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Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: A Day at the Rally
From: Gordon Fitch

This is about the pro-choice rally/march/festival
in Washington last Sunday (April 5) from a somewhat
different perspective -- participation -- than that 
of the big-time media.

The story can start with my getting up at 3:30 a.m. 
-- because the busses were supposed to leave at six, 
and I live about an hour and a half away from the 
point of departure, and it takes me about an hour to 
get functional.  That may seem too individual to 
matter, until you think about hundreds of thousands of 
people doing it in the cold April morning.  I made my 
way through the night to Union Square alone, milled
around as dawn came, and finally collapsed onto a NOW 
bus, which followed many, many other busses down I-95 to 
Washington while I dozed.  I regained full consciousness 
in one of the Pentagon's innumerable parking lots with a 
lot of somewhat confused instructions and some new 
friends.  (Some groups stuck together in large numbers, 
but the NOW people broke down into small gangs.  
Anarchists at heart, I suppose.)

The rally population in general was about 85% female, 
and 95% Euro-American, with the remainder mostly being 
made up by persons I would guess to be of South or
East Asian descent.  I estimate the median age to have 
been about 28, maybe less, with noticeably low 
representation of the middle-aged; there were quite
possibly more people over 60 than between, say, 35 
and 60.  A substatial minority, perhaps 15 percent, 
made a point of proclaiming homosexuality, e.g. 
"Queers for Choice", although they weren't noisy about 
it -- just an accepted part of the scene.  There were 
a few old-time radical Left types, mostly on the 
periphery, giving away lots of literature about
imminent socialist revolution.

The participants claimed to have come from the expected 
locales in the East and South, and there were also 
representatives (or at least flags) from California, 
Colorado, and Alaska.  In general, participants were
"middle-class" if we can make that term vague enough.
It was not a particularly New York City sort of crowd, 
although I would guess a quarter of the people were 
>from the area.  

The sun was out, but there was a rather cool wind at
first; this turned out to be a good thing once everybody
got to the Mall.  The sky was cloudless.  The dogwoods
were in bloom.  In other words, a very fine day.  Many 
people wore white, which sort of went with the weather;
I think this was a tradition of the suffragettes, 
although clever demonstration organizers can tell you 
that bright colors make crowds, as well as structures, 
look larger.

We followed the surging mob from the hundreds of busses
parked at the Pentagon -- a strangely yellowed, worn-
looking mass forlornly sitting among the classy new
corporate office towers of Arlington -- through the 
Washington subway system, which is spacious and 
attractive (one might even say beautiful, compared to 
those of New York and Boston) and got out at the 
Smithsonian Station, which is closest to the Mall.  

By the time we arrived the Mall was about half full, 
although the people were not densely packed.  Still, it 
was a lot of people, and they kept on coming.  There was 
a stage with a large PA system down at one end of the 
Mall, and other PA speakers at intervals of a hundred 
yards or so, ensuring that the sound would interfere 
with itself and give some interesting echo effects, at 
considerable cost to intelligibility.  

Not that it mattered a whole lot.  The people were way 
ahead of the speakers politically and aesthetically, in my
judgment.  Of course, I heard only about a third of them.
Peter, Paul and Mary turned in a ritual performance of "If
I Had a Hammer" with which I suppose the crowd was supposed
to sing along, and some of them did, but the folkbaggage of
yesteryear's radicalism seems to be dying out -- and a good
thing, in my opinionated opinion.   (Actually, a lot of
people seemed to like this stuff, but I find it pretty 
bland and about as far from the taste of the American 
"folk" as you can get.)  These were followed by a number 
of self-serving haranguers, including a few presidential 
candidates.  There was also the _eminence_noire_ of 
American Politics, Jesse Jackson, who is still the best 
orator in town, and Bella Abzug, the only serious 
politician I have never regretted voting for.

Yes, Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton were there, doubtless
regarded as the _significant_ part of the scene by the
_New_York_Times_ and _Time_ magazine and the rest of their
set.

The problem I had with the speakers is that they were doing
the old blood-sweat-and-tears-and-sacred-anger-and-endurance-
in-defeat-meanwhile-vote-for-me-and-give-me-money number, 
while the people seemed to have caught a whiff of victory.  
I don't know if Carol Braun was there, but her primary win 
was certainly a presence.  Blood has been drawn from the 
forces of social reaction and its friend, business-as-usual
-- one of the principal reasons for Braun's victory was the 
treatment of Anita Hill and the confirmation of Clarence 
Thomas -- and as Arnie says in _Predator_: "If it can bleed, 
it can die."  _Sometimes_ it's worth listening to a 
Republican.

As the haranging was going on, it became time to march past
the White House, but there were so many people there that
this proved difficult to do.  We stood around in a rather
dense crowd for about an hour, which is not a particularly
pleasant way to spend one's time, especially for us middle-
aged types whose feet hurt.  Finally, along with several
thousand other people, we went and sat on some lawn or other
in the neighborhood for awhile and ate our lunch, and then 
made an end run behind some of the humbler buildings in the 
area --  one of them had a Red Cross sort of red cross on it 
-- and circled back to the parade route, coming down onto 
Pennsylvania Avenue and getting our shot at telling Butch a 
thing or two.  

The windows of his house were, of course, dark and empty; as
I recall, Nixon used to make a point of watching pro 
football during demonstrations.  God knows what George was 
up to; and probably only God can stand knowing.

The march then wound around back to the Mall.  When you could
see it all at once, as you can going downhill towards the
Capitol, its size was truly impressive.  There was a good
deal of chanting, standbys like "What do we want...." and
some more specific, such as "We won't go back!"  The were
the usual signs, some respectably printed by the sponsors
and some hand-made -- many featuring coat-hangers, and
many making suggestions to leading anti-abortionists that
cannot be repeated in a family newsgroup.  There was also 
a kind of cheering for the sake of cheering that simply 
passed through the line of march as if an ethereal football 
game were passing by overhead -- although the predominance 
of women's voices gave it an interesting quality you don't
hear at most athletic events.  Perhaps it was the sound of 
the banshee, coming for the Administration....

Various musical groups presented accompaniment, not in the 
line of march, but standing across the street from the 
White House -- a sort of latter-day Punk Rock band, suitably
attired in black and sporting many metallic objects impaled
in clothes and body -- and some other people, further along,
were doing complicated Latin-American-style percussion.

There were a few counter-demonstrators -- maybe 20 in all --
working off religous-fanatic themes.  Given the propensity 
of the media for presenting "balance", e.g. giving 20 
counter-demonstrators equal time with 500,000+ pro-choice 
people, some of the pro-choicers did a clever thing; they 
stood around and behind the counter-demonstrators with pro-
choice signs, so that the news cameras could not pull their
usual stunts, unless they did some very careful pictorial
cropping.[1]
------------------------------------------------------
| [1]  Check the _N._Y._Times_ coverage as of Monday;
| substantial coverage is given to an almost non-existent
| opposition.  I suspect this is not because the _Times_
| is anti-choice, but because it just doesn't like non-
| establishment types of _any_ kind.  Important questions
| should be discussed by sober men in dark suits....
------------------------------------------------------

After walking down towards the Capitol, we got back to the 
Mall and found some unoccupied grass and flopped down and 
loafed around.  Miraculously, the haranguing was still 
going on, but its volume had sunk down.  Here and there in 
the multitudes various people started doing their own 
music; nearby me, one group of women from, I think, 
Dartmouth, did a nice rendition of "America the Beautiful" 
in close harmony with some new words appropriate to the 
occasion.  From far away, drifting on the now mild breezes, 
came the intermittent sound of Afro-Latin drumming.

Finally, as it got to be time to go, we wandered back to
the (jammed) metro station.  Here, we finally came up to the
drummers -- who I thought were pretty good -- and a few
hundred people dancing.  Unlike the movements of a few 
years ago, which to me looked angry and aggressive, popular 
dance has become sinuous, joyous, ecstatic.  Or maybe it
was just with these people, on this occasion.  I'd rather
think that something's in the wind.  It sure seems like it.

--

Some of the problems I think NOW, NARAL, Planned Parenthood,
and the others who sponsored the rally need to think about 
for similar future events reflect underlying general problems: 
the lack of participation of Black, Hispanic, and working-
class people in general; lack of participation of men; the use 
of the movement for politicians' self-serving harangues.  (Not
that the politicos should be kept out, but they should know
that what people want to hear about is not how great they, the
politicians, are.  And some non-pros interspersed would leaven
the discourse a bit.)

More music wouldn't have hurt.  There _are_ feminist rappers
and rock groups, for example, and I would have vastly preferred
listening to them to listening to, say, senatorial candidates
advertising their wares.

I spoke to a number of people in the week before the march who
said they might have gone but did not know how to get connected
to a bus, or hadn't been informed soon enough.  Perhaps those
were just pass-offs, but I did find there was not much
information about.  Needless to say, the owners and operators
of the mass media are not going to put out any information 
which interferes with consumption if they can help it -- unless
someone pays them big bucks -- so it may be just too costly to 
inform the public in general.

Speaking more tactically, the participants could have been 
given more information by the rally leadership.  For instance, 
movement onto Pennsylvania Avenue could have been organized so 
that people did not have to stand in a dense crowd for an hour.  
It may be that a few cheap walkie-talkies would have been in 
order.  Also, the distance from most of the parking lots in the 
vicinity of the Pentagon and the Mall is only two miles; many 
of the young and vigorous could have skipped the jammed 
public transit and walked, especially considering the 
beautiful weather, but that would have required little maps 
and directions, which were not in abundance.  However, these 
are minor quibbles.  On the whole, it was a good day with
great energy and about the best event of its kind I've 
been at.
--
Gordon Fitch                        gcf@panix.com



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