Tour Guide

I gave my Anarchist Historical Walking Tour tonight for a conference of lefty lawyers & law students. During the tour I handed my camera to a young guy so he could take some pictures, as I was too busy. When I examined the pictures I was a bit scandalized by how inept they were. This was the clearest shot. That's me standing on the wall and pointing to the Occupy Philly encampment, where anarchists of the city a century ago made soap-box speeches, when the statue of William Penn was sitting on the pavement, waiting to be hoisted into the sky on the tower of City Hall.

His other shots were not clear enough to blip. This could have made me seem like a sorcerer, with our forty-foot illuminated clothespin looming behind me (it was just to the right). This amuses me, because I somehow take a good frame for granted when I fool around with my camera.

But in all these many years I've never had a better tour! About forty people, who understood all the basics and shared all the belief in Free Thought and Free Speech, followed me around the center of town, and I managed to get my two cents in about Thomas Paine's 300-year-old banishment from his rightful place among the founding fathers. His pamphlets caused victory in the War of Independence, but it's not easy to find any trace of him in this city of his greatest achievement.

I also told a short version of the tale of an organizing effort I led in 1996 at Borders Books. The stinking cadaver of that company stands empty on South Broad Street, saying "This is what happens to bosses who fire people because they sought to join a union." Those are dear memories for me, those 90s are. That decade seems like a box of candied dreams now.

This is a little vicinity where the fight for Free Speech was waged. Here is where policemen slammed their clubs onto workers' heads for asking why they were so miserable and poor. This is where the people spoke; where the sneering powers listened.