Thursday, April 26, 2007

Batten Down the Hatches


Be prepared. Be very very prepared.


On Tuesday May 1st, we can expect tens of thousands of good people rallying in Downtown. You may have seen the street closure announcements. May 1st has become a day of rallying and protest for the immigrant rights movement and we can expect thousands to descend upon Downtown to express their views.


There is a lot of emotion around the issue of immigrant rights. La Placita Church, a safe haven and organizing center for the immigrants rights movement, is sponsoring a hunger strike in front of their church.


You may remember last year was an unprecedented march with tens of thousands of people in the streets. They gathered Downtown before marching to the La Brea Tar Pits.


Since last May 1st there have been many other attempts to put together marches but most of them have fizzled out and produced only a few people. I remember a few weeks ago the LA Times covered a small protest that actually had equal number of marchers and anti-immigrant marchers.


I am not sure what the route is this year, but it looks like the City has cordoned off parts of downtown for the march.


I think this is important for Downtowners to know this. I came home from a meeting in City Hall on a Friday at 11:30am and was surprised when I was unable to access my car because the parking garage was closed -- to make way for the St Patricks Day parade. I loved it.


The parade was actually very small and had very few attendees. But I loved the fact that I could not go to work and I loved the fact that Gilmore was passing out free green beer. The scene was very festive.
But others were very upset by the street closures. Some people in cars were furious. I witnessed two rather ugly altercations with police officers and drivers who were upset that they were unable to get through Downtown.

I know that some may get annoyed by the minor inconveniences of the marches and the parades, but I personally love it. I think it is a great perk.
So, if you can, go out and join the good people on May 1st.
Downtowners Unite, you have nothing to lose but your ________!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello! I live in the continental, and once I started seeing all the signs, and I checked out the actual closures on http://traficinfo.lacity.org , I really started to wonder how many people are going to make it to work if they start any time past 7:30 in the morning.

Heck, I'm still wondering how I'm going to pull into the old bank district parking lot around 3:30, since that is the time the streets open and the possibly 100,000 people will be leaving.

Worse than the Disneyland parking lot at closing time :)