Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Batons, black blocs and pretty lights

In a class about leisure I was told that "deviant leisure" was a great way to gnaw at social bonds, upon hearing this I felt confused the people I was closest with were those that I got trouble with the most...
Today was pretty great. I went to the protest against police brutality, I went with Ice Cream, Australia, TKJ, Guts and Dreads was there as a photographer (not that it mattered later on). The protest was great and of course deteriorated into a proto-riot at the end. It started out pretty calm, an anarchist marching band playing music, people standing around and a punk throwing some muffins at cops. After we started marching towards the downtown (we never got out the suburbs since we were far and the cops...) a black bloc started to take action.
These guys were prepared and had brought along all kinds of goodies for the police and of course were decked out in head to toe in black. They started by shooting off some fire works at the riot cops who lined up on the sides of the streets we were marching down, it was really spectacular seeing the fireworks blow up against the police shields. They had some flares to throw around also. After their assault they broke up and slipped into the crowd. And for a while we kept marching just fine, As we turned a corner and started up through a playground some black bloc kids were kicking out bricks from the foot paths, but once we reached the middle of the playground people at the front of the march were telling us to change route and be careful because the police had cut off the initial route in their first attempt to break up the protest. As people gathered and looked for a new path we realized that another route was also blocked. As everyone walked into the last remaining street the black bloc kids were hurling bricks and fireworks at the cops to the cheers of everyone present. At this point I was with only TKJ and Australia since we had lost everyone else in the chaos. As we stood in the only clear street left we realized that we had been trapped, at the top of the street was a line of riot cops complete with shields and batons! We weren't immediately concerned until they began charging down the street beating everyone they could reach while shouting "BOUGE!" (French for move). At that point we had already decided we want to get outta the protest since I had an exam to write that I was already late to and Australia wasn't feeling it. We were walking into an alley when one of the riot cops ran past us shouting and or course hitting us with their batons (don't worry riot cop batons are padded), we dashed in to more dealings with the cops. I climbed a wall along with some others and crossed a yard into another street behind a police wall. I looked around having lost track of TKJ and Australia so I called TKJ, went back to the alley, helped a few people up the wall and we all continued to follow what was left of the crowd.
The remaining crowd was only a fraction of its former mass. We walked a few blocks, before having some routes cut off by police again, this time mail boxes and trash cans were upturned and some kids who remained from the black bloc turned over a cart full of woods and set it on fire, we looked around and saw that police were giving chase so we dashed down another alley way. TKJ traded phone numbers with a friend until police turned the corner and we vanished into another alley.
At this point we were set on just leaving (going back to the metro station where everyone locked up their bikes). We passed a gas station were we saw something strange, a group of protesters seemed to be hanging out with the cops right next to their cars; we were confused until we realized they were undercover instigators, they were there to cause enough trouble to "justify" police brutality, *sigh* bastards.
We got the metro without mush trouble after that and I was able to take my exam (I think I did okay).
Later that night I went to hang with Guts, TKJ, Dreads and Australia. We just kicked it, talked about the protest and went dumpstering, we found a shit ton of stuff but I only brought back a bit since the fridge is pretty full at the moment, can't wait to move, I'll be living with 4 or 5 people and will have two fridges!

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