From: "John Perry Barlow" <barlow at eff.org>
100, 000 March in San Francisco. Media Fail to Notice.
So I went down to the demonstration yesterday. Instead of getting my fair share of abuse - the San Francisco police were as non-confrontational as Muppits - I was ignored. Along with anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000 other people.
In spite of its being largest and most demographically diverse demonstration I've seen in a long career of dissent, the closest the Bay Area peace march came to being a national event was a mention on page 8 of the New York Times that thousands had also gathered in San Francisco.
Perhaps if it had turned violent... But probably not. As I said in my last blast, the best way to neutralize us is to pretend that we don't exist. The puzzling question to me is, why are the media going along with George II on this. What the hell is in it for them?
I mean, we know that the war sells papers. William Randolph Hearst, a pioneer in this regard, told his photographer in Cuba - where the battleship Maine had just exploded, providing the excuse for the Spanish-American War - "You get the pictures. I'll get the war."
But if all you're trying to do is to get and keep public attention, any popular fracas will suffice. I am certain that a lot of people bought the paper today to find out about yesterday's demonstrations. Why couldn't such a modest desire find its gratification? It's weird. I can think of no mechanism by which the White House could directly muzzle the press without someone getting the word out over the Internet. But something is making the media act as if opposition to this war is no big deal.
But from where I was marching, it looked like a big deal, and not simply because everything I'm involved with looks like a big deal to me. This was huge. Let me tell you a little about it, since apparently no one else is going to.
I've been on the road with Mountain Girl Garcia. We have been staying at her daughter Trixie's Julia Morgan house in Oakland and decided to take BART across the Bay rather than experience the agony of looking for a parking place in a city that doesn't have parking places even when nothing unusual is going on in town. When we got to the north Oakland BART station around 11:00, there was already a line for the ticket machines that snaked half an hour out into the parking lot. The train, when we finally got on it, was breathing room only. There was a line to get out of the station at the Embarcadero.
I'm not keen on being in line, but these experiences were not at all unpleasant. There was a lovely energy among the protesters, who seemed to be of all social sorts. It was not just the usual suspects. There were children, old people, men in suits, as well as people who will never wear a suit. A lot of tweedy academic types. Not so many with darker skins, I regret to say, but some. The only truly common element seemed to be a pleasant civilization.
And there were one hell of a lot of us.
When we finally got up to Market Street around noon, the march had already launched toward the Civic Center. Market was dense with humanity as far as I could see in that direction. We counted several different cross-sections of the moving populace, and the parade seemed to be about 20 people across. Assuming that each phalanx of 20 moved though per second, this would be about 72,000 people per hour. The march continued unabated for at least 2 and a half hours. If our calculations are even a little accurate, this would be over a hundred fifty thousand people who had gathered to protest a war that has barely begun.
I remember the first anti-war protest I ever attended. It was in the fall of 1965 and it took place on Boston Commons. I'd be surprised if there were more than a hundred people there, though they included, as I recall, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It was not until after Kent State, five years later, that I saw anything like the assembly of protestors I witnessed yesterday.
Furthermore, on that occasion, in May of '70, it seemed that just about everyone filling the Mall in DC looked pretty much like me. We were not The People. Not to say that scruffy, dope-smoking kids weren't well represented in yesterday's march. But they were certainly not the majority, even if you counted the scruffy, dope-smoking seniors like me. Mostly the marchers seemed like Just Plain Folks.
There were some great signs. Like "Impeach the Uber-Goober." Or "No Weapons of Mass Distraction." Or "If Tim McVeigh caused 911, would we bomb Michigan?" Or "Chez Panisse for Peace." Or "Stop The Bushit!" Or "Stay Glued to the TV, You Hysterical, Brainwashed Fool!" One showed a concerned looking whale with a thought balloon that said, "Save the Humans."
It seems important to me that this many Just Plain Folks could come to together on such short notice. It seems important that so many could gather in indignation without any violent or rude behavior. It seems important to me.
But it's not important to the media. Why?