Why I Bailed Out Of The G20 Protest Early
Evolution | Reversed | Let's Break Something
I arrived in London the Saturday morning of the protest just in time to catch all the hype on the tv over breakfast. I wanted to meet a friend at Embankment, she was late, I took off on the march without her. I wasn’t trying to come across as an anti-capitalist, although I did want to hear what the pro-environmentalists had to say.
But there’s a reason why I bailed out at Trafalgar Square and headed for the relative safety of the National Gallery: There’s just something altogether far too disturbing about British crowds.
With all the efforts gone to to ensure this protest was “peaceful”, windows just had to be smashed, didn’t they? It seems as though the British just can’t get through a day together without breaking something these days. As opposed to the old days, where a stern hold on the elbow seemed to be enough to encourage you to stop your unruly behaviour:
Some fascinating and stunning photographs at The Big Picture on boston.com demonstrate the absurdity of the English stereotype as stiff upper-lipped, tea drinking intellectuals, when in fact they act the same way during a peaceful protest as they do when their football team has lost a game:
The National Gallery by the way, wasn’t much calmer. It’s practically suicide to attempt to see anything in there on a Saturday without getting smacked in the shoulder without bothing to say “excuse me”. (Them, not me. I have a bad habit of apologizing to everyone.) Manners forgone, it was the perfect place to get my hand slammed in a door during a massive herd of tweenagers stampeding from the Impressionists to see Madame de Pompadour. However, I did find a beautiful book on the National gallery in war time, containing photos of the evacuation of their collection in 1939.
The National Gallery In War Time
While the G20 mission endeavours to “commit to maintaining open trade and investment, to avoid a retreat to protectionism, and direct necessary additional support to emerging markets and developing countries”, I can’t help but feel like we should be trying to help them along in our own little (but no less meaningful) ways. Lets keep our hands to ourselves, our protests peaceful, our manners in check, and our galleries nice places to escape to. I’m not 90, I just think that maybe we’re regressing to the level of dumb beasts when it comes to interacting with each other in public. Come on guys, can’t we all just get along?
Tags: g20, london, protests, trafalgar square, violence
February 4th, 2010 at 9:53 am
[...] 2 – London, UK – March I’m passing through London for a day on my way back to California, and I stop at my brother’s flat in Earls Court. I hold my [...]