2001-05-03 - 12:01 p.m.

Hm. May Day in London. I should have gotten up way early and watched the Morris dancers bring in the May at Wimbledon Common. But as faithful readers know, the K is *not* a morning person and 5:30 is way too early to be standing out on a hilltop in Wimbledon.

Especially when there's riots to watch later from the convenience of one's office window! One of the joys of living in London is being more "European". Well, one of the more European things we have is a series of anti-capitalist riots on May Day. They apparently started out peacefully, with various protests, handing out veggie-burgers at McDonald's, marching up Regent Street, naked unicycle riding, but then progressed to violence once they got up to the retail district. Fortunately, yours truly had gone home by then....

It's hard to really scorn the rioters (except for being idiots sometimes) because I'm sure their aims are laudable. As the child of hippies, who'd been on more anti-nuke, anti-war and whatever else protests by the time I was ten than I care to think about, I have a certain sympathy with protesters. But these guys didn't seem to have a real clue, either about what they were protesting, what good protesting would do, what they hoped to accomplish or anything like that. How frustrating.

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