Chicago's Anti-Capitalist/FTP march NATO--G-8 2012

I ran up a windy street past scattered groups of black bandana-masked protesters till I reached the first line of riot cops.  Night was falling.  This wasn't going to be like the other occupation marches I'd been on for two days.  You could feel it in the air.  Tension.  This was a large urban FTP march with an anti-capitalist theme--never a boring combination.  The Chicago Police Department was about to see civil disobedience in a qualitative way that they hadn't seen in that town since the 60s.  The Occupy Wall Street movement had energized and united group-after-group on the left in a profound way.  The crowd grew and grew in the shadow of mid-level urban buildings.  Hundreds of police, dozens of vehicles and the entire horse line of the CPD were shadowing us, unseen just a few blocks away.  What they were soon to see were teens with black masks, young eyes with far-away looks peering from above bandanas, red flags with letters made of duct tape, etc.   Then the group started to move.  The dance  that is civil unrest in 21st century America began--actually a beautiful thing if you're observant, yet if a right-wing Tea Partier had been there I have no doubt they wouldn't have said much more than : "“Oh, my Lord! They’re the worse kind of Commie, Pinko, Socialist filth I’ve ever had to lay my red-white-&-blue eyeballs on! Are you blind? Don’t you understand the threat that these and their kind are to the American way of life?  What a disgrace! This’ll only go over like a fart in church!”  But there weren’t any right-wingers in this crowd.  The protesters surged along under bridges of steel and concrete holding up pamphlets with words like Revolution and Socialism.