It's both aggravating and comforting to see what we call the Stanford Bubble—that three-dimensional halo of awe and protection and naïveté—travel with us all the way to San Francisco. Last Thursday, I was part of a direct action group which blocked the intersection of 3rd and Folsom Streets to protest the beginning of actual war in Iraq.

My involvement was almost by accident; to minimize police gaining knowledge beforehand of planned locations, this event received almost no publicity via campuswide flyers, dorm email lists, etc. I'd simply happened to pass Ian, my summer neighbor and current housemate, on the landing last Tuesday as I was about to indulge in a much-anticipated day off between a Monday evening final and a Friday morning one. He asked if I was interested in being part of an affinity group; I had no idea what one was and agreed to simply listen in on the meeting that was to take place at the picnic table outside in five minutes.

It turned out that over 2,000 protesters planned, through a impressively organized network of coordination, to take over 22 crucial spots around the city the day after bombing began to make clear the message that war was incompatible with "business as usual." An violation of international procedure must result in an interruption of individual lifestyle, and we wanted to Americans to experience a thousandth of the interruption that Iraqis and other inhabitants of the Middle East were certain to feel.

A cluster of perhaps a hundred people was responsible for each site, and they were, in turn, comprised of smaller affinity groups of a dozen or two people. Within the affinity group, participants formulated plans and behavioral guidelines for our action and arranged systems to keep intimate track of those present, document proceedings or help them get safely back to campus if anything went wrong.

This was to be my first antiwar action. I'm not entirely sure why I'd never gone to a protest before, save a brief stint at a rally during the National Student Strike on campus a couple of weeks ago—I'd in fact gone to my 9 o'clock lecture, stood listening to a few speakers by the clock tower for three-quarters of an hour, and biked home to crank away at a take-home midterm due at 5pm. On the dates of the biggest protests or marches in San Francisco, I was always at house clean or garden duty or, more often, ultimate practice when most of my housemates were gone; as a co-captain of a team that has trouble enough getting numbers together, I felt especially guilt-tripped into being there.

This time, though, I had enough free time to begin feeling terribly guilty that I hadn't done more to prevent the war that was, in fact, actually and finally going to happen. Anyway, I like baptism by fire.

Wednesday night saw me studying for my Friday final at 2am, as at that time I'd no guess at when we might return on Thursday, and then crawling out of bed less than three hours later to catch an extra-early CalTrain to the city. I ran into another Stanford affinity group debarking the same train, and we walked togetherishly—though not too much to avoid attracting attention from the police. As we approached the designated intersection we could see that the rest of our cluster—Stanford students, Santa Clara University students, and Palo Alto residents— were already there. Our arrival at the intersection filled a gap in a nascent line snaking across the street while traffic was held up by a red light, and as we joined arms with them we solidified the line for the first time.

A guy in my dorm who shattered his tibia in a skiing accident, and gamely crutched his way from the CalTrain station to the intersection to serve as a legal observer. Here's his antiseptically objective report, likely based on notes in his capacity:
We are so darn lucky and so darn spoiled to be able to carry that bubble of security even to an anti-war demonstration in the middle of a major San Francisco intersection. The big-university name started us off on the right foot, I'm sure. After that, though, there were certain characteristics of our group which distinguished us from the others.

We'd chosen a location that was importatant to traffic flow but far away from downtown, to mark the separation between us and the more violent anarchist groups there. Affinity group representatives had gotten together to draft a mission statement, which we distributed on paper and read aloud. We'd vowed to be completely nonviolent polite toward the police, which I'm certain made a big difference in their treatment of us—though admittedly they were San Francisco (read: incredibly tolerant, and almost sympathetic) police to begin with and were commendably courteous throughout the whole procedure. Based on reports of observers at other locations throughout the city, our action was more dignified, more respectful to the police and to passersby, and, best of all, effective for a longer period of time than many other groups. Damn college kids.

Anyway, it took a while, but I now have an opinion on the war that I can articulate and, better yet, act upon.