This is the day our movement deepens. 

Yesterday, we walked the streets of the financial district and directly confronted the systems of social control which are so bent on destroying our earth, our lives and our loved ones. We experienced a level of violence from the state which even those of us who had prepared for these days did not expect. Today, that violence continues on the streets of Toronto, with political dissenters being targeted as we walk down the street, with smaller and smaller groups of activists being surrounded by hundreds of riot cops, boxed in on all sides along with pedestrians. 

This is a war on our movements, a literal war on the streets of Toronto and make no mistake, the thugs are the ones who are armed and dangerous. If the people in this city and this country do not wake up and grasp the gravity of the events of these two days, I would almost say they deserve the security crackdown that is so obviously being implemented in major population centers. 

Police are literally stopping us as we walk from place to place, detaining us and demanding our information, searching our bags, copying down our cell phone numbers and going through our cell phones, violating our bodies and our rights.

We are hearing, again and again, friends and loved ones have been detained, have been arrested, dragged away and thrown into the backs of unmarked vans, woken at gunpoint, doors kicked in and riot cops storming into our bedrooms, pulling us out of bed in the middle of the night and dragging us to jail. We have been intimidated and harassed by CSIS, and local and provincial police forces. They have chased us in their cars, followed us home, showed up at our homes and workplaces with threats of repression and violence. 

Welcome to Canada. Welcome to a new level of fascism in the Canadian state.

Many of us who are being persecuted are in hiding, waiting for news from behind the prison walls, for news of loved ones, family and friends who are among the over six hundred activists being detained without access to legal counsel, or even a phone call to let us know where they are. The phone lines to the Movement Defense Committee (the legal team of over forty lawyers working to free us) are constantly jammed, hundreds of people phoning anxiously awaiting news.  

Police snatch squads are all over the city. They drive around, four to six to a minivan and jump out, grabbing us, demanding information. They don't tell us where they're taken them. Partners, girlfriends, sons, daughters, mothers, daughters, fathers.. these are not the thugs the Toronto Police want you to believe that we are. 

I was an eyewitness to some of the scenes that unfolded on the streets of Toronto yesterday: Hundreds of riot police charging thousands of unarmed, unmasked young people demonstrating at Queen's Park, which was designated a "safe zone", firing random and indiscriminate rubber and plastic bullets into the peaceful crowd, who were shouting as they were being shot at "Please stop! We are not violent! Shame Shame Shame!" 

I saw a young man on a bicycle stop for a few seconds to fix his bike, trying to escape from the riot police when they suddenly charged at him, beating him with their batons, grabbing him off his bike and throwing him down to the ground, delivering brutal kicks and blows to his body, and throwing his bicycle off to the side. 

This has happened to hundreds of us. We are not violent. The police are violent. 

When we were being charged by the riot police, they gave no directives, no requests, no words at all except that they laughed when the young people ran, and yelled "Boo!", as though it was some maniacal training exercise in terror. 

This is happening to us right now, and the media is turning a blind eye to the real violence on the streets, the terrorism of riot police, with their horses and their weaponry. Yes, there was violence on the streets in Toronto, but it is coming from police, with their billion dollar budgets. And they are continuing to violate our freedoms and rights.

I think we are going to see a much higher level of repression, and I am convinced with the actions of the Toronto Police, that this higher level of repression is being put into place in the largest city in Canada. 

If any social movements could be cultivated, it is here in this city where cultures mesh and interweave, where peoples of the world converge. In the middle of celebrations of the World Cup, where ethnicities and national identities collide, in this city where we as people have the capacity to build truly radical and non hierarchical communities, where we could cultivate communities that do not rely on corporations to sustain our lives, we are at this moment being subjected to unprecedented levels of violence and repression simply for peacefully protesting. 

So, as activists, as movements, how are we going to respond? 

We need to start thinking differently about the ways we resist. We need to strategize, we need to  connect deeply in our relationships within the movement. We need to learn from the mistakes we've made and realize our blind spots, cultivate our strengths, our spirituality and our relationships, and recognize our weaknesses. We need to call each other on our shit, on the things we do that weaken our agreements with each other. There is no more room in this movement now for racism, sexism, or patriarchy, or factionalism. 

And we need to seriously reconsider our relationship to the state. If they are willing to use us as target practice for their rubber bullets and tear gas for peacefully protesting, what will be their response when we confront them with more direct action? Not just shutting down their economical veins and arteries, but also removing ourselves and our lives from the grip of dependence on corporate power: growing backyard gardens instead of depending on grocery stores, preserving and defending water in our streams and aquifiers, taking our children out of their schools, refusing to buy their shit, taking them down where it hurts, defending our land from mining and oil companies, from development. 

And we need to recognize that we have made a serious mistake in gathering a huge number of radical people together in one place so they can be mapped, and their movements traced, so they can be surveilled, charged, controlled, beaten and intimidated by a massive police presence with an equally massive budget. 

We must start organizing in small groups, autonomous from each other, embracing a diversity of tactics, respecting each other's ways of organizing and acting. We must begin putting our principles of respect into action and stop using the affinity group model just for mass mobilizations, and start using it on a daily basis in our organizing. 

We must learn how to defend ourselves, our lives and our loved ones and our homelands from the terrorism we have witnessed committed by the police in Toronto. 

And most of all, most importantly of all, we have got to remember that those of us who can speak, are speaking for those who have been silenced by prison or by intimidation. 

This is a transformative time, a metamorphosis into something new, something birthed from a time of outright war against us.