Unconvention blogging: The People are PISSED!

In terms of sheer numbers, I've never witnessed anything like it. I've been to protests in Seattle for the WTO, Philly for the 2000 GOP Convention, Boston for the Presidential debate, DC for that goddamn thief's inauguration, and Cincinnati for a Bush speech egging on war in Iraq. The DNC protests last month hardly count.

But this is, by far, the largest protest I have ever participated in.

This march produced so many people in the streets that, for once, the mainstream media (NY Times) and Indymedia agree with each other on how many people showed up. Indymedia claims 400,000, and NYT says "hundreds of thousands." Indymedia has always beena accused of trumping the number of protesters at events they cover, but if NYT is willing to back them up, then this march must have really been huge.

This is historic, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

I was stuck in the middle of the pack, and I never saw where the bodies started or ended. In terms of size, here's the best picture of the crowd I could muster from being on the ground.

It seemed to stretch for endless amounts of blocks. At one point, I stepped away for 30 minutes. When I joined the march again, I was in the same place. The crowd was so dense with protesters that it had hardly moved.

And this crowd was pissed. I've never seen such overt profanity at a protest before. I gleefully joined in on chants of "FUCK YOU BUSH! FUCK YOU BUSH!" while flipping of Madison Square Garden. Granted, only a minority of the protesters were like this, but I've never heard it this bad at a protest before. So I, of course, loved it.

I saw a lot of colorful shirts today. For example:

And the signage was awesome. Like I said, expression of profanity was still a minority view, but here's some of my favorite signs that you won't see pictures of on the nightly news.

Like I said before, this crowd is PISSED. There were some other creative signs I liked, too.

Cute. Very cute.

These flags were well represented, you could see them everywhere. I think they came from the Code Pink rally prior to the march.

This sign is my hero.

Indeed. In most other civilized nations, this would be called a problem. But I guess if the government just intends to recruit kids to die in Iraq, why bother educating them first? What a gosh awful waste of taxpayer money.

In the interests of being fair and balanced, I got some pictures of Republicans, too.

What was scrolled on the back of their sign was more telling of their attitudes.

I didn't announce my political affiliations to them when I asked to take some photos, which is probably the only reason why I got the photos. (It pays to wear a plain, black shirt to protests.) I outed myself later, when about 15 of these people were behind a barrier, egging protesters on. One shouted, "Palestine doesn' exist!" I told him he should study some history before WWII, but it probably went unheard. So I got closer. Then another one shouted "Bush rules!," to which I replied "BUSH SUCKS!" I imagine the look on my face was akin to the picture of Dean in his scream.

This site isn't called Loaded Mouth for nothing.

Towards the end of the march, I saw this:

It looked rather out of place, because up until this point, I hadn't seen any messages supporting the protesters coming from the ritzy-looking buildings.

I also saw this guy again:

I took a photo of him in Boston, too. I guess God teleported him to NYC via the Religious Crackpot Express.

Unlike the Boston DNC protests, which received little coverage (probably because hardly anyone showed up), the GOP Convention protests are frontpage news - And the convention hasn't even started yet! The mainstream media has done a great job thus far of covering up other protests against Bush, but this one was too massive to keep a lid on. Judging from the the size and attitude of the crowd, it felt like a breaking point. Bush has bent us too far and the people have finally snapped. We will not let this man have another four years in office. I know that polls say the US is supposedly 50/50 politically, but the protests in Boston this year were nothing like this. You could hardly even call what happened in Boston protesting compared to what we'll hear about from the streets of the Big Apple in the next four days. After what I saw today, I find it hard to believe that this country is split 50/50.

As I conclude this, it seems appropriate for this Rocket From The Crypt song to pop up in Winamp: Stand back, look proud and tall! Be afraid of what you're seeing all the time, I'm Not Invisible! I'm Not Invisible! I'm Not Invisible!

We've always been out here, and we're not invisible anymore.