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I went to the march with a bunch of people from my college. To say we were unorganized would be putting it mildly; we all just wandered off and did our own thing.
First off there were lots of people. Its hard to tell how many were there when you can only see so much of it at a time. There were points when there the march ground to a halt because of a bottle neck and other points where the road was so wide we all spread out. When one of my friends asked the donation takers how many people there were he hesitatingly said "Six.... million... billion?" Umm... not quite.
I was with two friends of mine and two guys from DU, JohnKleeb and Zenfuego. We marched, sang, chanted, danced some more. For awhile my friends and I danced with this girl as we marched, and she started chanting "Dance for Peace! Dance for Peace!" So it was me and my two friends, all accidentally in shades of teal, dancing our butts off with a dreaded, all black wearing girl. Any other time we would have been a strange sight, but we blended right in with the crowd. There were people dancing and chanting "Love is greater than hate." In front of the block of counter protesters I chanted "Show them what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like." It looks like two crowds of people screaming at each other separated by a temporary fence and a line of bored looking policemen. We saw one officer tapping his stick in his hand menacingly later on, but he was the minority. We saw one guy on a street corner who flipped us the bird with his sons watching.
When we got to the end we flopped down in the dead grass and watched most of the rest of the crowd pour in. We saw Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. We saw a guy wearing a sign with lyrics from Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." We saw small children with signs as big as they were chanting "No war! No war!" We saw a kid whose sign was a piece of printer paper with small writing in red pen on the end of two snorkels taped together.
Then we wandered closer to the stage and listened to Sweet Honey in the Rock sing something about Halliburton. Some of our friends came back with Chinese food (we got lots of envious glances!) We eventually moved closer to the music. Head Roc was great, but the crowd didn't seem to into it, no idea why. Thievery Corporation was wonderful, such a wide range of sounds. The belly dancers were great but the crowd was very punk and waiting for Bouncing Souls which was loud and ruckus and perfect. The lead singer followed the led of a few others and went crowd suffering for a bit. I got knocked down when the moshing started suddenly, but no one was hurt. Then the punks left and the women and lesbians moved in for LeTigre, whom I had been waiting all night for. Jello Biafra as the MC was great. His voice hasn't seemed to have changed at all since his singing days. He not only talked about peace and war, but also about consumerism and other such things.
So now the cold I was fighting off has conquered me, and I'm sore from marching and dancing all day, but it was well worth it. By FAR the best protest I've ever been to.
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