From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I'm in New York for work this week, so I walked down to Zuccotti park last night to check out the general assembly for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Some thoughts and pictures are on my Google+ stream. Since it's a public post, you shouldn't need a Google+ account to view that though. If that's not the case, please let me know.

Two things of significance happened in the vicinity of Federal and Colfax on Thursday. The best attended and covered was Barack Obama's acceptance speech of the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party. I saw portions of the speech in a restaurant with the sound off, but intend to listen to it in full soon. Ten hours or so before Obama took the stage at Mile High, a few thousand immigrants rights supporters gathered for a march. The police and media presence was lower than at the stadium and lower than at the Recreate 68 marches, but the participants were just as energized. The organizers had set up their own security team to keep folks inside the boundaries of the parade route -- a more friendly rapport than cops with guns and body armor.

Before the march, Aztec dancers honored the directions and some folks gave speeches. Boxes of bilingual red and white signs were distributed. Attendance seemed around two thirds Hispanic with a few Asians and African-Americans and a fair number of familiar activist faces from earlier in the week. The Backbone Campaign brought the Organic Farmer and Free Trade Coffee puppets and the 14-foot inflated Statue of Liberty. Marchers included a few kids in strollers and some elders, but the majority were in their teens through forties or so. There were several large banners and plenty of home made signs to compliment the ubiquitous printed red signs.


The march ended in a park and the Aztecs drummed and danced some more before a variety of speakers took the stage while Food Not Bombs gave out free burritos and a few organizations distributed literature. Starting the march in shade around 10 and ending in shade around 11 felt great. The messages were on the whole quite positive: Support for immigrants as people, keeping families together (and thereby opposing ICE raids), and recognition of immigrants as a key strength in the U.S. economy. There was stronger overt support for Obama than in the radical left marches earlier in the week with several rounds of "Sí Se Puede." Given the anti-immigrant vitriol on cable news, I was surprised to only see one counter-protester and that was at the bus stop after I left the speeches.

After the march I returned home to rest my blistered feet, sort through photos, and hang out with mollybzz and a new friend. I had a great week, took lots of great photos, met some swell people, and got my RDA of exercise through walking. It was good to relax, take a shower, and enjoy the quiet atmosphere of a coffee shop. I wish luck to the folks hoping to spread their message outside the RNC.

Some shouts out for the week:

• Food Not Bombs for keeping activists, homeless folks, and fed and creating a shady and relaxed atmosphere to hang out
• Code Pink for being fabulous, ubiquitous, and on-message all over downtown
• The Backbone Campaign for creating great street art and presenting a positive message
• The many groups who organized the immigrants rights march
• Iraq Veterans Against the War for using their socially-granted status of respect to stand for peace
• Alliance for Real Democracy for embracing nonviolence and for not naming themselves after a year when a lot of bad stuff happened
• Street medics for making sure everyone had sunscreen and being ready in case anyone had a problem
• Police officers assigned to march duty for gently keeping folks in the parade route and not doing anything that would escalate into conflict
• Citizens of Denver who independently shared their own political or amusing messages
• Homeless guys who hung around downtown so that visitors could encounter some of Denver's normal flavor
• National Lawyers Guild for keeping an eye on the cops

I hope these blog entries have proved informative and enjoyable. I haven't seen any mainstream media coverage of the DNC, so I don't know how extensively they covered what was going on outside. My big colorful hat got me at least six short interviews, but I couldn't even find the section of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News the interviewers said they were from. I'm far from an unbiased source, but my goal has been to share whatever messages folks on the streets have, whether I agree with them or not. My photos of the DNC are all free for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. In 1968, gathering tens of thousands of people in the streets was a fairly effective way to share information. In 2008, the Internet has made information dissemination easy; everyone who shows up in a march already knows all about the issues. We cal all be the media.

The card someone handed me yesterday said that at 9 Public Enemy would be at Civic Center Park followed by a march at 11. In fact, at 10 there was a folk singer from Seattle on stage while the American Indian Movement got things set up. Several people spoke about racial issues and political prisoners in front of a crowd of 150 at the most. I wandered around and checked out the Pictures of You: Images from Iran exhibit and checked out the Falun Gong marching band and float. Apparently, the Falun Gong marched down to the "Freedom Cage" to play music and hold signs about Chinese torture practices, but since that free speech zone is totally out of the way, nobody was there to hear their message.

At noon, the protesters marched down part of the mall and up to the Federal Building (10th Circuit Courthouse). Speakers talked about Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, and other prisoner issues. 20 or so people did the march in orange jumpsuits and black hoods and then knelt by signs about Guantanamo prison. Someone gave a demonstration of waterboarding (but with a plastic mask over the face for safety). Turnout was pretty low; the march had about as many police (including 20 or so on horse) as protesters.


I wandered back down to the mall and came upon the Angry Christians Holding Signs intersection. Apparently there had just been a confrontation and a few dozen police officers were blocking portions of the intersection while one guy was arrested. There was a small crowd exchanging barbs with the "Homo Sex Is A Sin" crew, but police in the vicinity again outnumbered protesters. There was no police escort for the dozen or so Hillary Clinton supporters marching with signs and balloons on the mall. If march participation is any indication, Leonard Peltier has more support than Hillary Clinton.

After taking some pictures at the Code Pink "look at the absurdity of the freedom cage free speech zone that nobody can see" event, I made my way back to Civic Center where I had an interesting discussion at the Pictures of You installation with a guy born in Iran, a youth whose dad was an Iranian teacher, and a couple middle-aged white guys. Some of the conversation was taped for the documentary they're doing about the piece. I was also interviewed a couple times by the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post because I had a colorful hat. I can't find the parts of their websites the reporters were talking about, though.

On the inside-the-convention front, Michelle Obama's speech and the "candid" family interactions were quite deft political maneuvers. Republicans have had the upper hand in media savvy in recent times, but the Obama campaign are clearly an image force to be reckoned with.

Listening to KGNU tonight, I learned that about 80 people got arrested tonight. Many of them were probably involved in "Unconventional Denver" actions to disrupt some of the 1200 DNC-related parties going on. The police strategy seems to be:
(1) Have heavily-armed police all over the place, standing around and looking imposing.
(2) If something happens, quickly form a large police barrier so crowds can't get in.
I think it's a better strategy than police have adopted at other major protest events in the last ten years, but it's kind of disconcerting to walk down the street with guys in SWAT gear standing around every thirty yards.

The number of folks "on the street" today was already pretty small; if a lot of folks get arrested, later events might be quite vacant. I hope enough people show up tomorrow to power all the street puppets.

Flickr only shows the latest 200 pictures on free accounts' photostreams, so 20 pictures I took yesterday aren't available. I grabbed links to all my photos currently available and stuck them in an ugly page on my site in case you want to find something later. I'm posting to Flickr this week mostly so I can participate in groups and tags. My gallery will be the long-term home for these pictures.