Epilogue

Thursday April 20
8 pm
International Student Center, University of Toronto

There is a huge overflow crowd tonight, here for a debriefing on the DC protests, the issues, the actions and the outcomes. In the middle of this event, my friend David James Fernandes arrives with a videotape from the protests - I didn't even realize he was there. The lights go out, and we watch a single sequence of confrontation from the Sunday protests - a blockade is challenged by a bus, and the protesters defy the police and maintain their position until it turns around.

It's not until the tape is almost over that I figure out that what I am watching is a scene from my intersection, and that I am in the middle of the confrontation on the screen - this is the bus that I helped to block, my big moment.

When I left for Washington, I was determined that I would engage as a participant and not an observer. Now, after years of documenting other people's action, the camera was pointed at me, and whatever my misgivings, whatever the action did or did not achieve, the action was mine.

Mission accomplished.