About a year ago I was meeting with a very very exemplary local organizer. There had been some international day of action against the Apartheid Wall in Occupied Palestine and he had pulled together a little information picket at a Starbucks, whose CEO is a major supporter of Israel.
Our meeting had finished, and we were heading our separate ways. He cracked a joke at my expense, about how writing articles for the internet wasn’t going to lead to social change. I came right back with my own crack about how I guessed that meant what we all needed to do was picket coffee shops. I guess at root we were both lamenting our inability to respond to the problems of the world with anything approaching proportion. They bomb: we talk to our neighbours. They cause starvation: we pass out leaflets. They engage in coups: we march on the street. The disproportionality is glaring and can lead one down very dangerous roads.
Yesterday there was a march in my city, Toronto, protesting the sham ‘handover of sovereignty’ on June 30th. Accepting the disproportionality as a given, I thought the march was a very good one and a success. Here is a description of the event.
In the afternoon, there were pickets at the Canadian Commercial Corporation and Interhealth, both Canadian companies that are profiting from the occupation of Iraq: CCC by arranging arms deals to the US, Interhealth by trying to get into private health care markets in West Asia. Next, a high school student group called ‘Stir It Up’ made an attempt to take a major intersection of the city, but there were around a hundred young people at that point and the City Police was taking the whole thing rather badly, and had at least 100 riot police of their own. So there was a kind of rally on the street corner, followed by a march to the US consulate and another rally.
Outside the US consulate, something strange was happening. All of the events of the day were conceived and planned by the “June 30th Coalition”, a coalition that includes the high school student group, members of OCAP, and many others. The more ‘mainstream’ ‘Stop the War Coalition’ (which, for US readers, is somewhere between United for Peace with Justice and ANSWER) planned an event for the same day and a rally at the same place. After the rally ended (at 6pm) the J30 Coalition had planned a march into Toronto’s financial district to confront other war profiteers. Stop the War Coalition had decided to march half a block in the opposite direction and disperse. Stop the War had obtained a permit for this half-a-block march and police clearly saw them as the ‘legitimate’ protesters and the J30 Coalition as the dangerous radicals who were trying to cause mischief.
Things got strange just before 6pm. Stop the War being the better-funded coalition, they made sure they had a large sound system for their speakers, while J30 had only typical megaphones. J30 had hoped that there would be a moment when organizers could explain to the crowd, giving them the option of marching south (into the financial district) or marching north (half a block to dispersal). But as 6 o clock approached, the Stop the War speaker on their podium announced the march north and then would not pause for one second to allow the J30 organizers to announce the march south. Indeed, the Stop the War was clearly attempting to filibuster the whole thing, preventing the J30 people from talking at all. Two frustrated J30 organizers stepped up (one onto a post box, the other on to a ledge) and yelled at the top of their lungs, quite hopelessly against the sound system, what the plan was. One of them pointed out that we had been limited to protests outside the US consulate for the past 3 years, while Canadian corporations and US corporations with offices in Toronto were not even being exposed. J30 people went to Stop the War’s podium and pointed out the impropriety of trying to filibuster a potentially good march, to which the speaker replied: “Oh come on, you have your own megaphones…”
The J30 people started chanting, “south, south, south”, and marching, and in the end nearly the whole crowd, which had grown to several hundred (under 1000 to my eyes, though it’s hard to know), joined the J30 march. The police tried to contain it at various points, but it became a ‘snake march’ and kept turning off in different directions. There was a real energy, and the march visited such illustrious sites as General Electric (a major weapons manufacturer and owner of MSNBC), and GlobeRisk (a company that trains the kinds of ‘private contractors’ we’ve seen in Iraq). I saw the educational effect myself: both marchers and passersby were intrigued to learn about the Canadian role in war and plunder. There was no trashing, and the police seemed largely to refrain from provocation or attacks on the protesters.
It was a good street protest, a good feeling to be on the streets, and something that has the possibility to grow.
