San Francisco protests (but doth not protest too much)


I attended the anti-Schwarzenegger demonstration at the Ritz in San Francisco last night. It was a great event: Lots of energy and a big crowd of good people. There's no way it was the 10,000 people that organizers had hoped for, but it was several thousand, which is a great turnout for a demonstration that wasn't even during campaign season.

I took a lot of pictures and talked to a lot of people, but by the time I got home I was just too damn tired to do much more than sort my photos and go to sleep. I felt kind of like I'd been at a museum for eight hours: lots of standing and slow milling around. So I'm not posting until today. Sorry for the delay.

There are accounts out there in the blogosphere (e.g., here) of smoke bombs and scuffles with the police and the Governor not even being able to get inside the hotel. I have to say that these accounts don't jibe with my experience and observations. I was there the whole time; the event was peaceful. Certainly, the Governor attended his own fundraiser: he couldn't get in through his planned entrance, but he went in another way.

As my pictures start going up, you can make up your own mind. This was a crowd that had a lot of elderly and young people, a lot of cops and nurses and teachers, a lot of labor leaders and passionate liberals. It wasn't a violent or rambunctious group at all.

Anyway: I'm going to slowly blog the story over the course of the day, keeping this posting at the top and updating it with a link index of all protest posts. Keep stopping by during the day to see what's new.

Links:
Part I: Setup
Part II: Substance
Part III: Strafing the Ritz
Part IV: Cops and firefighters
Part V: Don't tread on me
Part VI: Fun for the whole family
Part VII: CODE PINK!
Part VIII: Local color

That's probably it for now. Most of the good pics are already up; the rest of what I have is crowd shots and a few shots of speakers at the mike on the flatbed truck, which all look the same. If anyone is looking for B-roll type crowd footage, let me know and I'll send you what I have.

UPDATE: More coverage and a bonanza of links at Dropping the Gloves.

Posted: Wed - April 6, 2005 at 08:24 AM   | Category:     |   |   | |



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