Stephen E Philion wrote:
>
> --well...npr thought it important enough a demo that it was worth
> belittling. the Bush administration may not have been impressed by the
> #s, perhaps, perhaps not, but you can be sure they notice the numbers
> of vets and even more important the military families involved in the
> protest.
I wouldn't be drawn into too much of a fight over whether the demo was "big," since its bigness is measured by what the demonstrators do over the next 6 months or so after they return home. A young woman here who had only recently become involved in any kind of activity kicked in $50 of her own money to help some students from ISU go. Its thousands, or tens of thousands, of little steps like that that make a movement, not whether a given demo affects the ruling class. In my lifetime probably two demos have had that kind of effect, the 1963 March on Washington & the 1969 Moratorium. That does not mean, however, that the thousands of other demos, big and small, local, regional and national weren't important. The demo of the Freedom Democratic Party of Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic Convention (very small, and held against the advice of King, Rustin, & other leaders) may just have been the single most important event of the '60s.
This may be apocryphal, but someone once quoted to me the Comte de Mirabeau (I don't remember whether elder or younger) as saying something like, "When 10 men get together, 10,000 tremble." My first anti-war demo was a 'statewide' mobilization of all of 30 people in Springfield Illinois. That was in 1965.
Carrol