I wonder how many people call their loved ones after a day of protesting and say that they are using their one phone call from jail. I wonder how many loved ones fall for it.

I was having a hard time imagining the logistics, but it turned out that 1st, 2nd, and 3rd avenues were closed off and filled with protesters for 20 blocks. I really thought that they were going to try to keep hundreds of thousands of people on the sidewalks, a prospect that was scaring me a bit. The police did a lot of herding people into confined areas, which was actually a lot better than it sounds. I was grateful that we weren't getting crushed forward. It would have been a lot easier and safer for everyone if they would have just allowed a march, but it was peaceful and successful in spite of the powers that be.

We had to walk uptown quite a bit to reach the back of the rally and even before we got there we were with thousands of other protesters trying to find their way. Once we got into the rally, we were basicly fenced into a city block on 2nd Ave many blocks away from the stage. There were speakers set up but they weren't on for some reason so the only way that people could hear the rally and be connected to it was with small radios scattered through the crowd tuned to WBAI. It was really pretty amazing. That radio broadcast held the rally together. We could hear Bishop Desmond Tutu over the radios, but not very well. They rebroadcast his speech while we were driving home and it was intense. That guy could be a freaking rock star.

Another interesting activist-technology story. When we were driving into the city they had an unconfirmed report of up to 400 arrests at a youth feeder march from Union Square. We started talking to someone at the rally who said he had started out at Union Square and I asked him about the arrests. He said that the march was being led around through a ridiculous maze of police barricades and at one point the marchers were gated up and a bunch of paddywagons pulled up. All the kids pulled out their cellphones and started calling the press! Apparently they didn't end up getting arrested, but the guy said he wouldn't be surprised if the police led the march to the Bronx instead of the UN.

New York was crawling with police, and the tension was the highest of any protest that I have ever been to, but under the circumstances I was grateful that the police in general were allright. The fear caused by these latest terror alerts is a recipe for trouble. Things went very smoothly.

They did make me remove the thin wooden dowel from my FEAR sign. I might have caused trouble with it. I suddenly understood why everyone else's sign was held up with cardboard tubes - like the kind from wrapping paper. They didn't, however, take away my brother in law's cane. He wacks people with that thing all the time. Go figure.

I hear there were 750,000 protesting in the UK today. You Brits kick ass. There were a lot of pro- France and Germany signs. And a couple of duct tape ones too - in fact I started talking to a woman next to me and realized that she had a duct tape sign that said "Don't be afraid of Peace". She seemed to have gotten the e-mail about the cardboard poles. I get a dozen protest related e-mails every freaking day and somehow I missed that one.

Some other signs:
Viva La France
Tony Blair Yankee Poodle
Drunken Frat Boy Steals Country and Drives it Into Ditch
American Foreign Policy (drawing of Lady Liberty holding a gun to her head)
My bush would make a better president
real men know when to pull out