On Friday we missed our train to Chicago from Kenosha that would have only cost us 6.50 (it’s only 5 dollars for a round trip ticket on weekends I think). The train was already in the station and we had no idea how long it had been there so we ran out of the car without our luggage to ask how long the train would be staying in the station to see how much time we had. The person at the door of the train told us we had thirty seconds, so we walked back thinking about the three two hour wait until the next train would leave. The whistle blew and train starting to leave told our travel companions what we already knew. We didn’t have the time to sit around and wait, so we decided to drive our friend’s car the rest of the way.

There was an anarchist contingent feeder march (a feeder is a small march that joins a larger march) starting on Chicago’s south side that was scheduled to start at six in the morning. Only three people, from the group of Milwaukee kids wanted to wake up that early. And only we probably could have because everyone else didn’t get to Chicago until 3:30 in the morning. We needed to be somewhat close to the start of the march if we intended to make it to the beginning on time, so we stayed at the south side punk house. Its location and the appearance fit rather oddly into the primarily Latino neighborhood of the south side. Most houses in the area had barely any lawns and were only one story buildings, but the south side house had a huge somewhat overgrown lawn and was a three story building. There were spare parts, random appliances and buckets scattered all over the lawn and a small garden in the front. Its practical potential and organizational creativity gave it a lot of charm.

We slept on the floor with sleeping bags and a cat called snoop dog that kept trying to be my pillow and then ended up resting on my friend's crotch for the night. We were told that we should wake up at 4:30 to get ready and that when we did there would be oatmeal ready for us to eat. When my alarm on my phone went off at 4:30 and the rest of the house was still silent and dark, I was a little nervous. At about 5:15 people who lived there started to wake up. We found out that the march started about two miles away from where the house was and that because no one else was around to help bring a grocery cart full of supplies and two banners to the start, that we would have to. One of the organizers thought it was important to be at the start since we were already late so one of us drove him to the start. We had to run two miles carrying the banners and pushing the cart, which left a trail of spilt oatmeal on the sidewalk, which allowed our friend to find us after he parked his car and ran back to meet up with us. I was pretty disappointed by how few people showed up to start the anarchist feeder march (but who wants to wake up at 4:30 and march 17 miles in a day?). We had to go at least six miles in forty minutes before the 8am Zapata park rally was scheduled to leave on its route.

I naively thought that if eight people could come all the way from Milwaukee for this there would be hundreds from Chicago and that we would march through the streets the entire time. Even if we weren’t much of a threat, the police and a channel seven helicopter thought we were. There were at least as many cops following our march since the begging as there were protesters. It started with just six bike cops and a couple squad cars and kept increasing along with us until there were maybe a thousand riot cops that lined the sides of the streets with more hiding in back allies and busses, waiting for us to start taking ourselves as seriously as they do.

When we got to rally there were about forty people to add to our ten or twelve. This was our first chance to rest and eat something since five in the morning. Resting made the sweat on my back turn cold. There were about nine medics for the sixty people who were there. We could have been a medic bloc. Three of the eight people from our group went as medics. After resting and eating some vegan tamales and Odwalla protein drinks, we listened to some speeches and got ready to leave.

We marched for another hour and then decided to take a break in a park alongside our route because we were ahead of schedule. I decided to take off my socks and remembered how disgusting they were. I put a band aid on one of my blisters that had started to bleed. Our group formed a stretching circle that my legs must be very grateful for now. I was limping at the end of the day, but it could have been a lot worse. I don’t know if many people realized it, but we had decided to stop right by a police academy. It seems a bit ironic of us anarchists. I don’t know who decided to stop, so it may have been on purpose.

We went a couple more miles with our police escorts following us and joined a group of a couple hundred when our contingent go to the Israeli consulate. We decided to take a little break to see what other groups were planning, to dance with our drums and eat some vegan food not bombs food. They had prepared some banana smoothies and some kind of vegetable soup.

After a half an hour or so some momentum built up in the crowd and people decided to start marching in the street to see where we could go. By this time there were as many or more riot police than there were protesters. They lined the entire sides of the streets, shoulder to shoulder, and on both sides of us, for the length of the thousand or so people who were marching. I had been drinking water, odwalla drinks, and random juice drinks since six in the morning. I went to ask a cop on one side of the line if there was any way to go to the bathroom. He told me they I could go on the other side of the street, but then I would be told that I couldn’t leave when I got to the other side of the line and they would tell me the same thing. This happened over and over about three times. One officer told me that he had to wait in a hot bus for hours as if it were my fault and that it was only fair that this should happen to me. I felt like my crotch was going to explode, so I grabbed an empty bottle and put it down my pants. I filled up two whole bottles and left them on the ground for someone to find later. Now the police can say the anarchists were planning on throwing urine at them.

This part of the march went really slow. The police would halt us to prevent us from going into parts of the city that they didn’t want us in and then some people would negotiate with the police and we would eventually move on. This happened a few times until we got to deerborn and wanted to continue onto State street. There protesters chanted and got ready to push or run through the police line as others tried to negotiate with the police and get the group to march back down deerborn to the answer rally. Only a group of about two hundred people out of the one thousand plus people actually wanted to, so people just turned around we marched down deerborn in defeat. We got to the ANSWER rally and were forced onto the sidewalk by horse cops. I had to save a kid from being crushed by pulling him from between two horses who the police were maneuvering to close in on him with their hind legs.

I think I fell in love with drumming. I started the day carrying a huge stack of about ten large plastic containers with strings attached to them. At first I felt really awkward and was pretty reluctant to hit them. I’m not used to playing any instruments or having any sort of rhythm, but you don’t need to be an amazing drummer to just make noise or keep a simple beat. I got a lot more confident as the day went on. Almost everyone from Milwaukee had a drum at one point and when we didn't have drums or drums sticks we hit whatever we could find. We fell into trances of ten minute spontaneous drum circles when the marches would stop. We sent militant echoes up the sky scrappers as we walked. I drummed for about four hours total throughout the day and someone in our group did for so long and hard that her hands just started bleeding. At one point we were at the front of the march masked and four or five us lined up horizontally with our drums pounding.

Overall I felt that although it was for the most part fun it was a failure in comparison to what should have happened, to what could have easily happened if people would have been willing to put their bodies on the line and to what the goals of the organizers were. That may sound naïve. Protests that don’t disrupt anything or aren’t illegal shouldn’t even be considered protests. If they don’t challenge or threaten anything, what’s the point of having them? There is a reason why protest within the accepted range of dissent is allowed. It is because it’s ineffectual. “Legitimate” activism is a buffer zone between a move in the direction of real radical change and complacency. I don’t know how anyone can accept anything less than shutting down the city and disrupting as much as possible if our goal is to actually stop the war. Anything less is just masturbatory. We just settled for blowing our load at the ANSWER rally. Guilt and disappointment set in for our potential wasted on politics and comfort.

A group of about twenty kids argued with the police and tried to stay in the street while the police used their horses as weapons to push us onto a full sidewalk, out of an empty street, kept empty by the police who blocked it off. I would pet the horse’s faces when they would get close. I’m sure they liked having a cop sit on them and being made to trample over people. They didn’t want to run in open fields. While we were doing this, the rally was going on. A man angered by the commotion we were creating came over to our group and told us “the anti-war protest is over there!” I pointed to the ground and my feet that were still in the street and told him that the protest was right here. He ran off angry and I didn’t care. His protest might as well have taken place in an auditorium fifty miles away.