Couple things. First, we should decide how we measure 'success'. I think the feeder march strategy is 'successful' when it takes marches through neighborhoods that don't typically see public displays of opposition to the war. Ideally, these neighborhoods would be flyered like crazy before-hand and the actual marches would be organized organically by base groups IN THOSE NEIGHBORHOODS.

We should take a look at where we live, and ask how we can hook up with our neighbors and get enough discourse going to generate street presence that comes from these communities. There are lots of ways to do this: house parties, barbeques, block parties, community meetings, jawing with your fellow neighbors freezing in the AM at the bus or el stop -- and putting something in their hands that gives them information they won't get from da mare's office.

Second, feeders themselves can be extremely effective if they're also used as opportunities to put information into people's hands. By this I do not mean the usual polemical tracts in the usual newspapers. I mean flyers with facts on them that people might not know, like the fact that Illinois residents have forked out more than ten billion tax dollars to bankroll the war. That document how many Chicago youth are of draft age -- and let people know a draft is coming. That talk about the number of area veterans (roughly half a million in the greater Cook County area) and link Bush's gutting of veterans' benefits to the shift in dollars to the on-site war machine. We don't need to tell people how to think about the war. We need to get people information about how disastrous this war is, and being empowered with this knowledge, they will draw the correct conclusions.

Third, I think it makes sense to try to structure more protests that stand on the principle of 'no business as usual'. People can argue about whether Clark or Dearborn was red or green, but the hope was to get to a corrider that would NOT permit business as usual, at least for an hour or two. Neither Clark nor Dearborn accomplished that. State would have been better. Michigan would have been better still, because it would have drawn a clear line in the sand to our pro-war, anti-abortion, Dubya-lovin' mare that he cannot dictate the terms without consequences.

The seventy or eighty people who came to the initial M19 organizing meeting ultimately agreed that a line in defense of civil liberties needed to be drawn. This is not just about marching and posing for the cameras -- if it was, in that respect we had a fabulous day. This is about saying to the City that we do not consent to have our core rights crushed because Daley wants Dubya to know his cops are willing to thwart any action that might impede high-rent commerce for a day, or suggest to the DC regime that they can't count on da mare to crush dissent the next time dubya comes to town.

Bear in mind that the same sort of police effort to thwart public visibility for an anti-war action will be -- and already has been -- used to shut down pickets supporting strikers and labor dissidents, community uprisings over police violence, and public outcry at community meetings organized by our craven alderpuppets.

We are not waiting for a backslide of our core rights -- we are in the middle of the slope, and it is sliding out from under us. I know one Indymedia reporter who was literally run off of Michigan Ave. (this person used to report for an NPR-affiliate on the east coast) not for carrying a sign or a flyer, but for carrying a boom mike and lacking proper police press credentials. I don't want the privilage to flyer my neighbors the day after an international day of action against the war. I want the right to flyer or carry a sign or shout on a bullhorn like the State Street preachers whenever the fuck I want. Everybody should have this right. Increasing numbers of us don't. If we can't have our rights, there should be no business as usual.

I also thought we missed the boat in not staging a Monday morning picket of da mare's office to put it out that the police did NOT respect our constitutional rights, because the goal was not to march, per se, but to march where the people were. We were denied that right, and we should not ask for it again. We should take it.