Monday, April 26, 2004
listening to: arrogant worms, the last sasketchewan pirate
whyyy are my carrots salty?
let me try that again.
hi! how are you? i'm good. (much better now that i've showered.)
the march? was awesome. i'll start at the beginning: so, i was born, and... er. well, the bus picked us up saturday afternoon around 2:30, and we.. got on the bus! and there were some other people there, from planned parenthood in des moines. and we rode for awhile, and picked up some other people in the quad cities, and then we were full. and... they gave us
songsheets. yes. they made us sing camp songs, re-written to be about being pro-choice. it was so, so surreal. like... the row row row your boat one? it was like... oh, i don't even remember... something something something, walking hand in hand... reproductive freedom, all across the land.
and then we did a round.
isn't that amazingly absurd?
anyway. so.. we drove a lot. 18 hours in a bus really isn't as bad as it sounds, though. and then.. we got dropped off at the arlington cemetery? and took the metro to the mall. (the metro made me realize how freaking geeky i was... i kept relating every stop to the west wing. like, "rosslyn! that's where josh got shot! aww!") and then, we got there... and it was insane. SO MANY PEOPLE. and we kept getting handed free stuff, which was awesome. my favorite things, though, were the hot pink planned parenthood traffic cones. (i think you were actually supposed to use them as megaphones? but they were totally little traffic cones. so cute.) and there was vaguely a grid system in place. they told us iowa people were supposed to be in C23, so we found that. it was pretty far back on the lawn. we sat down next to a bunch of iowan socialists, who were very well-organized and let us use their sharpies. they had big teevee screens up so we could watch the speakers. we got there in time to see the last half of hillary clinton's speech, and lynda carter (wonder woman is pro-choice!), and ana gasteyer (from snl) and cybill shephard and... lots of leaders of pro-choice organizations. and some mediocre pro-choice folk singers. (as well as the non-mediocre alix olson!)
and then finally, it was time for the actual march to start! it took us over half an hour just to get off the mall to "officially" start marching, and we just.. walked. they had blocked off the streets, and we all walked, holding our signs and sometimes chanting. there were some anti-choice people along the barricades, but they were mostly pretty peaceful-- just quietly holding their giant pictures of dead babies. once in awhile they would yell, but we would chant over them.
i just... i can't communicate the enormity of it. the march organizers estimated over 1.1 million people. (they had tons of people out, making people sign in, and then you got a bright green sticker once you had been counted.) and sure... 1.1 million people is a lot, but it's impossible to describe how many it really feels like when you're one of them.
hopefully your paper has a picture of the march, so you can at least see the sea of humanity... but oh, there were so many more of us than a photograph can show.
& now i'm off to stats class.
(oh, but one last thing-- this morning around 6 am we stopped at a big gas-station/rest stop/mcdonalds/convenience store type deal in indiana, and i bought a copy of the chicago tribune, cos we were on the front page [well not
us specifically, but we the march] and was looking at it off to the side, and this big american-flag-hat wearing trucker looks at the headline over my shoulder, then at my "grinnellians for choice" shirt, and says "did you guys go to that?" and i said "yeah" and he said "good for you!" and i thought, "that will teach me to judge people.")
posted by ~renata~ at 1:30 PM
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