Reaction to election NION and breakaway march-part I

There was an impressive number of people there, so it was difficult to find your friends if you lost them - maybe 1-2 thousand. The crowd had more people under age 35 than over, but there were plenty of seniors. I had to delete several beginning pictures on my camera to create space when the arrests started, but here are an initial few.

After an hour of standing at Powell and Market, we walked slowly to 24th and Mission BART station, stopping for a long time by the police station while the NOIN young people wearing red scarves were doing something. Lots of regular antiwar marchers from those 100000+ protests last year are in their denial and grief stages, but a lot of the people already out here are in their anger and planning for future stage. The RCP looked like it had 3-4 brand new recruits selling papers.

At the 24th st BART station, there was some sort of scuffle as we came up. I just saw people toss a few trash items over the open hole of the station, but someone explained that a person had been arrested, then 2-3 people held onto the person's feet as they dragged them into the station, then they were hit with sticks and pepper sprayed. If you are caught holding onto arrestees feet, you can be charged with lynching so watch out.
At this point, most people went out for a burrito or went home.

15 minutes later, some people started a fire of SF Weeklys, a Bush effigy, and a flag. This was uninterrupted by police. The police were less than 2 dozen in number, and had no battle helmets, so they had to wait for the sergeant to fetch some from the car. Some people stood around the fire until a thin hippie guy with a marijuana leaf shirt encouraged everyone to go down Mission before the fire department came. This started the 'breakaway march', which went on for a long time. No one was drunk, but it felt like people were staggering along like a party the wrong way through Van Ness for some time.

3 blocks down at 21st, some young men used an item as a battering ram to knock in a Wells Fargo door window, as seen in the picture here. Then someone tried to pick up a newspaper box, but could barely lift it and sort of tipped it over on the window.

I didn't like how a few people knocked over recycling bins that were probably owned by local businesses or apartments. There wasn't much trashing or destruction here.