Iraq Moratorium Tomorrow: Count the Armbands

As many of you know, tomorrow, Friday, September 21, is Iraq Moratorium Day.

It is an opportunity to conduct an empirical study on your fellow Americans. The primary action for Iraq Moratorium Day (IMD) is to wear black armbands to express opposition to the war. So you can count the black armbands you see to get some idea of how many people oppose the Iraq War.

Of course this measurement will be flawed, because not everyone will know about IMD. But the fact that people don't know about IMD is also an indicator of the level of antiwar sentiment in America. If the sentiment were stronger, there would have been more individual efforts to spread the word about IMD, and more people would know.

And I expect there could be a pretty big margin of error in your measurement, and you can still learn quite a lot from this opportunity for observation. For instance, I don't think you will be put in a position of asking yourself whether the 30% of people you saw with armbands actually means 40% of people oppose the war strongly enough to advertise their opinion about it. Rather, I think you will be stuck asking yourself what it means that 0% of the people you saw were wearing black armbands. What would that mean, anyway?

I will try to post another diary tomorrow where people can post their measurements (i.e., counted number of armbands). I think it would be interesting to hear, from across the country, how many people were participating in Iraq Moratorium Day. Or, if another poster who tends to get his/her diaries on the rec list wants to post a polling diary, that would be great too!