Day 2: Four subway tokens well spent.

We arrived at the ANSWER march at about 12:30. As we walked down the path into the back of the rally, we were acosted full-time with varoius Red newspapers. On each side of the path was the table for Red group after Red group. I mean, there was like the Revolutionary Socialist Maoist Communist Freedom Liberation Party, or something like that. Parties I had never heard of. There among the mix was of course the 9-11 truth table, staffed in part by none other than Adam. I don't think I had seen him for a year or more. He's living somewhere out in western MA and gets paid by one of these groups. He was, unfortunately, a bit too busy with his table to really chat.

The rally was 1/3 media, 1/3 sketchy Red groups, and 1/3 people who were actually there for the rally. The media included tons and tons of out-of-town reporters and photographers, and even some out-of-town local tv. The crowd was very light, and you could easily walk very close to the stage before the crowd even got somewhat thick. By the time the march took off, though, it got and/or seemed significantly bigger, and like a decent size. The AP and the NYT went with a police estimate of 3000 people, and that sounds about right to me.

The march was good on most fronts. The route took us down to Causeway Street, right near the Fleet Center, though the huge fence in the street actually kept us just on the far sidewalk of Causweay, in a rather narrow stretch. When we turned back right, the road widened up and we passed the entrances to the FSZ that essentially all major groups except for Monday's Palestine rally have vowed to boycott (the moderately large demonstration planned for the final day of the convention, for example, is just going to take over the streets in that area -- or something like that).

The chants at the march mostly weren't too sketchy; the speakers at the march had already taken care of that, what with their calls for "long live the intifada" (neverending violence is what the Palestinian people want? I thought that's only what the right-wing tries to tell us) and diatribes about how Kerry is no different from Bush.

I saw very few people I knew at the ANSWER march, and I also heard that many fewer people were at the Social Forum on Sunday then on Saturday. It sounds like a lot of people just sat at home, or were busy organizing other demos later in the week.

When the march returned, we went to Cambridge to check out the Cambridge World Fair for a while, which was fabulous as always. Then I went to Jamaice Plain for the "people's party", which was super-duper low-key and like a very small festival, heavy on JP people. There was a stage that the few hundred people gathered around, and Couscous (Dennis Kucinich) made an appearance. His speach was very short and passioned, almost a bit much so. It had a bit of that quasi-religious flair to it that Beth finds sketchy, and it bordered on cult-like.

Anyhow, the Backbone Campaign had a strong presence and they had brought their huge, long, backbone with them. It's hard to describe, but it's like a really long puppet. Um, the whole 'backbone' theme is supposed to be the idea that the Democrats need to stand for something, and something progressive. They seem to be a group of at least some prominence.

Oh yeah, then most of the people went on a small march up the sidewalk to somewhere else in JP, while maybe 50 or a hundred stayed back. I ran into EDoug and talked to her for a bit before I had to run. Then these thirty cops showed up on motorcycles and started stalking the event. Bad scene. Random, and out of nowhere, and this was when the main festival was over. After I entered the subway, I could hear what sounded like a helicopter overhead.