Cav's Place

Went to the third protest against ACTA yesterday, but was disappointed by what I found there and eventually left, frozen, a little more than an hour and a half after the start of the protest. Still, it is something for me that I managed to go, not to mention that I also did my best to keep up with the few who were trying to shout and sing, so I did my part and do plan to go again next time, on March 31. Whether I’ll stay or not will depend on how many others show up and what happens, but I’m quite sure that I’ll at least go and have a look.

If you want any details about yesterday, I’ll say that I left just past 4 PM and therefore rushed all the way there, since I thought that I might normally need more than one hour to make it, if I’ll have puddles to go around due to the melting snow. However, I perhaps rushed a little too much, arriving at 4:50, so ten minutes before the announced start time, and finding only three or four others there. As a result, I wandered around for a few more minutes, then sat on a bench and waited until, almost exactly at 5 PM, a few familiar faces arrived, one of them very loudly asking where were all the others and then calling one of the organizers to ask what’s going on.
Things did get somewhat better a bit later, but we peaked at slightly more than 50 people, perhaps 60 at most, around 6 PM, after which the number started dropping, only a little more than 40 being left when I also walked away, slightly past 6:30. Still, while well below the 2000 that attended the first protest and even the 150 that attended the second, 50 or 60 people are still more than the roughly 20 that tended to show up at protests around here before this year, so the worse problem was the lack of involvement, most splitting off in groups of five or so each and simply chatting with each other, few shouting or singing anything. That made it even more awkward for me to be among said few, feeling increasingly out of place as time passed, since saying or doing anything made me stand out so clearly even among what already was a very small group.
In the end, though I was originally thinking of staying until 7 PM, when another protest was supposed to merge with this one, I made my way out almost 30 minutes earlier, as I said, partly because I was too cold and largely because of this lack of involvement. The fact that someone asked me to pick up a sign and stand where I’ll be seen better certainly didn’t help either, and might have been enough to make me leave even without the other issues, but by then I was already getting ready to go and it actually made me stay for a couple of minutes more, so it won’t look like I’m running away immediately after refusing.

If you want some pictures, you have some from the ground and some from above, though I have to specify that there was some mixing of issues even while I was there and, as I already said, another protest was supposed to start in the same place at 7 PM, not to mention the one that’s scheduled to take place there each day after 8 PM, plus that some people from the ongoing protest that takes place across the street from that location were also coming for a “visit” just as I was leaving. As a result, while the pictures taken later may show somewhat more people, they don’t reveal how many people attended this particular protest, but only those of them who stayed among the others.