16 February 2003

whoa...the extent to which i don't even know what's going on in my own life...

note the post below, for example, wherein i refer to new york city as "dc." oy.

but never fear, i am now well aware that the city i was in yesterday was in fact new york. it was quite a day...check out the times for the mainstream account (and numbers) or indymedia for accounts from people who were actually there. i was interested to note that there were no (visible) mainstream media in the midst of the first avenue gathering -- they seemed to be grouped around the periphery, on second or third. is it that difficult to attempt to cover what's actually happening?

what to say...well, first of all, major kudos to new york city for making the protest a much bigger deal than it might have been. thousands of unnecessary barricades meant that people generally had to walk a dozen or two (or more) blocks to find a place where they could actually join the first avenue rally, and that once they got to first avenue the crowd was dispersed for thirty city blocks. if there hadn't been barricades or mounted police, i bet the rally would have been concentrated in ten or fifteen blocks of first rather than stretching for the thirty it did. it might also not have spilled over westward onto 2nd, 3rd and lexington, as it did. it might also not have snarled traffic for huge sections of manhattan, as it did. in any case, if they were hoping to make us as visible as possible, they did the right thing. ;-)

there were serious problems with the vertical nature of the rally, though. unless you were near a sound truck it was nearly impossible to hear what was going on. no matter, though...every round of cheering for every speaker created a wave of sound that reached all the way to the end of the rally, which was amazing to witness.

i spent much of last week wondering what good this event could do...i think i know now. first of all, the outpouring of rage on the heads of the bush administration will slow the rush to war. second, it just felt really good. when your life is saturated with mainstream media accounts of the inevitability of war and the domination of the current administration, it's nice to see the opposition be large enough, physically, to halt the life of a major city for an afternoon. by and large, the crowd at yesterday's protest was peaceful, good-natured and full of righteous moral outrage. i'll stop myself, at this point, from saying something really sappy about 'hope for democracy,' but...you know what i mean, i suppose. big protests have the power to make me feel absurdly patriotic for all the best reasons. like this:

"whose streets? our streets!"

"tell me what democracy looks like! this is what democracy looks like!"