DIRECT ACTION LAYS AN EGG

Quick report on events near my office , as of 12:00 PM
[Note: The anti-war community spent two months preparing for mass-protests to shut down San Francisco today, it being the fifth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. This is supposed to be the last big huzzah before Bush is out of office, my office is located right in the centre of events. Whoopee.]


Intersection of Sansome and Sutter: a table with some activists, two or three very nice professionally done banners, and a backdrop banner stating that it is a non-violent direct action to stop the war. Including passers-by, maybe ten people.
Nobody at the Citicorp plaza or the BART exit. Earlier there had been some people with George Bush and Cheney masks dancing to the music of Barbarella - or something like that. It didn't interfere with anyone coming to work in any way at all.

At 9:30 AM a peloton of maybe forty anti-Chevron bicyclists had come down Montgomery and turned onto Bush. They did not interfere with traffic.

Fewer sirens than normal in this neighborhood for the past two hours. It is quiet. Traffic has been a bit slower and more sludgy than usual, but transit was/is not interrupted.

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Montgomery and Market at 11:30: About three hundred to four-hundred wheatish-looking people blocking traffic on Post Street, dully listening to speeches, being very unphotogenic.

Market street is clear. Montgomery is clear. The cops are calm, the bystanders bored.

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If this is an attempt to "shut down the city", it isn't working.
There is no anger. There are no furious chants and screams. There is nothing to photograph.
Many of the participants are having a bad hair-day and their mom dresses them funny.

Anaemic. Pathetic. Futile. Silly.

However, as many of the people likely to come to SF for further protests are only just now waking up, who knows what else will happen.

At least it looks like 'stark-nekkid fer peas' is still on at four-thirty.




-----BOTH

PS. I'll be posting more later. At this point I expect the "Day Of Direct Action' to end up an anticlimax - their grand plans appear to have fizzeled, and whatever advantage there may have been to spreading action out (both in time and place) seems negated by the sheer convenience to the police of having small isolated groups who can easily be arrested in stages rather than a large unruly and potentially violent mass of demonstrators.

Taking these people into custody is much more like a leisurely dimsum brunch than a hot-dog eating contest. And who doesn't like dimsum?

The SFPD should really thank the extremists for so nicely sabotaging themselves. It was very kind.