March 2003 / War Declared - Arrested / 3 of 6

As we continued postering down the barricade, we stopped looking over our shoulder, and ended up getting detained by a group of police, bacon factor, who took us behind a fence to a makeshift command station. Here we were written up, and taken in a paddy wagon to a far away police station. It seemed a bit exaggerated on the part of the normally sensible Amsterdam police. We were put into individual cells within the paddy wagon itself. Upon arrival at the station we were led through in cuffs.

Once inside, the experience was an eye-opener, if nothing else. I was put in a cell with several arabic-speaking youths who had been tackled while running in a larger group, and charged with throwing stones. They were younger and more neatly dressed than I was. As we sat there, all spluttering at the sheer incredulity and oppression of it, it occurred to me that they were looking at a resentful future. After a few minutes of silence, one of them turned to me and directly addressed what I was silently thinking; that sitting locked up in a small room doing nothing is a fundamentally different experience, somehow, than sitting at home doing nothing.

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