Brilliant Indian summer day in San Francisco. Parade route from Dolores Park
over to and down Market, up Van Ness to Turk, West to Jefferson Park.
Definition of a Post-Modern Demonstration is Don't listen to the speeches
at the Start, Don't Listen to Speeches at the Finish. Walk and enjoy the
costumes, signage, other people's conversations, the drumming, the cat-calls
in unison up and down the parade, salute the City. Of course, take umbrage
at the Police with numerous surveillance cameras operating in full view -
umbrage because the equipment was no doubt bought with Homeland Security
Federal Grants to the local police - that's Homeland Security, the Federal
Agency that somehow could not use its surveillance equipment to see that a
hurricane was coming dead on to the Gulf Coast.
One of my favorite signs:
Read Between the Pipelines
The weirdest:
Free Hinkley
The day's tone: Unlike three years ago, in the build-up before the war, and
the one in New York before the Republican convention, instead of an optimism
that the demonstration might work to alter Administration policy, or produce
a new Administration, one senses two things:
1. The built-up rage is much more focused on Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -
their lies, deception, and what many have become to openly declare as
criminal behavior.
2. A deep sense of collective violation and lament- that we, the Republic,
have been almost irreparably damaged by the behavior, decisions and
consequences of this regime. A hopelessness - in the process of the Demo -
negated to a degree by walking, walking between the speeches, between Start
and Finish. Even as this so-called leadership begins to openly implode,
there is fear that the damage and debts incurred may be ones from which it
will take great leadership to recover. And, 'pray tell us', I suspect many
of us are asking, where on the political horizon is such leadership?

If interested, I got a few Demo photographs up on my blog:
Blog: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/

Love to hear an account of what things felt like in Los Angeles and
Washington, D.C. And London

Stephen V