Having perhaps finally recognized the futility of their antiwar arguments, campus liberals are now taking on a more important target: Taco Bell.

Okay, so perhaps they haven’t give up the ghost on Iraq. But still. The Taco Bell thing was intense.

I was heading back to Becky’s apartment after class when I heard distant chanting. It sounded like a protest, so I walked toward the sound. I called the Daily Trojan office on my cell phone and told the City Editor, Sophia, that “some kind of a protest or something” was apparently going on. She informed me that the DT was already covering it, and that it was the “Taco Bell protest.” Sure enough, moments later, I could hear the marchers chanting “Yo no quiero Taco Bell! Yo no quiero Taco Bell!”

It’s apparently some sort of labor dispute. Frankly, I don’t know the details, but the protest itself seemed a bit lame. The two dozen or so participants were pretty loud, but their chants were a bit too typical. For example, they said:

What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!

To which I mentally replied:

What do we want? New chants!! When do we want them? Now!!

The protesters snaked their way from Leavey Library to near the intersection of Hoover and Jefferson, then began marching down Jefferson toward Figueroa. Presumably, they were going to turn left on Figueroa and march to Taco Bell itself. But I abandoned the march and headed home after a few minutes. I’m feeling a bit too under the weather for much protest marching (or protest photography). Presumably there will be an article in the DT tomorrow, and I’ll link to it here when it’s put online.

Anyway, here are a couple more pictures:

UPDATE, 2/25/03, 10:00 AM: Here’s the Daily Trojan article about the protest. The DT says there were about 75 marchers, which is roughly three times my estimate of “two dozen.” The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the middle.

UPDATE, 2/25/03, 10:36 PM: A USC student named Ana Morales signed my guestbook this evening and criticized this post, asking, “why are you being so negative towards a taco bell protest when you don’t even know what the issues are? maybe you should do some research first before you make offensive remarks about people demanding some human justice. just a suggestion.”

Well, I don’t really think I made too many “negative” or “offensive” remarks (my only explicitly negative comment was criticizing the lack of creativity in the protesters’ chants), but I’ll admit that I was making light of the protest in such a way that it may have seemed I was criticizing the protesters’ goals. The fact of the matter is, I’m all for “human justice” — living wage and all that sort of thing. I can’t say I know enough about the protest to absolutely agree with it, but I’m definitely inclined to agree with it, unless someone convinces me otherwise.

So, there. I’m not a Republican bastard. Ok? :)