Reply #9: The night the war started... [View All]

[htuttle]

...we had a protest in Madison at the Capitol building (as usual). Somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 or so showed up, IIRC (it may have been more -- we did top 10,000 at one protest, but I think that was the Feb 15th one).

There was a short march scheduled after the traditional speeches from local activists, labor leaders and church groups, and that's when it got really interesting.

As the protest organizers started off on the designated 'march route' (parade route, really), a group of Black Bloc'ers (bless their hearts) decided to take another route, right up at the front, on a breakaway march.

Well, for some reason still unknown to me, the crowd as a whole DECIDED TO FOLLOW THE BREAKAWAY MARCH. We had thousands and thousands of people carving a free-form snake through Madison's downtown -- stoppping traffic all the way.

The Bloc'ers bascially hijacked the whole damned march. Some of the organizers were kind of upset (ownership issues, I guess), and were also concerned about what the police would do.

Well, Madison's cops got damned good at handling this sort of thing over the years, and did NOT try to stop the march. They instead kept ahead of the march a block in every direction, and stopped traffic where ever we were headed.

We were shouting, we sat down in the middle of some intersections for awhile, we were marching through college student neighborhoods, calling people out of their houses to join us. WE WERE OFF OUR FRICKIN' LEASHES!! It was the most fun I've had outside our bedroom for a long, long time.

We marched 56 blocks, unpermitted, with at least a few thousand people hanging on until the end. At one point, we marched directly into traffic on a one way street (University Ave), and forced everyone to stop as we marched between the cars.

Like I said, the Madison police force, thanks to the influence of former Chief Cooper, has gotten very good at NOT inciting a crowd, but still keeping people from getting hurt. Nothing really bad happened that night. And it didn't stop the invasion.

But at least, for once, we were playing offense!