The police arrived well before the protesters.

 

 

On a variety of modes of transport

 

 

 

and it wasn’t hard to tell what they were preparing for

 

 

 

fortunately as the crowd gathered, they presented a less fearsome picture.

 

 

and once the march started the focus was on:

 

      getting attention – whether by visual means:

 

 

or by aural means:

 

 

and the message

 

 

 

 

 

 

I walked from the front of the parade to the back. There were thousands and thousands of people. They were mostly young, or gray, not so many in between. The speakers weren’t embarrassing, but their message probably wouldn’t have played for too many other audiences. I’d say I sensed a bit of resurgence of radicalism, tho maybe its just been too long since I was on a college campus.

 

At the rear was a tightly-packed small group with an unholy air about them. Their banners of red and black had no text on them. The police pulled down their visors and circled . Somebody from the crowd threw a wadded up leaflet over the heads of the police, a small scuffle ensued and the group was escorted onto a waiting bus for the ride downtown. They all seemed to be reading from the same script.

 

The ghost of the '60s was everywhere, but without a war to “heighten the contradictions” (lenin’s term?), I was hard pressed to see how they would ever gain a mass following. Not unless tie die comes back in.

 

Still, whoever said youth is wasted on the young may not have been entirely right, cause its hard to know who else would have stood outside on a blustery winter day for this purpose. The few NGO types who were invited to WEF acknowledged the demonstrators when they said they felt more listened to ever before.