SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
“Cool,” he said, crestfallen. I made a show of carefully folding the kerchief and tucking
it into my pocket. Who knew, maybe I would need to blow my nose -- or soak up some
blood.
-..-
I heard the protest long before I saw it, the unmistakable drum-circle, whistle-blowing
sound. It made something inside of me cramp up a little, a reminder of the Xnet concert
in Mission Dolores park, the gassings and beatings that had followed it. But Liam was
clearly energized by the noise, started to pogo a little as we came up out of the BART station
and headed toward it. The streets were lined with SFPD cruisers, and the sidewalks
were thronged with beefy SFPD officers, ostentatiously sporting thick bundles of zip-strip
handcuffs at their belts. They all had goggles pushed up on their foreheads, masks pulled
down around their collars. For the gas, of course. And yeah, there were a couple officers
wearing what looked like SCUBA tanks, except I knew they were filled with pepper spray,
connected to spray-nozzle hoses that were clipped to their chests. I didn't make eyecontact
with them, but their body-language told me they were playing plenty of attention to
me and Liam. I wondered if it was the Guy Fawkes bandanna around Liam's neck.
The tents filled the area in front of City Hall, spraypainted with old slogans from old occupations.
This left very little room for the demonstrators, so we spilled out into the street,
holding hand-lettered signs about student debt, corrupt politics, joblessness. The news
was always full of stories about homeless camps being moved along, and big lengths of
Shotwell Street had turned into tent cities, the whole sidewalk full of tents and mattresses
and piles of cardboard. There was a big billboard by the Powell Street BART advertising
the services of a security-through-occupation company that would move its employees into
abandoned or foreclosed houses to keep squatters out.
Off to one side, a woman had climbed up on the high concrete base of a lamp post. She
had cut off her long, fluorescent pink dreads, and it made her seem a lot older and wiser,
but I'd recognize Trudy Doo anywhere. The frontwoman for Speedwhores and founder of
Pigspleen.net was a San Francisco icon, and she'd been Jolu's boss until her ISP went
out of business the year before. She shouted, “Mic check!”
Around her, people echoed the cry: “Mic check! Mic check!” This was the People's Mic,
another fixture of occupy protests. At first, people did it because their cities wouldn't give
them “amplification permits” to use megaphones, but even in cities where the authorities
didn't play stupid amplification gotcha-games, the People's Mic was preferred. Something
about having everyone cooperating to help each other be heard really felt right.
“We have the best government --”
She shouted with her gravelly punk-singer voice, making each word good and clear and
loud. The crowd echoed it, with some grumbles. “We. Have. The. Best. Government,”
shouted the people around Trudy Doo. Then people around them repeated it. Then the
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