The first thing you notice when you get hit by a cloud of tear gas is the sickeningly sweet, acrid smell. The chemical isn’t technically a gas; it’s a powder that disperses into a fine mist. When it touches your body, it activates pain receptors, causing a severe stinging sensation on the skin and in the eyes and lungs. You can mitigate the respiratory impact by breathing shallowly, but the chemical induces a sensation of suffocation, so your instincts compel you to gasp, which makes the pain and nausea much worse. Your eyes shut tight reflexively, and when you try to open them severe discomfort surges into searing pain. You can wash it out with water, but that requires blinking, which is agonizing. As you recover, you begin to be able to open your eyes for longer — a quarter second, a half second. But every time you do, the feeling of needles in your eyes becomes more like knives, and you’re forced to shut them again instantly. Sometimes it passes in a couple of minutes; sometimes it takes a half hour. If you’re getting bombarded with it, there’s a good chance you’ll start choking on a new round of gas while you’re still trying to recover from the previous one.

CS gas, the most common form of tear gas for riot control, was banned from use in warfare by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. But it is routinely used by police against civilians. On April 18, when over 1,000 protesters converged on Ridglan Farms, a dog breeding facility outside of Madison, Wisconsin that sells beagles to laboratories for use in painful and lethal scientific experiments, the 17 law enforcement agencies assembled there to defend the property fired tear gas at crowds of unarmed people continuously and prolifically, for hours.

I was there as a reporter, but to my surprise, the drifting clouds of poison did not bother to check my press pass. The powder crawled into my eyes and lungs and alighted on my skin like some ghostly extraterrestrial parasite, just as it did for everyone else.

It’s an eye-opening experience to witness your body become incapable of obeying your mind no matter how much willpower you summon to the task. When you’re in the middle of a tear gas cloud, naturally, the first thing you want to do is get out of its way. But the anatomical apparatus you require for that action simply shuts down. You find yourself sprawled out on the ground, or stumbling around like a zombie, blind, coughing, dry heaving, moaning and cursing and thinking of only one thing: pain. If you hear the pop of another tear gas canister fired in your direction, instead of trying to get away from it you just bear down, moaning more loudly, breathing more desperately, preparing yourself psychologically for another few endless minutes of hell. It’s all you can do.

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I’m a modern American white collar professional. I’m soft, unaccustomed to suffering. The closest I can come is when I used to run marathons. By mile 22 you become intimately acquainted with pain. But it’s of a different character: it’s vital, wholesome, debatably healthy, and voluntarily contracted. It’s an achievement. You can take pride in it.

The pain of tear gas, like the pain of a beatdown, is hostile, alien, destructive. It’s a foreign invader that’s trying to kill you. The smoldering lactic acid of a long distance run generates the kind of controlled discomfort that a middle-aged, middle-class dad can embrace. Being physically subdued by weapons engineered to turn you into a cowering domesticated animal is a whole different category of ordeal. It’s not just physical; it’s also symbolic. Someone more powerful than you has demanded that you submit, and you have submitted. You are literally powerless to do anything else. For this handful of minutes, you are a slave. This is not part of the repertoire of daily life for the average member of the American bourgeoisie.

I remember in graduate school when a sociology professor was comparing social forces to physical ones. As many a natural scientist would be quick to point out, things like laws or norms or market forces are not real in the way that gravity or velocity or disease is. They’re social constructs; they exist only because we conjured them into existence and agreed to recognize them as “real.” But, the professor pointed out, go out and smash the window of a police car. You will quickly find yourself pinned to the ground and handcuffed, then put in a cell you couldn’t escape in a hundred years. In a society with functional social structures, the physical consequences of resisting those forces are just as intractable as those of cancer or falling off a roof.

Though less direct, things like market forces are consistent with that tangible reality. The cost of being poor is, in part, a physical toll: hunger, malnutrition, exposure to coldness or heat. To be sure, you can get around the condition, sort of, by breaking laws — stealing food, or robbing a house to get money for rent — things you can’t do to evade the force of gravity. But sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in that cell again, contemplating the profound non-social-constructiveness of the concrete walls surrounding you. Even social forces like norms, which do not exist in a legal context, have tangible consequences you cannot escape, from the panicky, accelerated heart rate of devastating humiliation to the exclusion from social and often physical spaces that your degraded reputation has earned you.

These kinds of consequences are more familiar to the average, law-abiding, middle class American than physical assault and detention. We don’t often flirt with brazen crime and court the risk of incarceration. The authority of the state is something of an abstraction. There are laws, and we know we’re not supposed to break them. Intellectually, we understand that if we were to commit a felony, we would go to jail. But the deterrent effect of the law usually doesn’t feel quite that specific. It’s more like religious prohibitions against sinning: we just have a taken-for-granted sense of how to comport ourselves such that we continue to fit in with other normal, respectable people. We don’t have to think too hard about the consequences of breaking the rules, because we’re simply not rule breakers. We drive within our lanes. We never even come close to hitting the rumble strips.

Most of the protesters at Ridglan Farms that day, like most people everywhere, were rule followers. They were normies. There were plenty of vegans and radicals, but I also interviewed a retired pilot from South Carolina, a retired machinist from Wisconsin, and a welder who served in the military. They told me how much they loved their steaks and how their politics generally leaned rightward. What brought them to the action that day was not ideological fanaticism but the very normal, middle-class moral conviction that abusing puppies for profit was bad. Within minutes of showing up, like me, they were choking on tear gas.

As Max Weber’s famous definition of the state suggests, the government’s authority is, at its foundation, a function of its capacity to exert violence. In Weber’s formulation, what differentiates the government from criminals is that its exercise of violence is legitimate, by which he means perceived to be legitimate by the broader public. When that government is pulverizing people trying to save puppies, its legitimacy can be cast in doubt, but the violence part is beyond question when you’re choking on it. These are the moments when the scales fall from one’s eyes, when power becomes visible, when the state appears as it actually is rather than what it pretends to be. It’s when you learn what it means to truly disobey.