San Francisco, March 20, 2003 (Part I)

My partner Debbie and I left our house at 6:30 AM to walk to the Ashby BART station, and immediately encountered neighbors from up our street, also obviously heading for demonstrations. We walked and talked together, but just a little bit too slowly for we missed the 6:40 train, and had to wait fifteen minutes for the next one. The train was not full. A significant fraction of the passengers were obvious demonstrators.

We got out at the Embarcadero station, and were on the street at about 7:15. We walked along Market Street towards where Sutter and Sansome streets intersected. We passed a line of empty Muni buses as we approached, a sign that the street blockages had already begun.

We had chosen this intersection because acquaintances of ours, fellow participants in a weekly workshop that had met the night before, had told us that this was where their affinity group was acting. And there they were: two lines of people seated in the street, their arms encased in tubes connecting them. More people sat in the street, blocking access to the chained lines of demonstrators. A line of police officers in full riot gear stood between the sidewalk and the demonstrators, but there were not enough of them to deny access to the street in anything more than a token manner.

Another two lines blocked off the other end of the intersection. The people we knew were chained across Market Street in the further line, at the southwest end of the intersection, and it was to them that we made our way.

Anger was in the air, and tension - the authorities could not possibly remove this human obstruction without either the cooperation of the chained demonstrators or using some sort of heavy equipment. But it was also festive. A brass marching band, about a dozen strong, came by and performed. A lot of people had drums and whistles. People in the open intersection danced to the music.

The organizers had set up a loudspeaker, and a young woman was speaking to the crowd through a wireless microphone. It was mostly slogan-chanting: "Stop the war against Iraq; the world says no!" "The People united will never be divided!" (I had always heard this in the past as "defeated", not "divided".) "Ain't no power like the power of the people, 'cause the power of the people don't stop!" and so on.

At the other end of the intersection, where the demonstrators appeared to come from one of the more hard-core radical elements behind the organized anti-war movement, a common slogan was "No justice, no peace!" I thought this was the wrong slogan for the moment. This particular slogan usually is meant as a kind of bargaining threat: if you don't give us justice, we won't give you peace. At this moment, though, peace is one of our demands. The most charitable interpretation of the slogan now is one of description of our predicament, in that we have neither justice nor peace; but I don't think this is what the chanters had in mind. These demonstrators had placed a sign reading "Free Palestine", with a Palestinan flag design, n the front window of the empty bus at the head of the queue of stopped buses.

Looking up and down Market Street, I could see blockages at other intersections, in both directions. The woman with the microphone told of closures at Van Ness and Fell streets, at the corner of Powell and Bush (this inspired a mocking cheer), and at the Federal Building. It began to be clear that more was happening than in this particular location. As yet, I had no real indication of how big things had gotten, as a demonstrator's announcement had to be considered hearsay, little better than rumor.

A phalanx of police officers arrived in formation from the southeast along Market. The woman with the microphone invited the people on the sidewalk to show their support by standing in the street by the chained and seated demonstrators. I got off the sidewalk in response, but Debbie asked me something I couldn't hear. I returned to the sidewalk to speak with her; she wanted to know what I wanted from her in case I was arrested. I answered, "Bail me out...," and we began to discuss the implications.

The police suddenly moved into the intersection, along the edges at the sidewalk. They quickly and effectively cleared the street of people, herding them with their riot sticks held in both hands like bumpers, leaving only the chained demonstrators and the people seated alongside to shield them.

One officer lost control, and began swinging his riot stick, beating the person who was trying not to be herded. The crowd roared. People took snapshots and recorded the beating with video cameras. I began to shout at the offending officer and the other police, "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!" The crowd took up the chant. The beating victim escaped to the sidewalk. The police fell into position in lines on either side of the street, along the sidewalk, to stand between the crowd and the seated and chained demonstrators. Out of breath, I stopped chanting, and discovered that the woman with the microphone had taken it up and was continuing to chant along with the crowd. The moment passed, and the situation evolved into the next phase of quiet stability.

Now began the long, slow process of arresting people and taking down the chain of demonstrators. People on the sidewalks were deemed legal; people in the street were violating the law and considered under arrest. A fire engine approached along Market from the southeast. Another phalanx of police in riot gear marched onto the scene. The police took one demonstrator at a time out of the group, secured his or her hands with plastic cable-tie handcuffs, and walk or drag him or her to the holding pen that had been set up on the corner where Sansome met Market. Many of the demonstrators resisted passively, requiring that at least two officers drag them - typically a third would carry the demonstrator's feet.

Every time a demonstrator was walked or dragged away, the crowd applauded. I remarked to Debbie that it was rather like the final table of a major poker tournament, where the players are applauded by those remaining, and the spectators, as they bust out.

At length, the unattached, seated demonstrators had been hauled off, and firefighters wielded saws to cut the pipes and chains joining the rest. We were afraid, as we watched, that someone's arm would be cut by the saws, but both the demonstrators and the authorities were in fact quite careful. The pipes were long enough that there was plenty of room to cut without getting near anyone's arm; and the firefighters took advantage of this. One by one, the pipes were cut, and then the chains inside them, and another demonstrator was taken away. "This is what democracy looks like!" chanted the woman with the microphone, as the saw cut through the pipes, orange sparks spraying onto the street.

The woman with the microphone, who had continued to speak, chant slogans, and sing to the crowd while all this was going on, remarked on how nice it was of the police to hold the intersection for us, doing a much better job than we could ever do.

Debbie chatted with one of the police officers in the line in front of us on the sidewalk. He said he was actually having a good time, that he was glad everyone was behaving themselves and being respectful. (He must have a thick skin, because he surely heard the anti-cop jeering that came from time to time from the crowd on the sidewalk.) He didn't like it, though, he said, when people had to be dragged away instead of walking.

The line of demonstrators was completely removed at last, and the police and firefighters moved on to the twin chains at the other end of the intersection. There the chained protesters lay flat on their backs to interfere with the cutting procedure.

And while all this was going on, people had gathered the street outside of the police line where the arrests were taking place. When the last chained protesters were removed, the police lined up to sweep the street and began to advance. The people in the streets fell back and returned to the sidewalk.

At this point it was about 9:00 AM. Debbie and I were both feeling like we should see what else was going on, so we walked up along Market Street, towards the next occupied intersection, at Montgomery and Post streets. There, the streets had been obstructed with overturned trash cans and newspaper racks. A group of six demonstrators had their hands linked together in the same pipes into a ring, and were dancing in a circle in the middle of the street. A planter holding a small evergreen tree had been dragged into the middle of the street. At Sutter and Sansome there had been no evidence of blocked traffic, except for the empty buses. Here, however, Montgomery Street was filled with cars trapped by the action, waiting for the time that the intersection could be cleared and they could drive on through. Debbie and I encountered our friends Laura and Michelle, and we all discussed what we had been doing and seeing.

Further up the street, where Geary, Kearny, and Third streets met, a large truck stretched all the way across Market Street. We couldn't tell if it were trapped there, or whether the driver had deliberately stopped it there as part of the action. We walked up to see, and saw that the police had just finished clearing obstructions, and the truck was ready to go. The driver looked philosophical, still no indication of whether he was there by choice or by circumstance. As he drove off, some of the people on the sidewalk shouted to the driver, "You are a hero!" indicating that they, at least, thought that he had blocked the street intentionally.

After walking back towards Montgomery, where the ring of chained people had disappeared but protestors still held the intersection, we parted company with Laura and Michelle. Debbie proposed having breakfast at a coffee shop she liked, and I liked the idea. The others demurred at the idea of spending money in the city on a day that was supposed to be anything but "business as usual". We each draw our own lines where we think they belong.