus-like and tried to protect themselves from the stream. The sound was like a high-pressure washer, but the most powerful one you can imagine. When deflected sprayoff the sidewalk hit glass windows, I feared they would break under the impact.

More tear gas. Burning in the top of the mouth and throat, but also a feeling like I couldn’t get a full breath in my lungs.

Curiosity satisfied, Dave and I started to move at a quick-walk, I think because we figured if we moved like that, we’d look more like bystanders and maybe the police and their cannon would discriminate and not come after us. Actually, the water cannon seemed to speed up its progress and come pretty close to us a couple of times, but we moved faster and pressed closer to the wall of storefronts.

We ducked into one of the side streets, and people were sitting outside a small restaurant, eating and drinking and looking back onto Istiklal to see what was going on. A waiter in his twenties looked at me. “There are eighty million people in this country, and three-quarters of them have no problem with him [Erdogan]. These people making trouble are a small group.” “Twenty million people, a small group?” I thought. “Besides, all this because of a small fire and some yelling?”

We pulled ourselves out of the side passage and back onto the main street. The cannon was a bit further away than before, and we thought we could make it back to the Mavi where our spouses were. Store owners all around were pulling closed their security doors, calling to those in the street, “Inside, please, inside.” Once we made it into Mavi, I got the spousal yelling that I probably deserved.

As I have watched the news from Ferguson, Missouri this week, I keep thinking back to a year ago in Istanbul. I cannot pretend to really understand the dynamics of police authority and citizens in that little town, but I also can’t pretend to fully understand the dynamics of state and citizen in Istanbul either. Each time I see pictures of American police in camouflage with armored vehicles, I think back to that night in Istanbul. What in the end was a small trash fire and some chanting was met with armored vehicles, water cannon, and armed police.

Two realizations come to me out of the parallels of the situations. First, a government or civil authority that responds with a heavy hand to criticism from its members must fear them quite a bit. Most Turkey analysts I’ve read think Erdogan has some real anxiety about letting protest grow too large, for fear it will undercut his authority. I can’t help but think that the authorities in Ferguson and environs are really afraid of the people in their communities. Fear may manifest as the abuse of authority, but there’s still underlying fear. Else, no fear, no fight.

Second, I think it takes a certain fatalism and anger to throw oneself at the tools of power. I don’t want to argue in favor of riots or other civil violence. Many people who willingly expose themselves to civil violence, however, have given up. They have decided that life can’t go on as it has. Whether you’re a Turkish liberal or an African-American Midwesterner, you have decided that life as it is is not sufficiently free if you put yourself unarmed in the way of highly armed, lightly restrained agents of the state’s power.

There’s no easy solution to either of these situations. It so far appears that there can only be ebb and flow in the cycle of fear, desperation, and violence, whether you’re on the Mississippi or the Bosporus.