Keith Olbermann spoke to Dorli Rainey -- the 84-year-old Seattle woman whose pepper spraying by police at an Occupy Seattle protest rocketed around the Internet on Tuesday -- on his Wednesday show.
Before speaking to Rainey, Olbermann ran through a string of news from Occupy events around the country. He then showed the picture of Rainey with pepper spray all over her face that went viral.
"Every time you might think you had seen the worst of the establishment's response to Occupy, somebody, somewhere, is willing to bet you are not," he said. He then turned to Rainey and asked how she was feeling.
"I'm feeling great," she said. "I'm so energized. It's amazing what a little pepper spray will do for you."
Rainey called her participation in Occupy Seattle a "natural progression" for her, since she has a long history of activism behind her. She said that she had been going to a transportation meeting when she heard "tons of helicopters" overhead. She guessed that an Occupy rally was happening, and went to join it. A little while later, though, she got pepper sprayed and shoved.
"Thank heavens a young Iraq veteran grabbed me," she said. "...Otherwise I would have been on the ground trampled."
Rainey apparently took the whole thing in stride and got back on her normal bus. "I must have looked a fright," she told Olbermann. She said she was ultimately happy, because everyone on the bus started talking about the protests. "They had never seen a real person that they could identify with who got pepper sprayed," she said.
Rainey concluded by remembering something one of her heroes, a Catholic nun, had always told her: "whatever you do, take one more step out of your comfort zone." She said that "it's so easy to say, 'Well, I'm going to retire, I'm going to sit around and watch television or eat bon-bons ... but somebody's got to keep them awake."
Keith Olbermann, Dorli Rainey Talk Pepper Spray Incident, Occupy Movement (VIDEO)
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