It's four years almost to the day since the start of the illegal invasion of Iraq. The last war rally I attended, on March 15, 2003 was on the very eve of the launch of that war. If you read that report March 15, 2003 was a very exciting day for me, what with watching a cat-and-mouse game between police and an unofficial protest march I came across going down Market street that ended with a couple hundred arrests of people who had essentially been simply walking down the sidewalk and making a bit of noise.
As a measure of something related to the greater significance of the protest rally .. the march route four years ago went through some very non-mainstream areas of San Francisco, through neighborhoods with many surveillance cameras (can you cay 'high crime neighborhood'). The protesters I mentioned who had been arrested were trying to take the protest to Market street, because that's where the significance is if you can be visible in front of all the tourists etc. This year the protest rally started at The Embarcadero, went down Market Street, and ended in the Civic Center plaza across the street from City Hall. You couldn't have asked for a route with more significant visibility in San Francisco.
I took Caltrain up the Peninsula and it was more than exciting how jampacked the train was with war protesters. There were people handing out flyers, talking away with each other, a representative from Raging Grannies was teaching us some songs, etc. And .... that person remembered me from 2 1/2 years ago from the November 2004, San Francisco Autoshow when I accidentally bumped into a small scale protest staged by Medea Benjamin with Code Pink and Raging Grannies representatives who were climbing on top of Hummer's and chanting Hybrids not Hummers and calling into question the patrioticness of the HummerLovers ogling their dream vehicles.
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