The Power of the People

I am back, safe and sound and with renewed strength and commitment. It was a truly wondrous, empowering, and inspiring march with over 300,000 people who felt so compelled to speak out that they came from almost every state and travelled great distances despite inflated gas prices and not-so-coincidental shutdown of amtrak in the northeastern corridor the day of the march. There were so many people there, the march wrapped around on itself and no one could even start walking for a couple of hours.

Lady Alice and I were with the Code Pink contingent the whole day, staying right up at the front of the group and using our incredibly loud voices to help get the chants going. Evidently, if you dress up like a huge freak in a noticeable costume, people give you even more credit for knowing exactly what's going on; we were asked about 10 times each if we knew where Cindy Sheehan was, as well as being asked other official march information. It was also really interesting to see people's reactions to Code Pink - Lady Alice and I, being walking advertisements for the group, were given huge hugs by random strangers all day, who would loudly proclaim their undying love for Code Pink.

One womyn came up to me while I was briefly chatting with Sarachkah and her whole family who came for the march (their were 3 generations there!), and asked if she could have Sarachkah take her picture with me and Sarachkah's baby (who was sporting a fabulous "I already know more than the president" shirt). I said sure, and as people had been taking my picture all day, I thought nothing of it. It turns out that her son is in Iraq right now and she has people all over the country that she emails who are praying for him; she calls these people her son's guardian angels. Well, I happened to be dressed as an angel, and she was thrilled to see me and asked me to think of him and pray for him; I assured her I would. It was a very real moment, reminding us all exactly why we were there.

Another womyn came up to me at one point, asking if I knew where Cindy was; she seemed to be barely holding on and there was a definite air of desperation in the overly rigid way she held her body. As I tied a pink ribbon on her arm, she told me about her son, who had just come home from Iraq and who is not doing well at all. He has horrible post traumatic stress and is suicidal and she's beside herself with worry about him. We forget about counting those casualties of war as well; those who are so damaged by their experience that their lives are essentially lost. I hugged her as tightly as I could for a few minutes and told her that I was marching for her son that day too. She said she called him to tell him that she was there marching for him; I told her to tell him there was a virtual army of people marching for him, and that we send our love and support. It was heartbreaking and touching and incredibly powerful.

I danced on the lawn with a little girl with Down's Syndrome who told me all those people were going to stop a war.

The day was filled with images and experiences such as those; 300,000 people's worth of stories and viewpoints and commitment to ending the loss of life. It was truly a sea of humanity, and it renewed my faith in the existance of humanity. Its very easy to see how caught up people tend to be in their own little microcosms and you begin to wonder if its hopeless to search for some sort of a collective spirit...some concern for the whole instead of merely the self. Seeing the neverending walls of people everywhere who were indeed concerned about more than their own little lives was heartening in a way that I could never begin to put into words, but those who were there can understand.

And those were just the ones who were able to or felt strongly enough about the issue to show up! There are countless more.

At the Operation: Ceasefire concert and rally after the march, one of the speakers (I think it was actually Jello Biafra) told a story about how at the 1969 Moratorium and Mobilization against the Vietnam war, the turnout was so huge that one very prominent activist said he would be very suprised if Nixon didn't pull out right then and there. When Nixon did not indeed pull out, he was extremely discouraged and felt like the whole thing was innefectual. Not that long ago, through the Freedom of Information Act, he discovered documents proving that while it did not in fact end the war, that protest was a huge factor in Nixon's ultimate decision not to drop nuclear bombs in Vietnam.

I will never again let anyone question the power of protest.