While it is a privilege to follow a news event in nearly real time without the dilutions, biases, etc. that come with the mainstream media sausage creation, following something like the May Day march in Portland, Oregon through a twitter hashtag has its own setbacks.
One such setback is a human being who has this image as their internet avatar:
I understand that not everybody sees the world as I do, and can respect that to a certain degree. However, capital worshipping I-shop-therefore-I-am types get the whole year for their worldview. For those of us who value human life more than a CVS window, for example, we get precious few days, and May 1st is one of those. Labor Day is not. It is the macguffin of holidays. To put it another way: it is an American holiday in honor of worker’s rights, aka a joke. May 1st began as a worker’s holiday in this country, but was then baited and switched with what red scare era conservatives labeled alternately as “Americanization Day,” then “Loyalty Day,” and an official national holiday signed into reality by D.D. “Ike” Eisenhower called “Law Day.”
Arguably the labor movement had already succeeded in creating an equitable work environment that any human being in the country had equal access to, under the simple condition that this human being get off its lazy ass, or out of its hobo boxcar, trading in the ride-the-rails dream for a decent American wage. So it makes sense that someone would see a labor demonstration as an unnecessary inconvenience.
Leaving with 3 hours to go in order to try to get to work. Hope I make it there safely. Thanks oh so much #MayDayPDX
The irony of course is that, had the cat lion human left Beaverton three hours LATER, the protest would have been long over. And so, as I check what is happening at the #maydaypdx I left behind in order to be here I don’t get news, but rather the ignorant fuming of someone whose life seems to revolve around negative experiences involving public transit. #thanksobama
Critiquing capitalism in public in America is subject to such pitfalls because it essentially elicits the response one would get from young fishes when commenting on the water—as described in David Foster Wallace’s now iconic commencement speech—What’s water? And so—as the short speech has become titled and sold in inspirational volumes—the answer, however obvious it may seem, is given: This is water.
Lyse, this stuff that surrounds us and envelopes us, the transit buses, the MAX red line, the SUVs operated by humans, the way that these things create what outside public space feels like, it is not inevitable. It is not the only way. It might not even be the right way. To get to that conclusion, however, one would need to think that another way was even possible. The conceptualization is possible for any individual. To flood a downtown artery with human bodies essentially drowning what we have come to expect to dominate us, however, requires a crowd.

Luckily we just made it out from there! #MayDayPDX#TheWorstTimeToShop
Idk how I went to the gym earlier and didn’t see any of the #MayDayPDX stuff going on downtown.
“Oh.. It’s gonna be like Hunger Games getting on this!” Riders waited 2+ hours for MAX, after #MayDayPDX delays.
#MayDayPDX participants are just a bunch of neo communist sheep! They have been brainwashed by Subversive Agents into being angry!