by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
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those five-gallon buckets you find, behind corporate businesses. Big traffic barrels can also be requisitioned, equipped with wheels, and applied as bass drums. A little practice can produce a marching band to be reckoned with. You may not all need to bring drums?street signs, dumpsters, police cars, all these make great percussion devices, and it can be inspiring for others to discover that the oppressive city environment is a veritable sea of musical instruments just waiting to be utilized. Don't forget, either, the variety of other instruments that can be integrated into marching music, including saxophones, megaphone sirens, and whistles?the last of which can be clenched in the teeth of people who have their hands full drumming. Singing, topical or wordless and improvisational, can really raise spirits, too.
Speaking of singing?chanting almost always breaks out at permitted marches. You may be one of those sheep-like souls whose heart thrills at the sound of a mass of people repeating the same few inane syllables in brainless unison; but if you're not, consider how you vrill handle the situation if it arises. At the very least, you can always make up your ov\ai: "Hey hey, ho ho, megaphones have got to go!," "Rob the rich, arm the poor, social justice is civil war!," "I say something, you say something: Something! ('Something!') Something! ('Something!') You say nothing, I say nothing! ('Nothing!') No, you idiots!" All this is not to say that there's never a place for chanting?^sometimes it can be an important affirmation, or exhortation?but there's a big difference between shouting, "Whose streets? Our streets!," as you sweep the police off the highway and mumbling those same words from the sidewalk.
Banners, on the other hand, serve a variety of important purposes in almost every march scenario. These can be made from painters' drop cloth coated in white primer paint and decorated wdth mis-mixed house paint, which you can find cheap or free at most hardware stores. They can be reinforced with bamboo or other sturdy (but light!) materials. In addition to making your views more explicit to others, banners held firmly
You can carry a sports whistle or emergency whistle for use in a marching band or other public noisemaking activity; unlike a bucket drum, whistles are practically weightless, leave the hands free, and can easily be concealed, while still making a commanding racket.
Marches and Parades 337
You can start a marching band;
on off days, practice by parading
around neighborhoods, keeping life
fun and unpredictable and perhaps
distributing announcements of
upcoming events.
When two things must be
connected swiftly and durably,
such as the segments of a banner
barricade, you can use zip ties in
place of rope or chain.
Marches and Parades 338
along the front and sides of marches will help keep police out and obscure their lines of sight into your ranks. Remeraber, always aim the business end of a banner away from your fellow activists, in the direction from which the march is most visible to everyone else; it's remarkable how slack people can be about keeping a banner legible to viewers.
Cloth banners have the benefit of rolling up easily, but if you can transport them and you think you can get them in place without prematurely occasioning too much attention from the police, you can always make banners out of other materials. One group took six boards of tough cardboard insulation material, each four feet high and ten feet long, painted messages on the fronts, and cut handholds on the sides. With chain or rope, these signs could be bound together, forming a virtually impregnable, mobile barrier up to sixty feet long. This barricade could be shifted at any one of five hinge-points to form any shape, and yet was Hght enough to carry for long periods. The material had enough give that it could bear a few blows without breaking, and, carried by a minimum of seven courageous people (one at each joint), could secure a broad area from police incursion. When these were deployed in a liberal tovm without much history of political street confrontation, the police didn't know enough to seize them when they arrived at the demonstration before they were safely in the hands of the crowd.
