Goodbye, Blue Sky: 03.20.03

Sorry, gang; the YouTube copyright police are jerking me around again on account of the old Pink Floyd tracks I used in this piece. You can download a copy of the mpeg4 with the sound track intact (05:39, 66.3mb) from archive.org. Sic semper tyrannis.

Oh say, can you see
on the bridge named for Key
where the “Aqua Team” marched,
and a bunch were arrested…!

It was bone cold, rainy, sloppy, and miserable only a day before the official beginning of spring — in other words, your typical mid-March morning in DC. It was also a morning full of coordinated disobedience actions across DC marking the first day of Iraq War v2.0. Our group, nicknamed “Aqua Team”, was given the plum job of mobbing aboard a Metro to Rosslyn and taking Key Bridge early during rush hour.

Things turned out quite nicely. All the color-nicknamed groups gathered for their rallies at designated points around DC, not knowing where they were headed until it was actually time to go — a brilliant piece of strategy which greatly reduced the chances of any snitches in the crowd getting the word ahead to the cops — in our case, it was a meetup at Eastern Market, right in my backyard, then onto an Orange Line all the way across town to Rosslyn, where hilarity ensued…

It's an "Eat-In" for Food Democracy!

By this time, most of you — especially in the progressive activist community — have heard the old “stone soup” story. Based on the concept of “stone soup”, Occupy Monsanto, as part of its ongoing campaign against GMO foods and for citizen awareness of GMOs, is staging an “eat-in” on the grounds of the FDA’s Center For Food Safety And Applied Nutrition in the suburbs of Washington, DC on April 8. The organizers are inviting folks to bring their favorite organic ingredients for a vegetarian soup to be cooked at the event, designed to raise awareness of the FDA’s recent decisions on GMOs in favor of Monsanto, and the entirely-too-close relationship between corporations and the FDA, especially in the person of its Deputy Commissioner for Foods, Michael Taylor.

So, folks… are you hungry for a little “food democracy”? 

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Blast From Yer Past: Feb. 15, 2003

February 15, 2003 was called by many “The Day The World Said ‘No’ To War”, and was reportedly the largest worldwide turnout for a single day of protest in history. Here’s a little “remastered” slice of what went down in New York City that day:



As I recall, the actual rally site and staging area for the march was somewhere around UN Plaza-ish, but owing to the staggering hugeness of the crowds converging — reportedly in the 1.5 million neighborhood — we never quite made it to the actual rally or march, and ended up just kind of flowing with the crowd through the streets, and spending most of the day hanging around East 50th and Third Avenue.

Here’s my friend Marianne from the Washington Action Group and the “Doghouse” puppet workshop in DC, being gratuitously harassed by NYPD goons for using a bamboo stick — apparently considered a “lethal weapon” that day — to hold up her sign. She was helped out by comrades in the crowd with some spare cardboard wrapping paper rolls.

DC anarchists “representing” on Third Avenue. One of the better flag designs of the day.

Some more of our friends from DC, the ever-popular Korean drummers’ group whipping up the crowd.

Just a few weeks before, the then-director of Fatherland Security, a pug-ugly bastard named Tom Ridge (a guy who looked as if he could play a gangster in a ’40s film noir) advised the nation that their best defense against a chemical or biological attack was to — get this — seal off your doors and windows with plastic sheeting and duct tape.

I never could figure out how these people got onto the top of that Fritos truck. It was an oddly inspiring sight, though they seemed oblivious to the shouts of the crowd below to “throw us down a bag of Fritos, man!”

“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” This had to be my number-one favorite sign of the day. One is a genius; the other’s insane.

The Radical Cheerleaders belt one out towards the end of the afternoon. About this time, a breakaway unpermitted march had forced its way onto the streets and defied the police to march to a point near our location, succeeding by the strength of sheer numbers.