Washington – Two Eyewitness Accounts:

I’m home from the rally. Mind you, I’m running on about 6 hours of sleep, over the past two nights, having spent those on a predictably semi-comfortable bus. So, if what I write is incoherent or babbling, I apologize.

The march was an amazing experience… Our group got the chance to hear Cindy Sheehan, Jesse Jackson and George Galloway. We didn’t get to SEE them, because the crowd was massive. I don’t know how the media covered it, if at all, but the only estimate I heard, 100,000, was ridiculously low. Once the march was on its way, we literally had the White House surrounded. Lots of different chants and cadence calls were constantly forming. Our group came up with “Send Bush to Mars!!!” It caught on, quite nicely. There was a small group of counter protestors. I never saw them, but heard the reaction to them. Someone who did witness this feeble attempt to counter us said there were about 30 of them.

Guerilla Theater was also everywhere. We saw Billionaires for Bush, and lots of dubya impersonators engaging in rather un-presidential activities. Oh, and the “Breasts, not Bombs” women put in an appearance, graphically demonstrating the difference. Our favorite groups was The Crawford Chicks – a group of women dressed in red, white and blue “scanties”, and wearing large missiles, strategically strapped to their, ummm, nether-regions. These additions put on quite a show of their own when the women started high-kicking.

Naturally, the police were at full force. However, it was hard not to notice that, while they were equipped with riot gear, it was on the ground, behind them. That included those in front of the White House. Some were of very good humor – some not so much. Someone in our group asked a city policeman how the day had gone. He said there were no problems with the protestors, and that they were just keeping their eyes on the anarchists. No doubt there were forces on the rooftops, but I never spotted them. Lots of helicopters overhead. No doubt some were media but I suspect some were sent to interfere with the speakers.

Our only frightening moment was when our group “elder”, a lovely gentleman with hearing loss and failing eyesight, suddenly disappeared. The group he was with stopped to meet up with another, but he either didn’t hear, or chose to continue the march. Everyone had been so watchful of him, but in a split second, he was gone. We were all in a panic, and broke into small search groups to scour the route for Billy. Thank God, we finally found him, safe and sound.

Please permit me a brag. My sign was a huge hit. (see below). I was stopped over 50 times with requests for photos of it and received literally hundreds of thumbs up and other enthusiastic responses, including great burst of laughter… Someone said it might be put into a book of protest signs.

On our trip back home, we stopped at a rest stop at about 3 in the morning. Standing in the parking lots was a passenger from a Detroit group who was still in the bathroom when his bus left him. So, we gathered him in and headed out in search of his bus. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before they realized they had left someone behind, so they pulled off to the side of the road, in hopes that the next bus to stop would do just what our driver did. That might be SOP for these tour buses, but it gave our group a good feeling to have helped a stranded cohort.

I thought about all of {my friends} while I was there, marching and chanting and satiating myself with all of the good mojo that was flowing through the crowd. I just wish everyone could have joined us.

Obviously I got home a lot earlier than Susan T did, but I was also exhausted and went to sleep fairly early. I did try to check the media coverage before I went to bed. As Susan Hu had mentioned to me on the phone, to CNN we did not exist, odd in view of the fact that they did cover it as an important story on their web site. The media coverage I saw was mixed. The only coverage I saw on TV was a brief mention this morning on Meet the Press, and they only focused on what Cindy Sheehan said, not on the size of the crowd (In all fairness, today CNN Headline News called the anti-war demonstration “massive” and also mentioned that today’s pro-war demonstration in D.C. attracted only 400 people despite the organizers’ predictions of 20,000). As far as I can tell, the most under-reported aspect of the demonstration was the “power Outage” experienced by Amtrak. Some accounts I found had this buried deep in the coverage, and it apparently was part of the Associated Press report, but many papers left this incident completely out of their coverage, and no one, as far as I could tell, gave it more than one paragraph:

“In a hitch for some coming to the protest, 13 Amtrak trains running between New York and Washington were delayed for up to three hours Saturday morning for repair of overhead electrical lines. Protest organizers said that held up thousands coming to the rally.”(The Washington Post, Paragraph 13)

This account is apparently inaccurate since the entire Northeast grid has New, York as its hub, so Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and Baltimore were also down. I still do not know when those “repairs” were completed, and whether those people ever got to Washington (or how many just decided not to go, given the long delay). The PA system at the demonstration was also reporting that a spontaneous demonstration had erupted at Penn Station in New York with thousands of people chanting “end the war now.” If that is accurate, I know of no media that mentioned it in their coverage. If any one believes this was a “random” mishap I have a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn. The right-wing Republicans in Congress have developed a long list of programs they would like to cut to pay for hurricane relief, and Amtrak is high on the list. I would think they would be particularly susceptible to suggestions that maybe those “overhead electrical lines” needed some immediate attention. If any Booman readers have first-hand knowledge of the Amtrak situation perhaps you can post a comment.

Susan T’s description of the size and make-up of the crowd pretty well sums up my impressions as well. As for the size of the crowd, we were packed close together once the march actually began (quite late because ANSWER seems to have packed in way too many speakers and allowed them to speak way too long). I would estimate that there were 35 to 45 people marching abreast, and the procession was easily two miles long. That would conservatively add up to over 300,000 people if you do the math (and one has to wonder how many Amtrak people never made it). I did see the counter-demonstration that Susan T. missed. I would have estimated their numbers in the dozens even though some media accounts said there were as many as a couple thousand (others estimated their numbers at 150-200). They formed a single line behind police barricades, and they were not even closely packed together. I think their area was two blocks long, so again, do the math. Unlike our demonstration, the war-boosters did not seem to be having much fun, and their signs were ugly and mean-spirited, lacking the humor and creativity of their anti-war counter-parts. (one example: “I’m against terrorism. Are you?”).

This demonstration brought back strong memories of the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in D.C in 1969. The nature of the signs, the sense of shared camaraderie, the street theatre, the huge throngs of people, the diverse nature of the participants, all were very similar. My biggest surprise and source of satisfaction was the number of young people in attendance. Unlike the demonstrations against the Vietnam War which were dominated by the young, up until now it has seemed that the dissent against this war was decidedly older. I think that changed yesterday. A very large percentage of the crowd was composed of people under 25. I hesitate to put a number to it. Yesterday I suggested to Susan Hu that it was about half the crowd. Some of the people I was with suggested it was closer to 40%. In any event, the young were there in large numbers, and that is a very good thing. I think the anti-war movement really was born yesterday. Again, I urge any under 25’ers reading this who were there yesterday to post a comment indicating what motivated you.

My only regret is the speakers program ANSWER put on. It seems that every third world issue was represented, and there were a lot of strident speeches, especially on Palestine, that were totally unrelated to the stated purpose of the demonstration: Iraq. There is a legitimate time and place for those debates, but yesterday was not it. We need to bring people together to protest this war. Many people in the crowd were clearly upset at the tone of many of the speeches causing some to groan and others to leave. ANSWER has a history for this sort of thing, but I was hoping they would refrain from that kind of polarization this time. They didn’t. I believe John Conyers left the podium without speaking, and if that is true I suspect it is because he did not want to be associated with some of the speeches. I also suspect that more main-stream politicians would have shown up if the event had not been organized by ANSWER. We need Move-On and other more moderate groups to step up to the plate with a more moderate coalition that will attract a list of speakers the media cannot so readily ignore. I think ANSWER did this movement a major disservice yesterday. Nevertheless, Sheehan, Galloway, Jesse Jackson, Ramsey Clark, and a few others were inspiring and drew loud cheers from the crowd. Several others were far less enthusiastically received.

All in all it was a great day and a good time was had by nearly all. I hope this was the first of many massive demonstrations opposing this war, and I trust the Democrats will wake up and give us the respect we deserve the next time.