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January 18, 2003 in San Francisco. This is what democracy looks like... |
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February 15, 2003 in Amsterdam, probably the biggest day of synchronized protests across the world. (Okay, Europe pictures were obviously not taken by us, nor were the aerial pictures.) Some of my favorite signs of the protests: "War is Peace. GEORGE orWell" and "Buck Fush"
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February 15, Barcelona. |
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February 15, London. |
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February 15, Madrid. |
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February 15, Paris. |
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February 15, New York City. I was very lucky to be at this protest, the first really major one in NYC, even though they had been happening in San Francisco for months. I had serendipitously scheduled a grad school interview at Cornell Med on this date and initially was really disappointed that I wouldn't be able to go to the synchronized protest in San Francisco -- until I found out that New York would be having its own massive one. I was supposed to have interview activites throughout the day, but on the day of the protest, I was incredibly lucky that they released us early for free time soon after the protest was supposed to have started. Having this land in my lap, I spent half an hour trying to figure out where the protest was and how to get there...until I found out that the march towards the rally point was only one block away! This picture only shows a small part of the march, which stretched for many blocks. |
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Diversity in every protest...but especially in New York. |
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I marched for 4 hours in sub-zero temperatures (five degrees below zero Celsius) towards the rally point at the United Nations. The most frustrating thing was that the police blocked us into groups and only let us march very slowly, maybe one block every twenty minutes -- really different from the essentially free march in San Francisco. This march wasn't supposed to happen at all. The city had refused to grant the permit, but how can any police force, even of New York City, stop half a million people from marching? |
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February 16, San Francisco...the one I missed. It's obvious from this picture how densely Market Street (which is pretty wide) is packed, and this goes from Embarcadero to City Hall, a distance of nearly two miles. All the major protests were like this. Which brings up a point that still shocks me: the police in San Francisco used to make visual estimates of how many people were at each protest. For one of the protests (it might have been January 18) they said that there were only 50,000 people at the protest, in contrast with the 200,000 that the protest organizers claimed using a different methodology (they have several people at different points along the march counting the number of people that pass by in a given amount of time, and multiply that by the length of the march). The police always estimate a number much lower than the protest organizers (in part because low numbers makes protests appear to be more controlled), but this difference was particularly striking. Anyway, the day afterwards the San Francisco Chronicle and every other news outlet published the 50,000 police estimate in their coverage of the protest. But several days later, the Chronicle published another article: the police had based that estimate only on the people at the City Hall rally -- they didn't include the thousands of people marching towards the rally, which greatly outnumbered the number people at the rally itself. Remember that the march is TWO MILES long, lasts for a good four hours of continuous movement, and is densely packed (to the point where people couldn't even get out of the BART stations and stations had to close and redirect people). The police then said that it was, after all, possible that there were 200,000 people at the protest. The importance of this is that they only admitted this days after the protest, when the rest of the country and the world weren't paying attention anymore. (And this explains why an Australian I met last year told me that the Australian media had portrayed the protests in the United States as "minimal" -- I wonder if the rest of the world really thinks no one opposes Bush here?) The police gave up making estimates soon after this... |
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March 20, San Francisco, the day the war started. There had been a pre-organized protest to be triggered the first day of the war -- smaller because the date wasn't known beforehand. People came to San Francisco and blocked intersections all over the city to stop normal life activities, trying to make the point that normal life was being stopped for civilian Iraqis, and that such things as going to work and driving around are relatively unimportant when people are dying in Iraq. Although it's a good point, I can't agree with this approach...it's just counterproductive if no one actually understands it (as much as they should) and get annoyed with the protesters and thus the cause. I did join a march in San Francisco on this day, but left as they headed onto the Bay Bridge to block it off. But that did give me an opportunity to watch the march pass by; I estimated about 8,000-10,000 people were in that march alone. Which made me mad to go home and see on the evening news that "several hundred" people were marching in San Francisco. Please...they wouldn't have had 100 policemen in riot gear following a march of only a few hundred people (besides the hundreds of other policemen spread throughout the city). It takes a lot of people to shut down a major city like what happened in San Francisco that day. More than 1000 people were arrested that day alone, so many that the police ran out of the plastic handcuffs and jail space. An article from the SF Chronicle (which was somewhat better at covering the protests than most of the mainstream news sources out there...) The media also kept bringing up "black bloc" protesters (whose tactics I also disagree with) even though 99.99% of the people only engaged in civil disobedience at the worst. One funny story about this: before the war started, someone anonymously called the police saying that black bloc protesters were smashing windows. The police showed up only to find the protesters smashing Windows CD's. |
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March 20, San Francisco. This confused group of policemen was trying to block the path of a group of marchers by surrounding them, only to find themselves surrounded by a group of protesters marching from the opposite direction! I wish I could take credit for this picture. :-) |
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March 20, Berkeley campus. Protest at Sproul Hall (most famous for being the rally point during Berkeley's Free Speech Movement) the day the war started. Berkeley is a city and school of extremes...while there are a lot of liberal people, as obvious from this picture, many would be surprised to find that (at least in the present day) conservative views are also strongly represented. |
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