Letter from Washington, January 18, 2003

Tom Sgouros

18 January 2003

I marched in Washington last Saturday, to protest the President's plans for war in Iraq, and as the march was starting, I lost track of the people I had come with. I was fairly sure I was ahead of them, and since they were marching with a banner that stretched about eight feet between two people, I figured I could find them if I rode the march out aways and then stopped and waited. So I did, but I hadn't realized how many eight-foot banners could fit side by side on the Capitol's wide streets. I waited about half an hour, letting the waves of protesters flow over me, clear water splashing down a mountain stream. But reveling in my simile (thinking, that is, about what would be washed away) didn't help me find my friends. So I marched on a little bit further, and stopped again. And I waited another half hour without seeing them. So I marched on a little further still and waited still another half hour, still without result. But this is what I did see:

I also had time to think about counting. I drew an imaginary line across the street where I was standing and tried to estimate how many people crossed that line each second. The first time I stopped, I guessed around 30 every second. The second and third times I stopped, I got around 20. Twenty people a second for the hour and a half I was stationary comes to around 108,000 people. I was nowhere near the beginning of the march when I got moving, and I could only barely see the end behind me when I finished. Also, many many people cut the corner where I was standing the first time I stopped. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to imagine that I only saw a half or a third of the marchers. After all, I never managed to find any of the 50 people I'd accompanied on the bus until I found the bus at the end of the day.

And it's also not unreasonable to imagine that lots of people who attended the rally didn't march. Did I mention it was bitterly cold? We saw a bank sign that told us it was 16 degrees F when our bus pulled into DC at 8:30 that morning. It had warmed a little by noon, but you could see body heat shimmering off the parade as it passed in front of the Capitol building.

At the march's end, finding the buses to get home was its own little adventure. Ten buses came from Rhode Island (!), and we were all supposed to meet at precisely the same place. Which was the same place the Atlanta buses, the Cincinnati buses, the Chapel Hill buses, the New York City buses, the Maine buses, the Vermont buses, the Minnesota buses, the Texas buses, and lots of others, were also supposed to meet. So it took a little while to get things sorted out. Of course, by that point in the day, maneuvering through dense crowds was old hat. But having buses trying to leave through those dense crowds was a new twist.

At a rest stop in New Jersey on the way home, we saw CNN report that 30,000 people had attended the rally and march. News reports the next day reported "tens of thousands" (though I did see one report that eschewed numbers and simply stated it was the largest peace rally held in Washington since the Vietnam war). Unfortunately, this is pretty typical. Marchers must be resigned to representing one-eighth of a person, if that. (Unless you're a counter-protester, in which case you can count on equal time, even if there are about twelve of you, which is how many of this breed I counted.)

A friend asks "what does it matter what the count was?" And here's the answer: if there are only a few protesters then if you secretly agree with them you'll feel as lonely as they look. But if there are a few hundred thousand marching, and each one who made it to Wash- ington corresponds to several dozen back home who had sick children, soccer-coaching responsibilities, an aversion to back-to-back all- night bus rides, or who don't usually think about joining marches as a way to express one's opinion, then perhaps the situation is a little different. That is, if you imagine that our president's belligerency is a touch ill-advised, or if you think that he has done little to make us safer in the past year, or if you suspect that he has been overplaying the mandate dealt him in the 2000 election, you have quite a lot of company.

Sadly, it seems there will be more marching to do before this storm passes. After all, a president who can blithely ignore 50 million votes against him can certainly ignore a few hundred thousand marchers. Especially the polite variety in evidence last Saturday. But on the bright side, it is a delight to be in the company of thousands of other people of like minds. Unity of purpose is exhilirating, however infuriating the circumstances that create it.

I'm told that the organizers of this march, A.N.S.W.E.R. has close ties to organizations I don't support. And I can't say that I found the speakers at the rally particularly mesmerizing or even that interesting. But the sad fact is that there are precious few avenues of resistance for those of us who object to the way our President is representing us to the rest of the world, and who think that his failure to address the real threats against us -- economic, medical, and environmental, as well as aerial -- is criminal. When the opportunity presents itself to vote with one's feet (by freezing one's toes, that is), the character of the organizers isn't the issue. It's the character of our corrupted and disfigured government that matters.

When you're not rushing in and out of the city on a chartered bus, one of the great things about going to Washington is getting to revisit the great memorials and reread the inspiring words on them. (I'm quite fond of Roosevelt's. You can read some of the inscriptions on it at www.nps.gov/frde/memorial/memorial.htm.) But this is also one of the depressing parts of visiting Washington, since it's so easy to hear the hollowness of those nice words as they echo off the buildings that house the government we've got.