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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Angelika In San Francisco, everything was turned upside down. After Ari Fleischer, the now-resigned White House Press Secretary, casually informed the public with a brief statement on March 19 that the first bombs had fallen in Iraq, thousands of war opponents took to the streets in San Francisco the next day. Civil disobedience was the order of the day. Groups of demonstrators disrupted traffic at major intersections with sit-ins and human chains, starting at 6 a.m. in the Financial District. For two days, the city came to a halt.
On the first day of protests, the police in San Francisco temporarily arrested 1,300 people. Temporary prisons were set up at the piers along the Bay. On Market Street, the main traffic artery through downtown, there was no way through, not even for public transportation. During the evening rush hour, the demonstrators eventually tried to get onto the Bay Bridge. The Bay Bridge connects San Francisco and Oakland, and even on normal days, traffic moves slowly on it. Pedestrians and cyclists are not allowed on the bridge.
The police, for their part, now formed human chains to block the protesters from accessing the bridge, fully aware that just a handful of people on the bridge would be enough to bring traffic to a standstill for hours. This time, the police prevailed. The activists wanted to disrupt normal life in San Francisco while innocent civilians in Iraq were facing the consequences of war. I think there’s something to that argument. Of course, there were also complaints from frustrated drivers who didn’t find any of it amusing. Our mayor, Willie Brown, was outraged, pointing out that this kind of civil disobedience cost the city of San Francisco $400,000 a day due to the increased police presence. The protesters, however, were unfazed, since that’s the price of a single Tomahawk missile, thousands of which were being fired daily in Iraq.
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