St. Paul preview

It is very late. and I will be getting up in about 3 hours to start our next event.  I am in Minneapolis now.  I thought it was important to do this:  I am going to leave you with a photo gallery I took today and a half-finished post.  I will have to finish it later.  I did take a lot of photos today.  The gallery is some faces of the arrested today outside of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, and a few from our procession during the larger peace march today, that happened before the blockades, which led to the arrests.

Wish I could write more now.  The following text may shed a little bit of light on the arrests.

 

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So here we are in the Twin Cities.  Denver, after the Veteran’s march was mostly calm and we spent some time getting ready to move again.  We slept in a rest stop in Nebraska on saturady morning for a few hours and then for a few more hours visited a friendly house in Omoah for showers, breakfast and a little bit of internet.   Our flagship Serendipity then took us faithfully on to Minneapolis, where we landed at another friendly home, our own home-base for the RNC, and met up with the rest of crew who flew out from Vashon Island, or rode north from denver with the Sustainable Living Road show on their beautiful bio-diesel busses.

Early the next morning we set up a full deployment of puppets for a parade in Minneapolis which sadly was a bit of a bust.  The parade was beautiful but smaller than expected and there were nowhere near enough volunteers to lift all of the puppets, leaving some of us hanging on the sidewalk with a huge yardsale of parts, puppets and nothing to do with them but pack up a gain and nurse our wounds.  That night I headed out to the “Convergence Center” in St. Paul to get a picture of what was going on with the autonomous groups — a large convergence made up of small direct-action and anarchist groups preparing to physically blockade the buses of delegates who would be arriving to the RNC in St. Paul the next day (today).

To be honest I had a sigh of relief upon entering the building.  It was like New Orleans, or Germany all over again.  There were crowds of activists talking outside and more inside, eating together and sharing conversations.  The largest event was upstairs in a great hall where at least a hundred activist were gathered for the spokes-council meeting, trying to decide amongst their various affinities what the best overarching plan of action should be for the next day, and how their respective groups would fit in.  I could imagine how scared the police are of these people.   But they are of a peaceful nature, and do not even serve meat, and spent the meeting find ways to meet everyone’s needs.

Here again I was visiting one of my favorite places, the small underestimated corners of true democracy-at-work.   I had entered into the middle of a five-hour meeting.  One of our friends from previous events was standing in front of the group, facilitating the consensus process.  There was a lot of discussion about solidarity in the event of arrest and it slowly became clear that most of the people there would be going to jail the next day, in the mission to at least delay, if not shut-down the GOP convention the next day.  In the end, most of them did end up in jail.  I watched many of them today be arrested having been corralled in a park after the blockades, nursing their pepper sprayed eyes and being handcuffed and led out one by one.  One hundred and nineteen of them would be held on felony charges for their alleged involvement in blockades.

At the convergence center the mood was somber to say the least.   America has a lot to learn form it’s young people.  It is late now, and I wish I could go into it more, but I wanted to give you taste.  Consensus can be apowerful tool.  If patriotism is real and can be a good thing, and if it extends beyond borders and orientation,  then this is one place where it is being developed.  If a nation only moves forward at the pace of it’s most radical fringes, then this is one such cusp, though there are certainly others, of other kinds.    I wish we didn’t share such huge myths about such principled people.  I am also thinking now about people of muslim faith who started ramadan today.

The building itself is an old theater across the river from downtown.  Two days before it had been raided.   The organizing committee that hosts the space had issued this statement:

“The police ransacked the building Friday night, bursting in with guns drawn, throwing people to the ground, and breaking down doors inside the space. They took with them computers, boxes of protest literature, maps, cell phones, digital cameras, a video camera, the landlord’s pvc piping, and poster making supplies.  The evidence receipts given contain no mention of feces or human waste, and the landlord can attest to the lack of sleeping mats on the premises.   The Ramsey County Sheriff’s office then closed the building for a “fire code” violation.  Fire code violations are also being used to close the houses of activists, with officials saying that if the doors on homes that they knocked down aren’t fixed by tonight they will board up the homes.  Today, Saturday, the city council representative for the ward that the Convergence Space is in was able to contact the Department of Safety and Inspections who are the actual authorities to determine if there is a code violation. The director of the department came to the space and ascertained that there were no code violations to be found.”

Police repression has certainly been a theme in the twin cities this last week. Raids have happend around town.  Today Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was arrested. She is one of the best and most respected  journalists in the country.  Other journalists homes were also raided.

the story goes on…

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logan