What struck me was how totally young the demo was compared to any demo of comparable size in NYC in many years. It was like the small MayDay demos multiplied by a hundred. Even we Guild "legal observers" were pretty much all law students or very recent grads; almost none of my generation (Abdeen Jabara to his credit, and a couple of others) and no fortysomethings at all. I found this a tremendous up (...except for all the questions about the "olddays" - which included the ActUp demos !! - from the law students I was assigned to work with, like "how did you do this before cell phones?")
The age spread was clearly the result of the terror publicity of the week before the demos by the cops suggesting that anyone who turned out would be busted. Liza got the frisson of fear exactly right: I was giving out the phone numbers to call from jail continuously. But what this means is that ten or twelve thousand people were prepared to get arrested!
My only quibble is with:
> "Anti-capitalist" has more bite than "global justice," and I like that, but
> it's just not representative enough of the movement.
I have never been at a large demo in NYC that was more overwhelmingly focused as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. When the one big bust that happened on Saturday occurred in front of the Plaza we were over near 57th and Lexington and were told (by cell phone - in the olddays they would have sent one of those cute WesternUnion runners with the little red caps) to stop there & wait to see if we were needed back by the Plaza. Until we were told to go ahead we watched much of the march go by. The great majority of the signs and all the chants were explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Though my fave was the one that started when the cops began squeezing the crowd to the tune of Yellow Submarine "we all live in a military state, a military state, a military state..."
john mage