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By Root 1214 0

they fired rubber bullets or beanbag projectiles first.) As I pressed through the crowd on Sixth, trying to move closer to the intersection, a tearful woman in her fifties grabbed my arm to tell me a friend of hers had been hit with a rubber bullet. “The police shot him in the mouth,” she said. “He lost his teeth.” She repeated this detail several times, looking at my pad of paper, insistent that I write it, then ran off. About a hundred yards from the intersection, I was stopped by several cops in riot gear—helmets, clear visors, with respirators over their mouths and black vests that looked like turtle shells. The police said nothing to me, and I barely seemed to register in their eyes. But the one in the lead was holding a wooden pole, maybe five feet long, which he held in front of him, with both hands, like a weapon from a martial arts film. I hovered back several feet. Through the smoke that hung in the air (which was breathable, though it burned my eyes and nose, indicating it was pepper spray and not tear gas), I could see cops in a line down on the intersection where protesters were locked down—a jumble of people in multicolored raincoats. The cops stood over the human chain. Some swung clubs. One, armed with either a plastic-bullet or a beanbag gun—I couldn’t distinguish which—appeared to take a shot at a protester lying just a few feet from the barrel of his weapon. Many cops were armed with what looked like fire extinguishers but were in fact pepper spray canisters. They pressed nozzles into protesters’ faces and sprayed in zigzag patterns across protesters’ mouths and eyes. They moved at a leisurely pace, meticulously spraying, clubbing and shooting the writhing pile of demonstrators, breaking apart the human chain. In their riot gear the cops resembled futuristic Orkin men, exterminating an infestation of squirming hippies.

I was later told by someone who claimed to have been in the human chain that as the police assaulted them, the protesters began to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” From where I stood all I could hear were screams and what sounded like a collective roar of “Ow!” The people moving nearest me formed a kind of riptide pulling in both directions. The problem was, nobody could figure out which way to move, since groups of police began assaulting clumps of citizens at different points within the extremely crowded downtown corridors. Even those who wanted to comply couldn’t discern which direction the cops were trying to push the crowd. When riot police managed to clear one section of street, a crowd of people pushed back from another group of cops and would just as quickly fill it. Through several hours of pandemonium I had yet to see a single anarchist throw a rock at a window.

Wingnut later told me how he and about two dozen fellow anarchists came to form the first “black bloc” later in the day. They spent the morning running interference on lines of riot police. When they saw police engaged with locked-down protesters, the anarchists ran between them, butting the cops and trying to knock them over. Outfitted that morning in shoplifted swim goggles intended to protect his eyes from pepper spray, Wingnut had the goggles torn from his face in his final encounter with cops a couple hours into the street fight. “I burled inside my mask,” Wingnut says, describing the spray-induced vomiting. “I tried to get away and was slammed in the back by a cop taking a baseball swing with his bat. Two people dragged me out of there. I have no idea who they were.”

Sometime after midday, Wingnut and several friends gathered at Westlake Park, a few blocks from the convention center. The night before, anarchists had distributed a flyer among black-clad kids printed with the words “Westlake Park at 11:11 am. Take back the streets.” In characteristic anarchist fashion, no one knew who printed it, or what they were supposed to do. Also characteristic of the movement, Wingnut estimates he and his friends—a dozen or so Eugene anarchists—arrived at least an hour late. They found a similar number of other young people