I went to the march. Living in Baltimore this was not particularly hard. Going to a march like this is much like voting: it impresses people who believe in the civics-class version democracy. I figure to earn a certain street cred with socialists, since I was at the '92 march too. And I wanted to make sure there was at least one libertarian there, flying the flag of liberty (Gadsden), to show that self-ownership is not merely a socialist idea. They got it from us, the liberals, way back before they stole the label and corrupted it to mean "milquetoast socialist".
The march was a lot better organized and funded than the antiwar marches of last year. There were a few fringe lefty groups that I noticed, but not that many. Whoever it was putting it on shelled out massive bucks. All down the mall, on both sides, were these rented big-screens -- really big, like 30 feet by 20 or so -- with the 18 wheelers used to haul them in. Perhaps 8 or 10 of them. Those can't be cheap -- renting a crummy little 1280x1024 beamer for a weekend business conference is $10k. How much are massive TVs? Hard to know - $100k/day? More? That's a million right there.
There were a huge quantity of printed signs being handed out for free at the metro. And then more signs on the mall. Thousands -- would have been enough if 1M people showed. Again, even at a dollar a sign this was fairly serious money.
Anyway, we got to the mall and I unfurled the mighty Gads. Very quickly I met a libertarian, but he turned out to be a tinfoil hat type. Gah. Well, I got the thing after the peace march last year, because I wanted to meet and talk to the libertarians, not socialists. Later on I met two interesing normal libertarians - one worked at Cato. So, it worked.
I walked around, not really listening to the dumb speeches; some of the speakers had a libertarian tone, though, and that was good. Most were socialists, pity. I got in a good circuit of the crowd, though, from several hundred feet from the stage (it would have been very hard to get any closer in the throng), to the very back of the crowd, which went back almost to the Hill.
I ran into a lesbian couple from my climbing gym. That was cool. Wonder how many other folks I know who were there but I didn't run into?
After this, some more boredom while the blatherers blathered, then we got to marching. The prolife people were out in fairly good numbers, and there was the standard silly crowd stuff on both sides. Chanting: "Prolife/it's a lie/you don't care if women die"; the smarter prolife using megaphones to subvert the chant by rhyming in "you believe in genocide" at the end.
I was walking on the far left edge of the river of women, so both sides could see my flag. One guy seemed to recognize it and started yelling at me, so I tried to go talk to him, but the cops (who were numerous) along that particular stretch of road were not letting marchers close to the protestors, and pulled me back.
Later on there was a black prolife group with explicit signage relating planned parenthood to nazis and the KKK. Charming.
The crowd was huge; very impressive. And that's the point. I got some good pictures of things, but no shot of me. Oh well, I'm sure shots exist out there. Garth at America's Outback was here in the core the day before the march, and got a shot of me and the flag.
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