On Saturday, July 13th my partner and I woke up at seven in the morning, dressed carefully for the heat, packed sunscreen and filled our water bottles, and headed out on a drive to Hamilton’s City Hall to participate in the “Hamilton For Who?” rally in support of the city’s embattled LGBTQ+ community.
My partner and I went to the rally, met up with friends, listened to music, bought t-shirts, drank water, danced and generally had a good time, as protests go. We also flipped off the violently islamo- and homophobic “Yellow Vest” hate-group which was forced out of the City Hall courtyard by the presence of both the rally and the weekend-long “Camp Chaos Gayz” occupation; making it the first Saturday in months that the Yellow-Vesters haven’t had a city-sanctioned presence at City Hall… which was one of the things the rally had been intended to achieve. We followed up the demonstration with a visit to the Art Gallery of Hamilton with some friends, then an early breakfast-for-dinner date at a diner and drove home in the long summer evening, footsore and sunburnt and feeling very good about the day.
At roughly the same moment I had gotten out bed that morning, Willem Van Spronsen was shot to death by police officers during his attack on the privately-owned and -operated prison for migrants called the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma Washington.
Continue reading “On the Grave of Old John Brown”