funeral

Sixty thousand people went to see Pinochet's body in state yestserday in the Escuela Militar, and thousands are there right now for his funeral service, which is wrapping up. Meanwhile the communists and socialists and everyone else who hated Pinochet are rallying downtown for speeches and all that. There's no violence today that I could see in the hour or so of news coverage I watched, which is great. Walking down Diagonal Paraguay yesterday Rosie and I passed shop after little shop with shattered windows, and thought, "What the hell is wrong with people, that they would take someone's natural death, no matter who that someone was, as an excuse to break their neighbor's windows?" That's where those people have to make a living, you stupid kids, that's where you go to buy your empanadas or your cigarettes, that person might live next door to you, might be your uncle, and you've decided that your id, your stupid selfish desire to break things and go wild is more important than others' livelihoods. Get the fuck over yourselves. It's the same way I feel about the kids in College Park rioting after the Final Four in 2001, or the Black Block people in the WTO protests in Seattle a while back, or the dumbasses who threw a rock through the window of the locally-owned Subway franchise that opened on Carroll in Takoma Park a few years ago. There's no need to break things, throw rocks at the police, light cars on fire, tear down street signs. No need at all. It's just senseless, stupid vandalism that accomplishes nothing and damages many people. And so it was a relief today to see that same group of people that came close to rioting yesterday because of the actions of a disgraceful few--those people whose politics are closest to my own of the two deeply divided groups here--marching peacefully rather than embarrassing themselves with another display of senseless violence. I can't make any judgment at all on the anger of people here, I don't know anything about it, I have no perspective that might allow me to say anything other than that it appears just. But destructive, pointless vandalism like the kind that happened over the past couple of days here is just wrong.