I live in Portland, but attended the Seattle, WA march today with a group of about 50 others from Portland via Amtrak. The Seattle march was great - we had absolutely perfect weather, everyone was friendly and in a great mood and happy to be joining together. Rallying before the march, we heard some great speakers. We marched for about an hour, with the usual chants (What do we want? Peace! etc.), then finalized with some musicians back at Westlake Plaza.
There were also some bridge candlelight vigils in Portland, OR this evening.
My thoughts after the jump.
I would have to estimate at least 7000 people in Seattle. Terrific costumes and signs. The majority of the crowd was middle-aged, white folks. The "freak contingent" was very minimal, only a few drummers and people dressed like clowns dancing around and a very few black-bandana anarchist types. Yes, ANSWER was there, the Mumia folks were there, and a few other splinter groups, but in general the theme was very unified. Unfortunately, no sponsoring group felt it appropriate to arrange for any porta-potties, thereby forcing everyone to go to the nearby shopping mall, ride 3 escalators, walk through the food court and stand in line to use a restroom. WTF???
Lots of peace-sign-waving onlookers on the streets as we walked past; I saw NO media cameras at all. Yes we chanted, but IMHO the chanting was pretty low energy and obligatory. I couldn't help thinking about the difference in fervor between today's police sanctioned, pre-arranged-route, polite protests and the angry, take-over-the-streets mentality protests of the Vietnam era. Interesting how "far" we've come.
I understand that here in Portland, people stood on the many bridges across the Columbia/Willamette Rivers here with candles and signs and I heard it was very peaceful.
What I'm most amazed at is the lack of media coverage here in the Northwest. All three TV affiliates, ABC, NBC and CBS, barely gave mention to the DC protest or the local protests. In fact, the CBS affiliate gave priority coverage to just a few protesters south of here regarding illegal immigration, before even mentioning DC, Portland or Seattle. The only mention of the DC protests said there were "tens of thousands" in attendance. In my opinion, our local media here (newspaper and TV) just plain sucks.
Overall, it was a beautiful, peaceful and well unified event in Seattle. All of us were thinking of you in DC, talking about you, wondering how it was going and being with you in spirit.