About 100,000 peo­ple — more by some esti­mates — filled the east side of Man­hat­tan on a bit­terly cold Sat­ur­day after­noon to let Bush know that the coun­try is not united behind him in his drive to war. The crowd milled along mostly peace­fully, except for a few scat­tered inci­dents, one involv­ing horses. “Take your horses out of here, you c***suckers!” roared one bearded pro­test­ers after a pha­lanx of mounted police offi­cers crossed 2^nd Ave. going east. The mood was upbeat and even play­ful, despite the weather and the grim mis­sion that brought so many out today.
Although the city denied the orga­niz­ers the right to march on the United Nations, the police had closed off all the streets, forc­ing us to walk up Lex­ing­ton, 3^rd and 2^nd avenues before hit­ting 69^th St. and finally turn­ing east where we could walk down 1^st Ave. This result­ing in three smaller marches uptown as pro­test­ers mainly ignored police warn­ings to stay on the side­walk and instead spilled out onto the streets. Many grum­bled that the cops were pre­vent­ing peo­ple from get­ting to the rally, hop­ing to dis­rupt it. If that was the case, they failed, as instead of sin­gle long pro­ces­sion and rally on 1^st Ave., they got the smaller marches pre­vi­ously men­tioned, tan­gling the entire East Side.
[UPDATE: George over at War​blog​ging​.com has a nice entry on the protest, and he is more effu­sive than I. As I said, I’m not report­ing much on this as I was a par­tic­i­pant rather than act­ing as a jour­nal­ist. He saw a lot more police action than I did…]
I took pic­tures while I was there, but since I was there as a par­tic­i­pant instead of an objec­tive jour­nal­ist, I won’t say much about this protest, instead point­ing you to cov­er­age by the Times and the Wash­ing­ton Post.
After the rally, the ten­sion in the air that I’d been feel­ing — a sense of wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen — seemed to have eased some­what. The act of march­ing, of gath­er­ing in huge num­bers against the pow­ers in Wash­ing­ton and in other cap­i­tals, was an effec­tive method of beat­ing back the anx­i­ety brought on by Orange Alerts and impend­ing war. And no, the protests prob­a­bly won’t halt the war, but they made us feel like we were doing some­thing. They gave us a feel­ing of fight­ing back — against war, against Bush, against fear. It’s a much bet­ter feel­ing than buy­ing plas­tic sheet­ing and duct tape and wait­ing for the boom.