Schedule: DNC response starts Saturday!

If anyone feeling solidarity from home wishes to follow the activity, this schedule should be helpful for anticipating the major events of the week. However, there is sure to be many unanticipated developments.

Some highlights include the Public Enemy reunion concert taking place free to the public in downtown Civic park on Tuesday. Chuck D (an Air America radio host) stated that they were pleased with the speakers list and organizing by Recreate 68 http://recreate68.com/?p=144
They will also hold a Levitation of the Mint - Shake your Money Maker, with a nod toward Abbie Hoffman who creatively helped organize the 1968 response to the convention.

Indymedia will have a home-base (as I understand) at the community cable access building to the south of downtown. If you wish to upload reports from Denver, you should investigate what is happening ahead of time.

There has been a bit of infighting between the group which split from Recreate 68 over its novel name, although hopefully most of this has been ironed out. The Alliance for Real Democracy has an emphasis on college organizing, and will host 'tent university' at Cuernevaca park on the other side of downtown. They have a greater emphasis on peer teaching and workshops at their home base, several marches to the freedom cage, and will have a list of youth speakers all under age 30. They will host a concert at the Denver Coliseum with rage Against the Machine on Wednesday, with tickets chosen by lottery.

In other areas, plenty of other groups have been doing parallel organizing, such as the Nader campaign, which will also host a big evening with J'ello Biafra, Cindy Sheehan, Sean Penn and a variety of other speakers.

Finally, it is important at this time to be prepared to follow these events and to identify any protesters who become unfairly detained or injured, and to give them your support. Many of us might support the original notion of 'direct action' (defined as directly solving problems in your community), and thus petitioning a political party for our grievances might seem to be a waste of energy. However, everyone can see that conditions are special right now, as we enter a recession, the rest of the world uniformly loathes our foreign policies, the democrats are too wimpy to deliver what the majority of the public elected them for in 2006 (exit Iraq!), and McCain is actually ahead of Obama by 5% in the recent Zogby poll. We really have work to do in stopping the bleeding.