[AChimp]

Barely a handful. The RNC is being held in New York, though, where there's more cops than most small cities have people. The complaints should be focusing on why there is an obvious difference in how the protests were handled, not "Boo hoo! I was arrested for standing on a barricade, even though I know barricades are meant to keep people away."

Explain how dancing in the street and blocking traffic helps your cause? You're only pissing off motorists while "sticking it to the Man."

I get to see protests a lot during the summer months. Every week there's some group standing outside the Manitoba Legislature waving signs and yelling. They're almost always people who are only there because Green Day or some other punk band said so. Sometimes they block traffic. Other times they are content to just sit on the grass. Most of the time the police don't even show up.

The most interesting ones were at the beginning of the war in Iraq. I still can't fathom how anyone would think picketing in front of a provincial government building to protest a war that Canada refused to participate in was going to do anything except annoy everyone else. But, I digress.

Police actually did oversee these demonstrations because the crowds were getting pretty rowdy. One guy, dressed in classic punk clothing, decided to show how mad he was at the U.S. by kicking over a garbage can, causing it's contents to blow all over the place. He really showed the Man, because now the Man has to pick up all that trash. The cops saw this, he saw that they saw this, so consequently he decided to run off. His friends were standing around and peacefully tried to block the police. The police decided to arrest them all (about five people altogether) and figure it all out later. I saw all of this firsthand because I was sitting on the bus waiting for another group of protesters to tire of exercising their right to hit the crosswalk button repeatedly so they could walk across while holding their little signs.

You see, there's peaceful protests, and then there's peaceful protests. I'm sure those punks were screaming bloody murder all the way to the police station, but I don't give a shit even though I agreed with the gist of what they were trying to say. Their right to protest infringed on my right to go home from university, along with the rights of all the other people who were stuck waiting in traffic. Not to mention the rights of the trash can.