D Jo got an email from
MoveOn.org yesterday, announcing a rally to protest President Bush's veto of the war funding bill. It was pretty short notice, but I headed out of work a little bit early, and she and the girls and I walked down to Front & Walnut Streets to take part.
We marched in San Diego in 2003 to protest the beginning of this war, and it's amazingly depressing to think that, four years later, we're still protesting it. At least now a larger percentage of the American public agrees with us; when we marched back in '02, drunk 23-year-olds wandered out of the Hooters in the Gaslamp District to flip us off. This time, with a few minor exceptions, anyone who favored an open-ended occupation didn't see fit to let us know.
The rally was pretty well-attended for something that had been organized on such short notice. At its peak I counted 38 attendees, and organizers put the final estimate at between 40-50 total:
We flanked both sides of Front Street:
Most people had noisemakers and signs and were encouraging drivers to honk to show their support:
The response from drivers was almost uniformly positive. Every second or third car honked and/or waved, and I only saw two cars react negatively: one was a pickup truck with a couple of guys who yelled something unintelligible as they drove away, and another was a guy in an SUV who dropped his car into neutral and gunned his engine, which I tool to be conspicuous consumption of gasoline and pretty stupid as far as anti-anti-war statements go.
A camera crew from WHP news was there, and the reporter asked me to say a few words about why I was here. The
news piece led the 11 o'clock news and included a brief clip of me in which they even spelled my name correctly.
