raindrops keep falling on my head
As Bela Lugosi once said, "Fuck, it's cold!"
There is a poster up in Kline that lists every state's average I.Q. along whether they went Kerry or Bush. The top states are Connecticut (113), Masachusetts (111), New Jersey (111), and New York (109). The bottom ones are SC, WY, ID, UT and Mississippi (which I forget how to abbreviate), measuring between 89 and 85. Not a single state below 98 voted Kerry, and not a single one above 100 voted Bush. It's terriffic. (Yeah, i know this has more to do with education and money than innate intelligence, but still, doesn't that say something??)
The newspaper articles Chelsea linked to today [ Newsday, WSTM, Poughkeepsie Journal, Daily Freeman ] were very disheartening, because it seems that none of them got the truth about what happened. There was no "fight" between students and police. There wasn't even any "rowdiness." We were completely well-behaved. All we did was refuse to get on the bus the police provided for us, and we were completely within our rights, because we weren't in the street. What happened was that the police wanted to shut down the crowd, and so they manufactured some story about student aggression and used it to arrest a dozen people and scare the flaming shit out of seven dozen more. Another paper quoted a Red Hook resident as saying we were "sore losers," which is almost amusingly ridiculous. This isn't like a sports game, like angry Cards fans protesting that the Sox won the World Series. That's a game, and that's decided. But this isn't some kind of sporting rivalry, this is about what's good or bad for the country, and half of America is pissed off about what the guy in office has done and will probably continue to do. Just because he won doesn't mean we have to like him.
[Aside: some of the people in the march said some things about Bush stealing the election, and some others passed out fliers saying as much, and that I do think to be untrue. However, the tone of the whole thing was just generally anti-Bush and anti-war, and that's what we were yelling the whole way. That's why I was there, because protesting the fact that he's still the president after all the shit he's done, whether he was the "winner" or not, is worth marching for any day, in my book. I mean, he did garner much of his approval via blatant lying.]
Finally, to the people who think it was silly to go to Red Hook, a principally Democratic place: the point of a demonstration is to disrupt business-as-usual and get people to pay attention to what you're saying. We did that. We also did disrupt a bunch of mothers who were just trying to pick up their kids from the high school, who didn't deserve the frustration, but it was only for about ten minutes, after which we got up off the street. I'm sorry that people got held up, but that's part of how a protest works. Washington D.C. is overwhelmingly democratic, and the March For Women's Lives probably fucked up traffic there good and proper last year, but so it goes. Better than being complacent.
That being said, the march was badly organized (barely organized at all), and we did not have any kind of unifying sentiment other than hatred of Bush. Still, if the police hadn't gone Rodney King at the end, I would have said that all in all it was a good thing, and I don't see any reason for people to be pissy about how it didn't "do" anything. It let a bunch of people scream and be heard. The huge antiwar protest in NYC didn't "do" anything; should they have stayed home? Bard will be better-organized and put together more effective counter-Bush moves in the future. For the time being, a lot of people are just angry, and the police have made things worse with their ignorance.
Here's a reward for reading through my whole rant:
At dinner Andreas stood on a chair in the cafeteria and shouted, "I have an announcement. Everyone should love one another. That's the announcement," and sat back down. "Who do you think you are, telling me what to do?" came a voice from the crowd. As someone left to bus his tray, Andreas's friends grabbed him and said, "Sir, before you leave, would you mind answering a few questions about your experience today? How do you feel about the Andreas Zambrano Love Imploration that was made just moments ago?"
In other news, I have eaten more salted seeds in the past three days than you would believe. The top layer of skin on my tongue is actually peeling off from the salt burns. Oh yeah it's gross.
There is a poster up in Kline that lists every state's average I.Q. along whether they went Kerry or Bush. The top states are Connecticut (113), Masachusetts (111), New Jersey (111), and New York (109). The bottom ones are SC, WY, ID, UT and Mississippi (which I forget how to abbreviate), measuring between 89 and 85. Not a single state below 98 voted Kerry, and not a single one above 100 voted Bush. It's terriffic. (Yeah, i know this has more to do with education and money than innate intelligence, but still, doesn't that say something??)
The newspaper articles Chelsea linked to today [ Newsday, WSTM, Poughkeepsie Journal, Daily Freeman ] were very disheartening, because it seems that none of them got the truth about what happened. There was no "fight" between students and police. There wasn't even any "rowdiness." We were completely well-behaved. All we did was refuse to get on the bus the police provided for us, and we were completely within our rights, because we weren't in the street. What happened was that the police wanted to shut down the crowd, and so they manufactured some story about student aggression and used it to arrest a dozen people and scare the flaming shit out of seven dozen more. Another paper quoted a Red Hook resident as saying we were "sore losers," which is almost amusingly ridiculous. This isn't like a sports game, like angry Cards fans protesting that the Sox won the World Series. That's a game, and that's decided. But this isn't some kind of sporting rivalry, this is about what's good or bad for the country, and half of America is pissed off about what the guy in office has done and will probably continue to do. Just because he won doesn't mean we have to like him.
[Aside: some of the people in the march said some things about Bush stealing the election, and some others passed out fliers saying as much, and that I do think to be untrue. However, the tone of the whole thing was just generally anti-Bush and anti-war, and that's what we were yelling the whole way. That's why I was there, because protesting the fact that he's still the president after all the shit he's done, whether he was the "winner" or not, is worth marching for any day, in my book. I mean, he did garner much of his approval via blatant lying.]
Finally, to the people who think it was silly to go to Red Hook, a principally Democratic place: the point of a demonstration is to disrupt business-as-usual and get people to pay attention to what you're saying. We did that. We also did disrupt a bunch of mothers who were just trying to pick up their kids from the high school, who didn't deserve the frustration, but it was only for about ten minutes, after which we got up off the street. I'm sorry that people got held up, but that's part of how a protest works. Washington D.C. is overwhelmingly democratic, and the March For Women's Lives probably fucked up traffic there good and proper last year, but so it goes. Better than being complacent.
That being said, the march was badly organized (barely organized at all), and we did not have any kind of unifying sentiment other than hatred of Bush. Still, if the police hadn't gone Rodney King at the end, I would have said that all in all it was a good thing, and I don't see any reason for people to be pissy about how it didn't "do" anything. It let a bunch of people scream and be heard. The huge antiwar protest in NYC didn't "do" anything; should they have stayed home? Bard will be better-organized and put together more effective counter-Bush moves in the future. For the time being, a lot of people are just angry, and the police have made things worse with their ignorance.
Here's a reward for reading through my whole rant:
At dinner Andreas stood on a chair in the cafeteria and shouted, "I have an announcement. Everyone should love one another. That's the announcement," and sat back down. "Who do you think you are, telling me what to do?" came a voice from the crowd. As someone left to bus his tray, Andreas's friends grabbed him and said, "Sir, before you leave, would you mind answering a few questions about your experience today? How do you feel about the Andreas Zambrano Love Imploration that was made just moments ago?"
In other news, I have eaten more salted seeds in the past three days than you would believe. The top layer of skin on my tongue is actually peeling off from the salt burns. Oh yeah it's gross.