OPINION GUEST COLUMNIST: What was all that about?

We got something truly rare in our country during last week's Republican Convention -- a good show for free. And I'm not talking about George W.'s speech.

"A good show" is probably about the most positive way to describe the demonstrations that occurred downtown. I've been working in Center City this summer, so news of the fun made me hit the streets during the week of the convention to see if the demonstrators were being depicted properly in the news. The conclusion I drew from my walks through the city, taken at the expense of my employer, was that the protests that occurred represented no clear or coherent political message or position, and that the demonstrators didn't care about having one.

Many of the demonstrators' notions were silly and naive, and the methods they used in expressing themselves were as dubious as the practices that (some of them, anyway) they said they opposed. The protests' needless violence, destruction and cost to city residents quickly soured locals to their presence. It also gave the country the impression that college students (a demographic that included a large majority of the protesters) lack direction, sensibility and meaningful ideas.

The first thing that struck me about demonstrators who I encountered and spoke to was that they were students and that most did not come from the city. Their clothing was hodgepodge, sometimes reflective of the causes they supported.

In Franklin Park, where many of the demonstrators spent the days, dress ranged from the preppy to the dirty. Some of the students seemed to have gone into their parents closets and worn clothes that were a step back in time to an earlier era of protest. Meanwhile, numerous others dressed as clowns, wore strange makeup and painted their skin different colors and, in a few cases, donned pig suits and sequined jackets and stood on stilts. The demonstrators were very concerned with attracting media attention, but were confused as to how to do that.

Unfortunately, journalists were able to report on only a few of the seemingly infinite vague notions which demonstrators considered their message. None of the demonstrators I spoke to came for the same reasons. One young lady in Love Park who mistook me for a protester (in spite of my tie and khakis) told me that she wanted to promote workers' rights and end environmental destruction.

A man and a woman who looked like Mummers as they walked down Market Street said that they were protesting against the Republicans and for the Democrats; another woman wanted to support the Green Party; two others wanted to end the party system, but one was in town to help effect a transition to pure communism while the other was, interestingly, an environmentalist and anarchist. Issues like gun control and abortion rights were mentioned by one person or another as being of importance, but were part of litanies recited when I asked them which issues were key.

The only tangible issue that seemed able to unite more than a small percentage of protesters was their opposition to police and the courts' handling of the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. Demonstrators marched around Police Headquarters and demanded a new trial for the convicted killer of a Philadelphia police officer. I had a hard time determining how these college students -- whose cell phones, pagers, laptops, portable CD players and other equipment identified as wealthy and suburban (distinctly un-Philadelphian traits) -- were somehow qualified twenty years after the case was decided to second-guess the decision of a fairly selected jury.

I had an even harder time seeing why the most effective way to protest the case's outcome was to spit on, gesture and curse at, and shove police officers near Headquarters. Perhaps demonstrators were using the same line of reasoning they had used last Tuesday evening, when they destroyed public and private property and clashed with passive police on the Ben Franklin Parkway.

Most telling of all is the lack of support the demonstrators received from ordinary Philadelphians. In this town of Democrats and union members, demonstrators claiming to support notions of union solidarity, workers' rights, and wage increases somehow managed to create feelings of public outrage against themselves voiced in letters to the major newspapers, opinions given on local news broadcasts, and, of course, in conversation. A friend told me in plainer language than this that the ' "cops ought to beat the heck out of those stinkers for the way they're goofing with them."

Police forced to work twelve-hour shifts at taxpayer expense rightfully received a great deal of sympathy and praise for their actions. While many may have enjoyed smacking around students who apparently can afford to skip work to party in front of cameras, it was probably much more damaging to the demonstrators' reputation and professed causes to simply let the show go on.

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