San Francisco Truth Action: 9/11/08 Freeway Blogging

We decided that for 9/11/08 we should try to reach as many people as possible. We decided that freeway blogging would be the way to go, and that we would reach far more people than we would with a traditional street action. We had never freeway blogged as a group before, so we had to come up with some banners. Since we have no funding, we resorted to making a crudely spray painted canvas tarp banner. Thankfully, Richard Gage was nice enough to loan us an ae911truth.org banner to supplement our home-made one.

Five of us arrived at about 7:00am and set up our banners facing the morning commute into San Francisco.

As the day went on, more and more members of our group showed up to join us.

And even more people showed up later on. In total we had eight new members show up, which was incredibly encouraging. We had about fifteen people total who participated in our demonstration throughout the day, many of whom brought their own banners to add to the display. One of our members brought a roll of butcher paper and proceeded to construct banners right there on the overpass with pre-printed letters. At one point we had eight banners affixed to the overpass.

There was an interesting piece of grafitti on the overpass that we found interesting

The motorists who passed underneath us were overwhelmingly supportive. It was a non-stop blaring of horns beneath us all day. Eventually it was reported on the radio on KCBS that a protest was causing slow traffic at our location and the California Highway Patrol promptly moved in on motorcycles to remove us from the overpass. Our interaction with them was brief; they first told us to remove the banners from the fence, we complied, and proceeded to hold them, and then one of the officers told us we were creating a traffic hazard and we had to leave immediately. Since they were telling us two different things, we requested they page a supervisor. After consulting with their supervisor, they told us we could leave the overpass, or they would take us away. It's basically futile to try to argue with oppressive authoritarian police, so we decided to call it a day. Here they are trying to intimidate us with their presence:

All in all, we were very pleased with our action. We got a solid 8-1/2 hours of freeway blogging in on the most important day of the year for 9/11 truth activism. We reached thousands of people with our demonstration, which is far more effective than the few hundred fliers we pass out at our regular weekly street actions. We were also hapily surprised at the number of new members that showed up to join us.

Afterwards, some Truth Action members took the banners to the 9/11 film festival at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland and unfurled them out front for the passing motorists to see.