Big day in Portland. You could march to "Banks Got Bailed Out; We Got Sold Out", or to "Peace Now", or to "Free Tibet". It was all kind of going on at once. Sure kept the police nimble today!
So Occupy Portland has been, er, occupying, two downtown park blocks for a week now, mostly without incident. Apparently a registered sex offender did his duty and reported to police that his address was now Lownsdale Square, Occupy Portland. See how law-abiding we are?
People met at the OP site around noon today, and the crowd seemed disappointingly small at the time. At around 1PM, we marched up Main Street 5 blocks to the Park Blocks where we met up with the End the Wars protestors. We had a 4-piece NOLA-style band to march to, but the War folks had some serious music. Great guy on a guitar singing great songs that took me right back to the 60's. Did not catch his name unfortunately. I was having visions of Country Joe McDonald.
Several great speakers, including a DJ from KBOO, a rap MC and a guy from the Socialist Workers party. All terrific. Then we took off marching again. While we had been listening to music and speakers, the crowd swelled dramatically. We marched down to the World Trade Center, around and back toward town. It was cool here, because as we marched west up the street, you could look down the cross street and see the tail of the march going east two streets over. The Oregonian reported 3-4000 people, which seems about right. Less than the 10K we had 1 week ago, but still a sizable crowd. We went up to the OP site, where we heard another great speaker from Iraq Veterans for Peace.
This is what Citizens United really looks like.
Then we took off back West into downtown and marched all the way up to 12th Ave. I thought maybe we were going to go onto the 405 freeway, but we turned North for a few blocks, then back East, back past the OP site, and on to the Salmon Street fountain.
The police were pretty much all around us all the time, on bicycles and motorcycles. They seemed to stay just ahead of the marchers, so every intersection had traffic blocked for us. There were zero incidents that I could see. From Salmon Street people wanted to go up to Pioneer Square (Portland's Living Room), so clusters of people started walking up the sidewalk. We were more or less staying on the sidewalk and pausing for walk signs, and the police stayed with us to "encourage good behavior" and to block cars if there were stragglers crossing the street. It all worked fine.
As we made our way to Pioneer Square, another march started up Morrison St. It was Vietnamese and Chinese protesting Chinese invasion of part of Vietnam, and, of course, Free Tibet. The police had the routes protected for them as well. The ended up in Pioneer Square too.
And a good time was had by all.
Whose Streets? Our Streets!
The Banks Got Bailed Out; We Got Sold Out!
Peace Now!
Free Tibet!
whew.