The offices of Friends General Conference are across the street from the Pennsylvania Convention Center, which is this week hosting a biotech convention. The streets outside are hosting a bit of a counter-convention led by a group named “BioDemocracy 2005”:http://www.biodev.org/. Here are some shots from a melee outside our front door a few minutes ago.
*Update:* apparently one of the police officers at the center of this scuffle “suffered a heart attack and has since died”:http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/business/special_packages/bio2005/11949070.htm. I’m not even sure how to comment on that. From my vantage point it certainly seemed like the police officers were using undue violence. But while I was ten feet away I don’t know who threw the first punch and what exactly happened in that sea of bodies. Whatever happened, it’s quite appropriate to hold him and his family in our prayers.
Any idea what the protesters were so up in arms about? I liked the picture of the protestors lining up face-to-face with the cops. My bet is that the protestors were concerned about keeping things natural and green, enviormental, etc. And right across the way is a gaggle of cops on BIKES. Talk about environmentally friendly! 😉
Hope no one was hurt. Why things get to push and shove is always a curiosity to me.
Hi Joe,
Sorry I forgot the link to the Bio-Democracy site. I was posting simultanously to Nonviolence.org, Quaker Ranter, Flickr and the Philly Indymedia site. The link is up.
The main points of the protesters:
The corporations gathering in Philadelphia this June are contaminating the world with genetically engineered crops at the expense of our health, popular food sovereignty and biodiversity. They are profiting from unsafe and costly designer drugs, whose side effects can be worse than the conditions they’re aimed to treat, while raising the false hope that biotechnology carries the solution to all human ills. In the name of “biodefense,” they are profiting from the costliest expansion of research into high-tech weaponry since the Manhattan Project, developing new bioweapons and resurrecting old ones, and exposing our communities to the hazard of uncontrollable biological agents. To reclaim our nutrition, health and security … we must resist their biotech!
One of the police officers in the middle of the melee suffered a heart attack and “the Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting he has since died”:an apparent heart attack”:http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/business/special_packages/bio2005/11949070.htm.