THE FRIDAY LABOR-ENVIRONMENT MARCH
We marched today with thousands in this hastily organized labor-environmental-take-back-the-streets rally through downtown Seattle. The speakers before the march acknowledged the importance of this past week for global change. It has been a historic time when tens of thousands of people from Labor, Environmental, and Social Justice movements have come together to stand for change.
We marched with the Anarchist Samba band, Native American drummers, sheet metal workers in blue nylon union jackets, topless lesbians with slogans written on their skin, which must have been chilly (Boobs not Bombs! Better NAKED than NIKE!), and with a police motorcyclist, this one from the Kent Police Department, who was looking forward to a day off tomorrow so he could see his family. With environmentalists, Messianic "Jews", chanters, singers, screamers, and drummers. With a woman who got out of jail at 4am because they couldn’t find any paperwork on her (scores of protestors gave their names as Jane or John WTO as a way to clog the judicial system). "There’s a lot of traumatized people in there who had nothing to do with the protest, who just got swept up with it," she said. The labor chorus sings "Solidarity Forever," there’s a sea of signs (my favorite, "Free the Seattle 500"), and the crowd chants, "THIS is WHAT De-MO-cracy LOOKS LIKE!"
At the corner of 5th and Pine, where the march turned north, it got tense. A few people wanted the crowd to face off with the line of police, and proceed down to the King Co. Jail, where for many hours last night hundreds of people gathered to protest. One man stood in the intersection, yelling, "Don’t turn, Go To The Jail!" Robin alerted a union peacekeeper and got a corrider opened for the march to continue. That’s all it takes, one or two people, to change the energy of a mob.
When we got back to Ballard, the cable news
had a helicopter shot of the rally. In the street,the crowd had lined up and spelled out
in street-tall letters,
"D E M O C R A C Y."
