re: #35 goddamnedfrank

That video goes a long way towards explaining why I don’t do protest crowds anymore. Too many random assholes in one place, no discernible hierarchy of decision making and shit can go south so goddamned fast that it’s easy to get caught in the middle of it without any clue what the fuck is going on. I did the WTO Battle in Seattle ‘99, got to experience the black block, giant puppets, panicky fuckwits, rubber bullets and military grade tear gas first hand (the SPD ran out mid day and actually sent to Ft Lewis for resupply.) It’s a good experience to go through once and while I value the role street level protestors play in our democracy holy shit never again.

You were there? I never call myself “being there” because even then I was too old and fat to really keep up with the action, so I was just milling around the periphery, but that was an event, for sure.

Then the next week, Nelson Mandela was in town, whom if the WTO had had the kind of regulations they wanted in place a few years earlier, would still have been on Robben Island, because the sanctions that broke the Apartheid regime would have been illegal.

Gotta love Schizophrenic Seattle™.