Just an aside.... as I was watching this video it totally made me flashback to my childhood when I was 5 years old and my father was carrying me on his shoulders walking beside my mom and all of their friends after a West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade in 1974. I remember turning around to look behind us as we were walking in the middle of what looked exactly like this crowd on our way to the festival and saying out loud to my parents, "woooow look look so many gay people." There was a sea of gay people behind us and a sea of gay people walking in front of us. It definitely was a sight to behold and I had the birds eye view. ;)
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The Wall Street Journal
written by John Lyons and Paul Kierana
Wednesday June 19, 2013
SÃO PAULO - A day after the biggest demonstrations in decades gripped Brazil, this South American nation awoke on Tuesday to a shifting political landscape, with protest leaders seeking to turn Monday's venting of national frustration into a long-term movement, and a wary political class searching for footing in a country that has voiced a powerful call for change.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla and Brazil's first female president, sought to empathize with the protest movement, declaring that she, too, is an agent of change seeking to correct many of the long-standing injustices protesters criticize.
"Brazil awoke today stronger, the greatness of the demonstrations yesterday proves the importance of democracy," Ms. Rousseff said in Brasilia, where on Monday hundreds of protesters swarmed the roof of the modernist Congress building. "Those who went to the streets gave a message that they want more citizenship, better schools, better hospitals, more participation. It was a repudiation of corruption, and careless use of government money."
In a season of mass protests in several of the developing capitals of the world, Ms. Rousseff's bid to align with protesters contrasts sharply with heavier-handed tactics of other leaders, such as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has faced mass protests in recent days.
The situations are different. For one, the Brazilian protesters haven't targeted Ms. Rousseff personally and are simply marching, not occupying land marked for development, as in Turkey. What's more, Brazilians are increasingly critical of use of force by police. By most accounts Brazil's protest movement ballooned after police beat protesters during a series of marches last week.
All the same, the appearance of massive demonstrations in multiple cities is hardly good news for Ms. Rousseff, who is up for re-election next year, or her leftist Workers Party, which came to power a decade ago with a message of change. Ms. Rousseff flew to São Paulo on Tuesday evening to meet with her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who built his own career leading mass protests and strikes. No details of the meeting were released.
"Protesters are asserting their sacred civil right to raise their voices and demand respect from authorities and by a self-serving political class that has become an embarrassment to itself and to the nation," said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.
A sea of people, in the tens of thousands, filled São Paulo's central Avenida Paulista again Tuesday evening, with smaller protests in other cities. In São Paulo, the mostly peaceful protests ended in sporadic looting late Tuesday, with a television news truck set ablaze.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets again on Wednesday morning, blocking a principal highway into the city and adding to a sense that the movement still has significant momentum. Organizers are calling for another mass march Thursday.
The protests began last week among students in São Paulo over a small fare increase for buses that many here consider inadequate. São Paulo's mayor said Tuesday he was considering canceling the increase and mayors of other cities who also proposed fare increases have already done so.
But indignation has already expanded to a litany of long-standing Brazilian gripes: Rising cost of living, political corruption, crime, and the cost of next year's World Cup soccer tournament when compared with the poor condition of schools, hospitals—and public buses.
For some Brazil observers, the massive but diffuse protests represented a kind of "awakening" of a new Brazilian middle class that has expanded tremendously during a decadelong economic boom, and is now demanding greater accountability from its political class.
In São Paulo and other cities, marchers chanted "the people woke up" to the tune of a popular soccer cheer.
Pedro Pereira, 30 years old, a lawyer who showed up at the Rio protest march in a suit, said the demonstrations appealed to him at first because of his daily bus commutes. But now, the poor buses are largely symbolic of broader frustrations with what he called political "impunity."
"The complaints are millions, and it's not all going to get fixed in just a few years," said Mr. Pereira, who voted for Ms. Rousseff in 2010 hoping she was a candidate for change.
"The fare increase was a small drop in a full bucket," said Rodrigo Vidaurre, 24, a student who was protesting in Rio. "We won't stop. Even if we get this with the price of the bus and have no raise, we won't stop. We will fight against inflation, corruption, we'll fight. We won't stop."
According to a Datafolha poll, 77% of the some 65,000 protesters who gathered to march in São Paulo Monday are college educated, and 71% were protesting for the first time. The vast majority, 84% said they had no political affiliation—though antipathy for elected officials was hard to miss.
Rodrigo Lima, 17, marched in a soccer jersey of Brazil's archrival Argentina. He wore it because Rio's Mayor Eduardo Paes recently joked that he'd kill himself if Argentina wins the World Cup next year.
For some observers, the protest represents middle-class frustration with rising costs of living even as the economy slows at the end of a long commodities boom.
There is no single voice for the protest movement. But there are plenty of glaring examples of what is bothering middle class sensibilities. Take political corruption. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court convicted around two-dozen politicians in a vast vote buying scheme. None are in jail—and several are back in congress making laws.
Meantime, many Brazilians live in congested cities where prices have soared so much that meals, movies and Starbucks SBUX -1.03% coffee often costs more here than in New York. Even in an economic expansion, salaries didn't keep pace.
Fancy new stadiums built to host next year's World Cup soccer tournament here in far-flung cities appear to some as frivolous expenses in a country where the roads, trains and hospitals remain emblems to Brazil's poorer past.
"Brazil is famous for being a people that are too passive, and now we are demonstrating that that's wrong," said Miguel Paschoarelli, 18, a student marching late Monday in Rio.
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