Editor’s note: Sweeps sent staff reporter Casey Toner to Central Park Saturday afternoon to give us a first-hand account on the protests against U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

I left the protest to the protesters, the Cheney to the Convocation Center and the vast buffalo-wing conspiracy to the Republicans Saturday afternoon.

Mainly because I had better things to do than be yelled at or yell with a bunch of strangers for four hours.

After all, what did I miss in the tattered signs and empty pop cans that littered Central Park after U.S. Senator Dick Durbin rallied the picketing troops against their Republican enemy?

In a nutshell, I missed a bunch of people yelling at the top of their lungs to pump up their egos. And I arrived just as the sun was setting and the local Democrats had boxed their podiums and megaphones. The day was done.

Protesters were starting to disburse after a successful day of expressing disapproval. Some stood around talking to each other about how great the protest was and how easily Dick Cheney’s first name could be converted into a sign.

Others just lamented and waxed beautiful poetics about thy fellow anarchists and thy greater, more picketed protests yonder.

I asked one young, heavily tattooed man about the protest and how it compared to previous protests on a scale of one to 10 – one being the not-so-famous Houston Tea Party and 10 being the Million Man March.

“We got hardly more than a few hundred people out there,” said the man who referred to himself as Rev O’Lution. “I’ve been in straight-up riots.”

O’Lution said he despised both the Republicrats and the Democrans and that he was an anarchist. A hell-bent anarchist peacefully assembling to give the finger to Cheney.

Then he took the stage – or what was left of the stage, a lone microphone before someone turned it off – and delivered this monologue about revolutionaries like Huey Newton to the collective audience of littered pop cans and straggling protesters.

Meanwhile, I was trying to interview this young woman whose kid clung to her right shoulder. She said the protesters (as well as her) had taken their protest right up to the glass of the Convo Center.

“We talked to people coming to dinner,” said sociology major Jenny Gilley. “We kept asking if they were serving fresh or frozen Iraqi babies.”

I kept asking exactly why protesters needed to insult people who had already spent $150 to eat cold-cuts and listen to some white guy insult some other white guy for 20 minutes.

-By Casey Toner

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.