Ryan Thompson was in the area when several hundred people split away from a downtown demonstration and rushed Interstate 680 at N. Main Monday, bringing commute hour traffic to a halt and police on the run.
After about an hour of cat-and-mouse tactics with police, demonstrators eventually abandoned the freeway and traffic was restored. Arrests were reported and tear gas deployed.
Ryan caught the initial rush as it happened.
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
–Mario Savio
Yeah, that happened in the sixties, too. Almost as eloquent as Yogi Berra.
“Mario Savio’s infamous Sproul Hall Sit-in Address given on December 2, 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley was given at the height of the Free Speech Movement. Many students, including Savio, spent the summer on 1964 down in Mississippi registering black sharecroppers to vote during Freedom Summer. They were radicalized in the South and began to tune into the necessity for Free Speech on college campuses to protect and expand Civil Rights.”
The Free Speech Movement of 1964
by Rhae Lynn Barnes
Man, those guys were really square. You should see the clothes they wore…the hair cuts. Not hipsters like Sponge Bob or Michael Jackson who would follow. But they made up for that with gravitas and courage. Some people believe in things that are true.
The police cleared out businesses (telling them that they interested to push protestors towards the car dealerships) with the intention of pushing protestors towards the freeway. Protestors being the freeway was caused by the police.