My madly creative friend K. and I went to the protest at the White House last night. I was at the front edge of the crowd and it was difficult to estimate crowd size in the dark, but K. guessed that there were about two hundred people. The organizers said that our protest was one of almost 1,000 taking place last night.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee addressed us and said that the voice of the anti-war movement IS being heard on Capitol Hill, but that the people need to keep "the heat on the street."
Our next big chance to let Congress know how strongly we feel about this issue will be Saturday, January 27th, when a mass protest is being planned.
I know there's some debate as to the value of protests. Maybe you've been to one or two big marches and, yet, here we are: waist deep in the big muddy while the big fool says to push on. But I think that protests are important. It's a way to physically put your body together with all the other bodies out there and say, "No. Not in my name. Not with my consent." It's like voting, in a way. You can tell yourself that your one vote won't matter. But you should still vote. And my spider sense tells me that the MSM may finally begin to cover protests seriously, for a change.
I noticed one thing different last night from almost all of the other protests that I've been to over the past several years. There were no counter-protesters last night, no one who stopped to argue with us. Of course, it was pretty cold.
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