I marched in Washington, D.C. on April 20th, 2002

4/23/02

So much happened this weekend that I'm going to break it into two posts. This is the beginning, and later I'll post the end.

Friday night I boarded a bus from the Boston Common to Washington, D.C. Two weeks beforehand I had been possessed by the idea of protesting in our nation's capitol against war. Bush's foreign policy is a complete mess, and I was just that pissed off about him labeling entire other countries "evil". I was angry about a lot of other things too: John Ashcroft, the economy, and the generally bad grammar that the president exhibits, to name a few issues that were plaguing me.

Plus, I had a little cash and I needed a break from things. D.C. promised to be very exciting; the day before I left I read an article in the Washington Post about the planned protests. There were going to be so many protesters in the capitol that weekend that the newspaper was obligated to print a map showing who was protesting what where. Nine different groups had registered permits for the weekend, and for fear of violence the city removed all the metal trashcans from the march route and called in extra cops. I wanted to be a part of it all. I even made myself an anti-war tee shirt that said: War is Bad. Stop it. I printed the names of a bunch of friends who agreed with me but couldn't make it to DC to march that day on the back.

So after subjecting myself to a ten hour bus ride to D.C. (just don't ask, man. It sucked.) , I made it to the State Plaza Hotel on the 2100 block of E street about 15 minutes before Kati, Michael, Dust and Will arrived. They had driven all the way from Tennessee the day before and slept outside of town in Virginia the night before. They were a hell of a lot more collected than I was. We checked our luggage and then headed over to the Washington Monument, our nation's phallic symbol, to tell the world we thought the President was an idiot.

Only, that's when things got interesting. As we walked, we first encountered a protest of around 10,000 angry Palestinians calling for JUSTICE. They had flags and energetic chants. Michael thought that was where we were headed and wanted to join them. No way, I said. I have no perspective on what they're doing. And we don't even know if they're non-violent. Everyone debated a few minutes about it, before we decided to keep walking to try to find the anti-war group.

The next protest we ran into was the Patriot group. They were a very well funded conservative lot there to protest the protesters. There were only about a hundred or so of them, but the Patriots had a huge loudspeaker system, and they were plenty angry. As we walked by, a man started quoting the book of John. We all just stared at each other and kept walking uphill, to the other side of the monument. A group of tourists, clearly just there for the weekend with no clue as to what they had stumbled upon, stopped us and asked to take our picture. We let them, grinning in our homemade anti-war shirts with posters Kati and Michael had made. "We're a tourist attraction!" Giggled Will.

Yeah, I guess we were.

As we came up over the side of the monument hill, we found the Anti-War protesters spread out over the slope like a giant crazy-quilt of causes. There were several thousand hippies, Quakers, college students, queers, puppeteers, Colombians, Episcopalians from Wisconsin, Green party activists, and a bunch of people in their twenties like ourselves who just thought Bush was Busted. Every 5 people or so had a different cause, complete with tee shirts, stickers, and signs to prove it. We were all united in our anti-war viewpoint, but that was about it.

Still, it was fabulous.

There was a 300-pound drag queen dressed like Condoleeza Rice. There was a group who called themselves "The Raging Grannies" who got up on the stage in front of the protest and sang anti-war songs in a nice and non-annoying way. There was a 9-11 widow who called for peace, but it didn't make much impact on me because every damn protest that day seemed to have a 9-11 victim to champion their cause. People passed out an amazing number of newspaper 'zines for a variety of causes; Kati and Michael started collecting them all. I picked up a bunch of stickers. We wandered around for a bit looking at all the fab puppets and bizarre people before settling on a patch of grass for a few hours where we would rest and wander about by ourselves or in pairs.

It was a very peaceful and happy afternoon. Kati and I got up and danced on some concrete boundary markers for a bit at one point, just to shake our asses for freedom. We rocked out on the killer vibe of being part of a protest with so many thousands of people. We boogied down in our own dorky way for peace and unity. We looked like complete idiots because we were so fucking happy to express our opinions in the nation's capitol, just a few hundred feet from the Washington Monument, America's dick. Dust pointed out that compared to the size of the rest of the nation, the Washington Monument is sort of small to be an actual penis. We all agreed that's what the problem was with the country; penis envy. I mean, look at France. The Eiffel Tower, now there's a dick…

Anyway, we had a grand time. The only time we were hassled at all was when Will and I went to use the porta-potties located at the base of the hill. The Patriot Protesters had claimed them, going so far as to put signs on them and even demarcate them for men and women, which is dumb (we all have to pee, OK? No one's going to walk in on you in a porta-potty. The doors lock.). It was like the military supporters had to exercise their manifest destiny right over the bathrooms. They wanted to make sure they didn't have to share them with hippies or Palestinians, I guess. As Will and I approached their territory, the man on the loudspeaker was warning the youth of America against pornographers, like the pornographers that made American Pie 2…

So there were very few women at the Patriot protest, so the girl's bathroom was empty and before anyone can tell me not to, I walk right into a porta-potty and lock the door to pee. I learned this strategy from growing up in club environments. If you think someone is going to tell you not to pee in their bathroom, the best strategy you can exercise is make a dash for the toilet before someone can stop you. Because believe me, they're not going to throw open the door on you while you're going.

But poor Will had to stand in line at the Patriot potties. As he stood behind another anti-war protester, a Patriot came out of the "men's" and got in the other anti-war guy's face. "You can't use these!" and the military supporter shoved the poor peaceful-protest guy.

And before anything else could happen, Will told me (because I was exercising my patriotic right to pee, I didn't see this) a cop was right there. He sort of sighed and told the anti-war guys to go over at the porta-potties near the Vietnam Memorial (ironic, no?). So the protester who had been shoved left, but will had to wait for me, with the cop and this crazy military guy glaring at him. I stepped out of the john a few seconds later, and the three men all had their arms crossed, staring at me.

"What?" I said.

And that was really the only bad thing that happened. Around 3 o'clock the anti-war march started, but because the Palestinians and the anti-war people hadn't communicated effectively, we started our walks to the capitol at the same time. The two groups met sort of head on at one point, and I couldn't tell what happened. When you're in a crowd of around 20,000 people, it's hard to tell. I suppose they came to an agreement, and we started marching together.

This didn't bother me at all at first, because for most of the march I was still surrounded by anti-war people. It was so much fun. We screamed and chanted and made fun of the president. All along our path to the capitol, protesters and lookers-on climbed the streetlights and sat on the roofs of short buildings, smoking pot and taking pictures and cheering us on. For a while we marched very near a group of girls who were all wearing pink plastic capes and who told Bush to suck their…well, Washington Monuments, basically. There was one boy with them who was wearing a shiny club shirt and acted as their male cheerleader. They rocked out, and I wanted a cape too, we all felt like super-heroes. There were just so many awesome people around us. The sky spit a little rain, but that was OK, it kept us cooled off. The cops were super nice, like they had received courtesy training or something.

The march was awesome, but near the end we started mixing up with the Palestinians. And some of them kind of pissed me off - I mean, I understand that they're being slaughtered. I understand that they dislike Bush as much as the anti-war people did. But I'm not going to cheer with people who are calling for more violence. No how, no way.

Will and I broke with the protest a few blocks from the capitol. Kati, Michael and Dust kept marching, meeting up again with more anti-war folks.

We met back up at the hotel room, dirty and exhausted, happy for showers and snacks. We turned on the TV and were sad but not surprised to find that the media was mostly covering the Palestinians; they simply had more people than us.

Mat and Emily showed up a bit later and were wonderful. We all went out to eat, and then sat around the hotel room later waiting to hear from Devon and Alestar. While we waited, Mat, Emily, Dust and I had one of those wacked out conversations about religion you can only have when you've stayed up too late and thought about things way too hard. I loved it though; I was so fucking happy I couldn't believe it. I spent the day surrounded by friends doing something we all believed in, and having intelligent conversation. We saw drag queens and messed-up puppets. We ate good food and had an impromptu slumber party.

My friends rock. Life is good. I'll write another post about what happened on Sunday later this week. The planets lined up, and there was a painting by Leonardo DaVinci, and Alestar told me about the opposite of waterfalls…