Replies

(This is a repeat of what's posted on another thread so maybe the moderators can/should remove the other one.)

I just came back from this march. I'll be posting a long article about it once I get myself gathered, but some quick notes for everyone's digestion.

Crowd size: The media estimates that I saw were much lower than we me and Nixi (wife) got. We're admittedly not good a crowd estimations, but all together, 5 to 10 thousand is what we came up with. We even got a chance to get demographics, as they had various regions respond to attendance calls: NY, NJ, PA and Houston had the biggest turnouts if the crowd responses were indicative.
Hate fest: This wasn't a universal attitude: there were a few people there who were actually very nice. Nevertheless, there was a lot of venom floating about, and one person had a "Kill Whitey" T-shirt that she tried to keep Nixi from photographing (and failed :-) ).
Counter-Protestors: Almost none. There was only one open set of protestors (guys from Inn Glory). How effective they were was hard to say. one person was loud and belligerent enough that he arguably made himself look worse; but that's a subjective analysis that I'll save for later. But if there was anyone else there also opposed to it, they were as incognito as we were.
Biggest speakers: Louis Farrakhan (sp?) and John Conyers were the biggest names to show up for this. Farrak did a good job (to be fair) of riling the crowd up, and was probably the most effective speaker of the event. He was also the one who provided the most specifics of what they were asking for, specifying the "deamnd" for "millions of acres". Conyers was more down to earth, but at the same time that he was trying to make his case that he just wanted Congress to consider it, he also couldn't help but spend about two minutes insluting Bush's intelligence (saying, for example, that they'd have to rewrite HR40 in smaller words for him). He did say, however, that one Republican house member was interested in discussing the issue with him. None of the rest of the speakers were that noteworthy, or said anything that really stands out.

All in all, there wasn't that much unexpected. I also wouldn't assume that the lower-than-a-million turnout means that this was a bust. I really think the 10,000 figure is more accurate (I'll post very large pictures so you can judge for yourself), and that's really not a small deal. I think it's a more important sign that this march even happened.

Oh, and there was one last consequence of the march: the We Won't Pay web site got a rush of new people pledging it. Thanks for the free advertising, guys. :-)

Will post more details soon.