Back from the front

[sabotabby]

My less-rambling SPP post is here, and my Flickr photoset is here but there really can't be too many SPP posts, so this is what I did yesterday:



I woke up at 5:30 and staggered to the meet-up point for 7 am.




Here's one of the buses, which was headed to Montebello today. The one-day bus that I took was a Coach bus, so far comfier and it had TV screens. I read Fun Home on the way up (it was awesome) so you can all stop telling me to read it. I also drew pictures of the bus being transformed into a giant centipede after I ran out of reading material.


Olivia Chow—one of the few politicians aware of the SPP and trying to do something about it—gave the send-off speech. She is far perkier in the morning than I am.

It was a long time since I'd been on a bus full of activists headed to a protest. As I've mentioned a few times, I'm not really keen on demos (I only go out of a sense of obligation), and I'm really, really not keen on symbolic protest. But there's something about waking up early in the morning and heading out on a road trip that really winds you up and gets you excited.

Here's where I say something nice about the IS for once: They were very well organized and they took the five-hour drive as an opportunity. One of the things that tends to annoy me about big protests is that the media inevitably singles out the stupidest people at a rally to quote. So you have summit-hopping punk kids at the anti-globalization protests whose analysis boils down to "Hulk smash capitalism" and worse, crusty old trade union fuckers who blurt out that the Mexicans are stealing their jobs. The group that I went down with ranged in age from late teens to mid-80s, with all levels of political experience. The IS organizers did their best to make sure that everyone had a basic understanding of what the SPP was and were able to talk about it intelligently.


Getting off the bus, we saw a bunch of cops and the other protesters gathering at Parliament Hill.


The first person I ran into at the rally was my friend "Jose" from the CPC-ML. They had a big contingent and had been in Ottawa for a few days. The CPC-ML has an incorrect political line and a stupid logo, but it's really nice to see Parliament Hill swamped in red flags.

I managed to find writer_grrrrl in the crowd, so we hung out on the lawn and caught up a bit.


The Ottawa cops are apparently not brutal enough to handle the likes of us, so they imported cops from other places, including Toronto and York Region. The Ottawa protesters were annoyed by this. I guess I'm desensitized because mass amounts of cops surrounding a peaceful symbolic demo is pretty par for the course in Toronto.


Can we stop with the September 11th conspiracy shit now? These people were all over and being very noisy, and they need to STFU. No one cares about your theory on WTC-7 and Wikipedia is not a source, kthnxbye. writer_grrrrl and I agreed that they must be purged from the movement before they make us all look bad.


You can guess why I like this picture a lot.


Here's the rally. Not as big as it should have been, and scorching hot. It was a good thing that zingerella supplied us with cookies.


Old lady activists are the best ever. I can't wait to be one. Seriously. When I'm 80 I'll be approximately a hundred times more militant and hotheaded than I am now.


I don't really get what this was about. Some people were going on about the recent electoral fraud that brought Calderon to power, and in response, they wanted everyone to "cast a vote for Mexican democracy." This seemed incredibly culturally imperialist, as if there wasn't a huge history of people in the First World choosing the leaders of the Third World.


At least they had a guy dressed up with a Mexican wrestling mask. That slightly redeemed the whole exercise.

Then we demo'd:





I was trying to find lovableatheist and my other Fellow Workers from Ottawa. I stumbled upon this guy who wasn't a Wobbly, didn't know any Wobblies, but was carrying a cool Wobbly sign:



Then I found myself in the middle of a Black Bloc breakaway march!



(Where I did find the Wobblies and got to say a very brief hello.)



This small dog is against the SPP. You should be too.

Afterwards, I attended the teach-in at Ottawa University and caught the bus back. On the way back, we watched Occupation 101 and I got in a debate with some ISers about the movie—namely, the fact that it was supposedly about Palestine but interviewed very few Palestinians. I'm now a bit under the weather and very tired (though I slept for almost 11 hours), so more later, including camwhoreage and cartoons.

Comments

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Totally cool. I knew I couldn't make the SPP rally, as it was coming too soon after Haiti, but I did go to at least one of the organizational meetings. I'm pretty sure some of the THAC people were there.

[sabotabby]

Yes; I ran into THAC's youngest member handing out flyers, and there was another THAC person that I was talking to on the bus. I'm sure there were others whom I don't know.

Welcome back, by the way.

[lovableatheist.livejournal.com]

Nice! It was cool to meet you and I kind of regret not snapping a pic of both of us, just on the off chance that someone out there might suspect we are the same person.

After we parted ways, we marched to the PSAC building where we had booked a room, but the cops wouldn't let us in. They eventually let us in when they realized that we weren't goig to tear the place apart (or had at least rented the room before tearing it apart). While we were inside spokescounciling, cops from everywhere came and surrounded the building, only to stand around and have lunch.

[sabotabby]

I was going to post the picture I took of you in a locked post, along with a few others. (I have a no-pictures-of-me-in-public-posts policy, which makes it awkward when I want to do a public post with a lot of photos and there are one or two that I'm in or that a friend is in.)

I'm amused that all the cops seemed to think that the protest was going to be a Really Big Deal and then they hardly got to crack any heads at all. Wankers.

[lovableatheist.livejournal.com]

Feel free to post pics of me. I don't mind. I did go to your flickr thing and steal the pic of me though.

The cops and the media made a huge stink of the rally. The infoshop even received a communiqué from the cops and a business association telling all businesses to take their signs off of the streets on Sunday to prevent protesters from using them as weapons and on the day of the rally, the infoshop was the only place on Bank street that I saw with a sign out. Hilarious!

[sabotabby]

It's a good picture.

Seriously, WTF? Do people in Ottawa just never protest or something?

[lovableatheist.livejournal.com]

You'd think that with Ottawa being the national capital, people would be used to protests, but I guess not. As you said though, we aren't used to having cops literally surround us and stand at every single street corner when we protest either. The whole thing was weird and I think the cops were expecting a full scale riot to break out at a Council of Canadians protest.

[sabotabby]

That granny with the ungrammatical sign looked pretty tough, though.

[ocicat-bengals.livejournal.com]

I woke up at 5:30 and staggered to the meet-up point for 7 am.

Now I know why I'm not at many demos these days.
Only the young can get up at these hours.
I took my kid to one demo and she thought it was
too much work doing all that walking.

[sabotabby]

Most demos aren't that early. Though I recall staggering around the back alleys of Washington DC at 5 am once. I'm okay with doing it if I have coffee, advanced notice, and a good night's sleep beforehand.

[peterbilt-47.livejournal.com]

Well,except I think it's "whose," not "who's." These people need to be purged from the movement before they alienate the copy editors.

[sabotabby]

It could just be—I don't know, very abstract, or even absurdist? Who is security? Dear Leader is security. Who is prosperity? John Galt is prosperity. Etc.

[ironed_orchid]

I don't know you, but I think I love you.

[zemleroi.livejournal.com]

Too bad I didn't see you at the protest. So you didn't go to Montebello?

Old lady activists are the best ever. I can't wait to be one.
Just hope that you remember how to spell the word whose when you are 80...

[(Anonymous)]

(Didn't see the previous comment.)

[sabotabby]

I thought you might be there. But I didn't see you. Oddly enough, I ran into all sorts of Toronto people. Did you go to Montebello? I should have, and didn't.

[zemleroi.livejournal.com]

Nah, I couldn't. I am submitting my Master's in two weeks and I have a job during the day... Really couldn't make it.
It's interesting that the media have portrayed the protesters as conspiracy theorists. And the Globe is saying there were "a few hundred people". Harper, of course, is the last instance and the sole repository of truth... Three hundred bows to the emperor.

[sabotabby]

There were a lot of Loose Changers in attendance. One was performing something atrocious that doesn't deserve to be called hip hop in my general vicinity. But somehow I don't think that's the kind of conspiracy theory they're talking about.

Does this mean that you're almost finished with the student life? Or are you doing your Ph.D.?

[emak-bakia.livejournal.com]

I hate those huge CPC-ML flags. Get over yourselves. Just because your flags are taller than everything else in sight does not make you any more relevant.

[lovableatheist.livejournal.com]

zing!

[sabotabby]

Someone needs to tell them that pink and red clash.

[ghostwes.livejournal.com]

So does their website. Ack, my eyes.

[sabotabby]

R.I.P. Hardial Bains :( :( :(

On an unrelated note, I may have finally gotten your IWW membership issue sorted out. That is, if you'll still have anything to do with us.

[ghostwes.livejournal.com]

Wow... I figured you guys had forgotten about me. I've received no correspondence or updates since, well, the last time I mentioned it to you. I'm not angry about it or anything -- I just figured it was a lost cause.

As for whether I am still interested... well, I dunno. I mean, I'd like to support an organization whose principles I agree with, but given this mess, I'm not sure that I have much faith in the IWW's efficacy at this point in time. Perhaps you can email me the details of what you have sorted out and I can decide based on that? In any case, I do appreciate your looking into this for me, sabotabby.

[cerulean-knight.livejournal.com]

I guess it could be worse, you could be down here protesting. They don't bother with cops to beat you up, just "Rally Squads" of steroid pumped, young-republican athletes.

http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/freespeech/presidential_advance_manual.pdf

[sabotabby]

"USA! USA! USA!"

[goodliver.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for this posting. The photos are great. It's so encouraging that people of so many different political ideologies (even complete idiot nativists) can see that these agreements are wrong, wrong wrong. It makes me feel somewhat hopeful.

Can I mooch your smurf icon?

[sabotabby]

Absolutely!