Dr. Rivka goes to Washington
Apr. 26th, 2004 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI was here:
My March experience started Saturday afternoon, when I went to the airport to pick up![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kcobweb. We were best friends from fourth to seventh grade, and I hadn't seen her since I was thirteen. When she decided to come to the March from Montana, it seemed like a perfect chance to catch up. She and I and curiousangel got ourselves nicely psyched up for the March by trading stories about Anti-Abortion Protesters We Have Known. (curiousangel and I both used to do clinic escorting in our respective college towns; kcobweb works for Planned Parenthood, so she probably has several times more wacko experience than both of us put together.)
The rally started at 11 and march step-off was at noon, so we planned to meetminnaleigh and some other people on the steps of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History at 10:30am. We were doing fine right up until we walked into the Greenbelt Metro Station and found about four hundred people crammed into the small lobby trying to buy tickets from machines that were utterly foreign to them. Spirits were high - we met some nice people in line and got our first March stickers, hot pink circles from Planned Parenthood that said "stand UP for choice!" They were also giving away signs outside the Metro station - I liked the one that said "pro privacy, pro family, pro choice," but at the bottom it said "another Republican for choice," so it didn't exactly fit.
Just as we got up close to a ticket machine, some friends of ours from church came in. We had been planning to meet them at the museum too, but if they hadn't met us at the station and cut in line with us, they would've been so far behind that we probably would have missed them entirely. They were wearing costumes: plastic fedoras in different colors, and light blue cardboard cut-out chicks left over from someone's Easter decorations, labeled "chicks for choice." Fortunately, they had an extra chick cut-out and I had a sharpie. Before we boarded the train I had a chick safety-pinned to my back.
We finally reached the museum at 11:15. (minnaleigh is very, very patient - although she did have Adorable Sven to keep her company.) We visited the block-long string of Porta-potties and signed in with a roving march counter. To get a reasonably accurate estimate of the size of the crowd, they were asking people to sign in and receive a "count me in!" sticker. Later, I heard that 1.2 million stickers had been given out. We were joined, purely by chance, by another member of our church, and we wandered down onto the Mall proper.
It's impossible to give any idea of the size of the March. It was impossible, while we were there, to even get an idea of the size of the March. We wandered a bit aimlessly, looking at signs. (My early favorite: "Hey Bush, we've got a plan for parenthood - have you got a plan for Iraq?") I wanted one that said "another ______ for choice" and had room for you to write in whatever you wanted.minnaleigh thought she'd seen some over by the Metro station, so we started off in that direction - and soon realized that we'd become separated in the crush of people. minnaleigh, kcobweb, and I stood helplessly on a corner crossing for a while, watching thousands of people stream by and wondering how we'd find curiousangel and the rest. My cell phone was the backpack curiousangel was carrying, so minnaleigh tried to call it - and got the voicemail. She had better luck getting Adorable Sven, who told us they were "by the white tent." Remarkably, minnaleigh was able to find them just from that.
Reunited, we sat down on the grass to rest and eat. Two WomBAT friends ofminnaleigh's joined us, ensuring that curiousangel was fated to spend the rest of the day counting to eleven over and over and over again. (He took it upon himself to make sure that we all stayed herded roughly together... a heroic task.) We listened to the speakers - Cybill Shepherd certainly has a mouth on her, and that's all I'm going to say about that - and collected more stickers. curiousangel put a big "this is what a feminist looks like" on his Atlanta Braves ballcap. Everybody loved that. As our friend Sally said, "okay, the rest of us - 'this is what a feminist looks like,' big surprise. 'A bunch of hip young women with no makeup - you're feminists? Really?' But with the Southern accent and the ballcap..." He was indeed perfect.
We wondered why no one seemed to be marching yet, given that it was supposed to start at noon. Eventually I figured out that people had been marching, and there were just so many of us that it took a long time for any movement to be visible from our vantage point. We finally saw people walking and followed them - at a slow shuffle on the Mall, and then at a reasonable walking pace once we got to the street.
I can't begin to convey the number and diversity of people who were there. Mostly women - probably two women for every man. Families with children, babies in arms or strollers, elderly couples, women in wheelchairs, college students of all races and descriptions. Anarchists and members of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Several families were present in three generations: grandmother, mother, daughters. Medical students were present in great numbers, dressed in scrubs and short white coats and carrying signs reading "we are tomorrow's abortion providers." (They got a lot of applause.) People from all over the country: I particularly saw a lot of "don't mess with Texas women" T-shirts and "I am the face of pro-choice Michigan" T-shirts. Wisconsins wearing T-shirts that said "cheeseheads for choice." People in costumes and in jeans and in church clothes.
For a while we marched directly in front of a group of college-age women carrying a banner that said "women of color for reproductive" something-or-other. (It was crowded; I couldn't quite see." They had the best chants: "If you take our right to choose/we will kick you with our shoes," for example, although they didn't keep it up for nearly long enough. Their most infectious chant: "Mooooove, Bush, get out' the way. Get out' the way, Bush, get out' the way." That one got kept up for a long time as we passed the White House.
We had to stop halfway to rest. The march went around three sides of a big open grassy space, and we sprawled in the middle along with a hundred or so other tired people. It was then that I first got an idea of our numbers, when I saw the column stretching all the way around and back the way we came - twenty people wide, the visible portion hundreds of yards long, coming on and on and on.
At several points along the route, there were protesters. They covered a lot of ground, but they were spread pretty thin - so we kept encountering more and more of them, but I think all told there were only about a thousand. Dismembered-fetus pictures were legion. There appeared to be two major rhetorical camps: the carrot ("women deserve better than abortion") and the stick ("insert Nazi comparison here"). The cops kept the two camps apart, and although the chanting got a lot louder every time we passed protesters ("pro-choice IS pro-life!" was most common, although the megaphone preachers also tended to get "not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate." We mostly couldn't hear what they were saying over the chanting, which I'm sure was a blessing.
The March wound up on the Mall again, closer to the Capitol than we'd started out. "Let's sit down on the grass and listen to the speakers for a while," our friend Jen suggested. Then we realized that the grass looked like this:
...so instead we sat on a large pile of discarded signs at the edge of the sidewalk. It was dusty, and because we were midway between two sound systems the speakers all had an echo effect, but otherwise it was perfectly comfortable. We found out, by chance, that we were sitting next to some Unitarian Universalists from Texas.kcobweb ran into friends from Montana, and while she was talking to them she missed a bunch of young women with "Montana feminist" T-shirts. I saw some people with "Twin Tiers for choice" T-shirts - from the small region of upstate New York where I grew up. Everybody, I mean to say, was there. Everybody walked past our little corner. We lounged there for a while, shedding members of our little group one by one.
Eventually we got tired and decamped to a Thai restaurant in Dupont Circle. The crush getting into the National Archives Metro Station was worse than anything I'd seen yet - dark and cramped, people squashed in elbow to elbow and unable to move. All I could think of was what would happen if some anti-abortion fanatic lobbed a bomb down the escalator - how many hundreds would die of smoke inhalation or trampled to death. But fortunately that didn't happen. Instead, we descended on Thaiphoon like ravening beasts, just before it filled completely up with other marchers. (Our waiter was wearing a March sticker on his uniform!) We had big tropical drinks with umbrellas in and scarfed down massive amounts of protein, and then staggered home, unwarrantedly tired.
If I had it to do over, I would've brought more food. Various people had brought snack food - dried fruit, nuts, cereal bars, beef jerky, baby carrots with hummus - and every time we stopped or sat down we all seemed to want to eat. I would've been much happier with a full meal. We just seemed to be burning a lot more energy than I had expected. We had plenty of water, but I hadn't really thought ahead about food.
I also would've put sunscreen on even though it was overcast all day. I wound up with sunburn on my nose and the back of my neck. (Boy, did we have perfect weather for marching - low 60s and cloudy. I was too busy being thankful that it wasn't hot, humid, and sunny to realize that I might burn anyway.)
I would've bought Metro passes in advance. And, most of all, I would've brought my film camera and gotten a lot more pictures. (I'm not crazy about our digital camera, which was a hand-me-down and doesn't work very well.) I had such a marvelous time! I don't think I'll ever forget.
My March experience started Saturday afternoon, when I went to the airport to pick up
kcobweb. We were best friends from fourth to seventh grade, and I hadn't seen her since I was thirteen. When she decided to come to the March from Montana, it seemed like a perfect chance to catch up. She and I and curiousangel got ourselves nicely psyched up for the March by trading stories about Anti-Abortion Protesters We Have Known. (curiousangel and I both used to do clinic escorting in our respective college towns; kcobweb works for Planned Parenthood, so she probably has several times more wacko experience than both of us put together.)The rally started at 11 and march step-off was at noon, so we planned to meet
minnaleigh and some other people on the steps of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History at 10:30am. We were doing fine right up until we walked into the Greenbelt Metro Station and found about four hundred people crammed into the small lobby trying to buy tickets from machines that were utterly foreign to them. Spirits were high - we met some nice people in line and got our first March stickers, hot pink circles from Planned Parenthood that said "stand UP for choice!" They were also giving away signs outside the Metro station - I liked the one that said "pro privacy, pro family, pro choice," but at the bottom it said "another Republican for choice," so it didn't exactly fit. Just as we got up close to a ticket machine, some friends of ours from church came in. We had been planning to meet them at the museum too, but if they hadn't met us at the station and cut in line with us, they would've been so far behind that we probably would have missed them entirely. They were wearing costumes: plastic fedoras in different colors, and light blue cardboard cut-out chicks left over from someone's Easter decorations, labeled "chicks for choice." Fortunately, they had an extra chick cut-out and I had a sharpie. Before we boarded the train I had a chick safety-pinned to my back.
We finally reached the museum at 11:15. (
minnaleigh is very, very patient - although she did have Adorable Sven to keep her company.) We visited the block-long string of Porta-potties and signed in with a roving march counter. To get a reasonably accurate estimate of the size of the crowd, they were asking people to sign in and receive a "count me in!" sticker. Later, I heard that 1.2 million stickers had been given out. We were joined, purely by chance, by another member of our church, and we wandered down onto the Mall proper.It's impossible to give any idea of the size of the March. It was impossible, while we were there, to even get an idea of the size of the March. We wandered a bit aimlessly, looking at signs. (My early favorite: "Hey Bush, we've got a plan for parenthood - have you got a plan for Iraq?") I wanted one that said "another ______ for choice" and had room for you to write in whatever you wanted.
minnaleigh thought she'd seen some over by the Metro station, so we started off in that direction - and soon realized that we'd become separated in the crush of people. minnaleigh, kcobweb, and I stood helplessly on a corner crossing for a while, watching thousands of people stream by and wondering how we'd find curiousangel and the rest. My cell phone was the backpack curiousangel was carrying, so minnaleigh tried to call it - and got the voicemail. She had better luck getting Adorable Sven, who told us they were "by the white tent." Remarkably, minnaleigh was able to find them just from that.Reunited, we sat down on the grass to rest and eat. Two WomBAT friends of
minnaleigh's joined us, ensuring that curiousangel was fated to spend the rest of the day counting to eleven over and over and over again. (He took it upon himself to make sure that we all stayed herded roughly together... a heroic task.) We listened to the speakers - Cybill Shepherd certainly has a mouth on her, and that's all I'm going to say about that - and collected more stickers. curiousangel put a big "this is what a feminist looks like" on his Atlanta Braves ballcap. Everybody loved that. As our friend Sally said, "okay, the rest of us - 'this is what a feminist looks like,' big surprise. 'A bunch of hip young women with no makeup - you're feminists? Really?' But with the Southern accent and the ballcap..." He was indeed perfect.We wondered why no one seemed to be marching yet, given that it was supposed to start at noon. Eventually I figured out that people had been marching, and there were just so many of us that it took a long time for any movement to be visible from our vantage point. We finally saw people walking and followed them - at a slow shuffle on the Mall, and then at a reasonable walking pace once we got to the street.
I can't begin to convey the number and diversity of people who were there. Mostly women - probably two women for every man. Families with children, babies in arms or strollers, elderly couples, women in wheelchairs, college students of all races and descriptions. Anarchists and members of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Several families were present in three generations: grandmother, mother, daughters. Medical students were present in great numbers, dressed in scrubs and short white coats and carrying signs reading "we are tomorrow's abortion providers." (They got a lot of applause.) People from all over the country: I particularly saw a lot of "don't mess with Texas women" T-shirts and "I am the face of pro-choice Michigan" T-shirts. Wisconsins wearing T-shirts that said "cheeseheads for choice." People in costumes and in jeans and in church clothes.
For a while we marched directly in front of a group of college-age women carrying a banner that said "women of color for reproductive" something-or-other. (It was crowded; I couldn't quite see." They had the best chants: "If you take our right to choose/we will kick you with our shoes," for example, although they didn't keep it up for nearly long enough. Their most infectious chant: "Mooooove, Bush, get out' the way. Get out' the way, Bush, get out' the way." That one got kept up for a long time as we passed the White House.
We had to stop halfway to rest. The march went around three sides of a big open grassy space, and we sprawled in the middle along with a hundred or so other tired people. It was then that I first got an idea of our numbers, when I saw the column stretching all the way around and back the way we came - twenty people wide, the visible portion hundreds of yards long, coming on and on and on.
At several points along the route, there were protesters. They covered a lot of ground, but they were spread pretty thin - so we kept encountering more and more of them, but I think all told there were only about a thousand. Dismembered-fetus pictures were legion. There appeared to be two major rhetorical camps: the carrot ("women deserve better than abortion") and the stick ("insert Nazi comparison here"). The cops kept the two camps apart, and although the chanting got a lot louder every time we passed protesters ("pro-choice IS pro-life!" was most common, although the megaphone preachers also tended to get "not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate." We mostly couldn't hear what they were saying over the chanting, which I'm sure was a blessing.
The March wound up on the Mall again, closer to the Capitol than we'd started out. "Let's sit down on the grass and listen to the speakers for a while," our friend Jen suggested. Then we realized that the grass looked like this:
...so instead we sat on a large pile of discarded signs at the edge of the sidewalk. It was dusty, and because we were midway between two sound systems the speakers all had an echo effect, but otherwise it was perfectly comfortable. We found out, by chance, that we were sitting next to some Unitarian Universalists from Texas.
kcobweb ran into friends from Montana, and while she was talking to them she missed a bunch of young women with "Montana feminist" T-shirts. I saw some people with "Twin Tiers for choice" T-shirts - from the small region of upstate New York where I grew up. Everybody, I mean to say, was there. Everybody walked past our little corner. We lounged there for a while, shedding members of our little group one by one. Eventually we got tired and decamped to a Thai restaurant in Dupont Circle. The crush getting into the National Archives Metro Station was worse than anything I'd seen yet - dark and cramped, people squashed in elbow to elbow and unable to move. All I could think of was what would happen if some anti-abortion fanatic lobbed a bomb down the escalator - how many hundreds would die of smoke inhalation or trampled to death. But fortunately that didn't happen. Instead, we descended on Thaiphoon like ravening beasts, just before it filled completely up with other marchers. (Our waiter was wearing a March sticker on his uniform!) We had big tropical drinks with umbrellas in and scarfed down massive amounts of protein, and then staggered home, unwarrantedly tired.
If I had it to do over, I would've brought more food. Various people had brought snack food - dried fruit, nuts, cereal bars, beef jerky, baby carrots with hummus - and every time we stopped or sat down we all seemed to want to eat. I would've been much happier with a full meal. We just seemed to be burning a lot more energy than I had expected. We had plenty of water, but I hadn't really thought ahead about food.
I also would've put sunscreen on even though it was overcast all day. I wound up with sunburn on my nose and the back of my neck. (Boy, did we have perfect weather for marching - low 60s and cloudy. I was too busy being thankful that it wasn't hot, humid, and sunny to realize that I might burn anyway.)
I would've bought Metro passes in advance. And, most of all, I would've brought my film camera and gotten a lot more pictures. (I'm not crazy about our digital camera, which was a hand-me-down and doesn't work very well.) I had such a marvelous time! I don't think I'll ever forget.
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Date: 2004-04-26 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-04-27 05:43 am (UTC)The mall picture, though ... somehow, my brain keeps insisting that it's one of those "Where's Waldo?" type things.
"Where's Wivka?"
Well, maybe not...
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Date: 2004-04-27 07:35 am (UTC)-J
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Date: 2004-04-27 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-04-28 08:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-07 09:10 pm (UTC)