For me, Earth Day 2003 started with a trip down to Sunnyvale to check out the effort to shut down Lockheed-Martin, the largest Defense Department contractor in Silicon Valley, a hotbed of government contractors.

I saw these four with some others of the same group at a march up in San Francisco, and somebody told me they were grieving mothers who had lost their sons on the battlefield. They were certainly a striking sight.

The blue line marked the edge of Lockheed-Martin's private property. The deal was that anybody that stepped over the line was subject to arrest. There were lots of cops waiting to do the job. Mostly people were law abiding, chanting anti war slogans and generally being frustrated by the things that were being done with their tax dollars.

I talked to the legal observer when it was over. She said that there were two waves of arrests, the second occurring while I was there. That time something like 19 people were arrested. During arrest waves nobody could drive through the gate and get to work, tying up traffic and generally frustrating the weapons makers.

Lockheed's campus is designed to not draw the eye, so there weren't any easy to photograph big signs that I was allowed to get near. Also, since we weren't allowed into the buildings for security reasons, the smart bombs we could find weren't silicon based intelligence.

It could be that in the halls of power NGO means some kind of Non Governmental Organization, but here on the streets of Sunnyvale, NGO is just another label on one of the cops. I'm sure that if those greedy suits could get more money out of picking a particular named Rent-A-Cop for the job, they would do it. The government, on the other hand, has to obey laws that are supposed to prevent it from discriminating.

It was almost funny how many different kinds of people were recording what was going on. In addition to at least these two news trucks and policeman, there must have been at least a dozen of reporters and many other people with camcorders and things like my digital camera.

The (un)weapons inspectors found Lockheed to not be compliant with our disarment wishes.

After that, I headed off to table in Palo Alto for Earth Day. Click through the bike trail behind the right picture to see what happened later.