George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in early 2003 and activists in San Francisco organized a protest to shut down the city. I wasn't there, unfortunately, so it's hard for me to write about this and give an accurate description of what happened. Luckily, my good friend Erin Yanke was there and documented the protest as it happened. Her interviews take place in a squatted building near Market and Van Ness in downtown SF. The vacant former pot club was taken over during the protest to act as a place to organize, relax, eat free food, get away from cops and plot your next move in the shutdown of the city. They even had door people to watch the front so that when the cops inevitably raided the building, they could be stalled and most everyone got out the back door without harm or arrest.
photo courtesy of Anandi
On side two, Paul Curran interviews people in the streets about their motivation behind getting involved with this protest and about how being punk has influenced their political ideologies. I think it's important to hear these stories of past struggles and learn from them to influence how we can do things better in the future. This protest brought out thousands of people and shut down the entire city for the day. It's really inspiring to me.
Photo taken from Basetree of protesters on Powell St.
Handiwork by Lee Wonder
Erin Yanke still occasionally does zines (audio and written) and is sitll hard at work with her weekly
radio show on KBOO in Portland, OR.
Is there a way you could re-upload this somewhere? That was a weird time to be to be protesting anything -- the war kind of took the wind out of a lot of sails and things were ugly for a while -- but it would be interesting to hear what people were thinking at the time.
ReplyDeleteDownload away...I reuploaded it for you.
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