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This is also posted in the Minnesota Forum. It was pretty neat, and we took over Coffman Memorial Student Union for about 15 minutes. We left just as the police were getting there. If we would have known they were going to try to force us out of our OWN student union, maybe we would have stayed. Tuition has risen 45% in the last 4 years, and a lot of that money goes to that piece of crap student union, so why should WE be kicked out of it? I'm paying 13,000 dollars a year after scholarships, I'll go in my student union anytime i damn want to. Anyway, this is the full report. The specifics of us taking over the building is towards the end.
The rally went pretty well. I counted 80 people or more at one point, which is a pretty decent increase from the 60 people we had there in January.
We had about 4 or 5 counterprotestors, from prostestwarrior.com
The rally portion went okay. Like usual at these types of things, most of the speakers were mixed. The AFSCME lady was a terrible speaker, but had a good message. The high school student from student counter-recruitment movement was great. And the veteran of the Persian Gulf War was AWESOME. She confronted the counter protestors, and said that until they enlist in the army, they have no right to call her, or any of us unpatriotic, and they just stood their with their "witty" signs and their tails between their legs.
Then we marched to one of the pedestrian bridges, blocked it off for the most part, and hung our anti-war banner over Washington Avenue, and got a few honks from cars.
Something we didn't mention to the crowd at the start, but were planning, as long as the numbers were big enough and the excitement was there, was to enter Coffman Memorial Student Union. Erika, the president of AWOL, suggested it to the crow, and everybody seemed excited about it, so we went in. At that point, the counterprotestors left the march, because they were scared of getting arrested or something, I guess. They're sooo macho, you know. :-P
So we entered Coffman Union, about 40 of us, I'd estimate. We marched around the first floor a while, where kids lay around in between classes and "lounge". We chanted loudly slogans such as "this is what democracy looks like! bush is what hypocrisy looks like!" and so on, and got a bunch of really dirty looks, but also got a few people signed up with us. We then marched down the elevator, and into the lunch room. At that point, a rather large man who I think is some kind of official at the lunch place said "you can't DO this" but we did it anyway. We were in the lunch room, and chanted for about 5 or 10 minutes, a guy talked a lot about the misinformation from US government (former support for iraq, support for saudia arabia, egypt, and such). Somebody yelled "shut up" but we didn't. And then we decided we'd caused enough disruption for one day, so left, just as the police were coming, presumably to either ask or make us leave our OWN student union.
We stood on the steps a while, and chanted some more, and then we all went our seperate ways.
It was quite exciting.
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