dresese

My first protest

I'm ashamed to say that today was the first time I've been in a protest march. But I've been progressively more and more dismayed at the seemingly inevitable invasion of Iraq. When I heard about the anti-war rally in San Francisco, I knew it was time. Plus, my father was in town, and although he's not anti-war, he knew it would be a great experience to go there. So we went.

The march started, haltingly at first, but we slowly marched down the street to City Hall. There was many interesting things to be seen. The crowd itself was interesting, a mix of age groups, from mere babies to fairly old people. The signs were great. My personal favorites were one that said "I want to live in a democracy, not an empire". Another, along the same lines, had a quote by Thomas Jefferson: "The destiny of America is not empire, but light". One sign said simply, "No". There were many other interesting signs, too many to list here. Besides the signs, there were also dancers depicting bombing victims, sharply dressed men in suits covered in blood imploring people to give up and go back to shopping, and a whole line of people in George Bush masks. I have pictures of the last two.

When we got to City Hall, there was a massive crowd. It took at least a half hour to get close to the stage. Danny Glover was MC'ing the event, and Joan Baez was also there, along with other luminaries of the protest world I didn't quite know. My feet eventually got tired and my father and I went back to BART, where it was about 100 times more crowded then I've ever seen it. I happend to run into a researcher I knew at NASA, who was there with his wife, daughter, and parents. He was always running around the halls at NASA ranting about Republicans, so I probably could have expected to see him there.

According to the SF Gate article about the protest, about 200,000 people showed up. I can believe that. Of course the "liberal" CNN's headline on the main page of CNN.com says "Thousand rally in San Francisco to Protest War". Way to play down the numbers, CNN. Going to the actual CNN article the headline changes to "Tens of thousands in San Francisco say no to war". Shouldn't 200,000, or the 150,000 of the prior police estimate actually qualify as as "hundreds of thousands"? It just goes to show how the media is actually fairly conservative.

And then we get to hear about how all the protests, all over the world, have not swayed the administrations opinion. What's worse, even formerly respected allies like France and Germany are being insulted by US officials. Evidently, it is not important that most of the world, and large segments of the US population feel so strongly in opposition to the war as to march on the streets. Can someone explain how America loves democracy when we don't listen to world opinion, and don't listen to opinion at home?

At any rate, here are the pictures:

Posted by ahyatt at February 17, 2003 02:14 AM | TrackBack