Turning up the heat on the climate change issue
It was such a nice day last Saturday, I took a little stroll with about 150,000 to 200,000 of my closest friends.
We walked down the block, around the big white house at the end and rested in the shade in the park where the big tall needle-like thing is, the Washington Monument.
It was a little too hot – 92 degrees – and a few people fainted.
But the People’s Climate March was completely peaceful, friendly, cheerful, loud and even joyous.
The few visible police around spent all day pointing out where the port-a-potties – the “Don’s johns” – were.
We knew the police were there to protect us as we exercised our First Amendment “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Those two rights are as sacred as any other enumerated in the Constitution. Just ask the Russian or Venezuelan people whose protests are met with beatings, arrests and bullets.
I’ve been to about 15 Washington marches since the Vietnam War, some as small as 30,000 (for affordable housing) and some as large as 250,000 (the second pro-choice march in the 1990s).
Organizers are now claiming 300,000 at Saturday’s march, but I think my estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 participants is as accurate as anyone’s.
“Tens of thousands” as the press now always lazily reports, can mean anything from 10,000 to one million people.
We marched 20 or more abreast for roughly 16 or 17 blocks with no gaps and I never saw the beginning or the end of the march.
At 2 p.m. we all sat down on the hot asphalt on Pennsylvania Avenue, for a count of 100 heartbeats – marking President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office.
Then as we passed his new hotel, the old Post Office Building, we all shouted, “Shame, shame.”
That’s as rowdy as we got.
And it was by far the cleanest protest I have ever been to.
At most marches, the walkers pile their signs around overflowing trash cans on the mall before departing for their buses or the Metro.
These marchers did fill the recycling cans to overflowing with empty water bottles but carried their trash and signs back home with them.
The marchers ranged in age from old men and women in wheelchairs and hobbling along on canes to babies in strollers.
Large contingents of young people and college students, white, black and brown, from all over the country swelled the crowd and I was happy to see that the next generation cares and will go on.
I saw American Indians in full regalia fresh from the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, N.D., burning large bundles of sage to bless the march.
Buddhists in saffron robes burned incense in small brass pots and clanged tiny finger cymbals, and many Christian church groups of all denominations proudly carried their congregations’ banners.
Thousands of families with young children came because parents know their children are growing up in a world that is already being drastically changed by global warming.
“Jared can’t fix climate change,” read one sign, a jab at Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
“Mara-a-Lago, elevation 3 feet, it’s not all bad news,” read another.
“We can do this every weekend, a------,” was my favorite.
A nice sentiment, we can’t.
The logistics of getting 150,000 to 200,000 people in and out of Washington in one day is daunting, which is why sister marches are happening in cities all over the country.
Many people traveled all night or for days and were exhausted before they started, only to face the long trek back home after it was over.
The marchers had to be positioned at predetermined staging areas because you can’t just have but really, everyone setting off from everywhere or you don’t really have a march.
I walked with the Philadelphia contingent and we had to wait three and a half hours in the blazing sun on a side street four blocks behind the Capitol for everyone to get in place.
So why did we do it – for the Page 5 photo in the local newspaper or the 20 seconds of video on the evening news?
Well, yes. We know that for every person who marches, 100, 1,000, 10,000 are glad to see us out there and are as equally dismayed at the sudden, foolish reversal of public policy on climate change since the 2016 election.
There are, by thinkprogress.org’s recent count, 180 climate science deniers in Congress – 142 in the House and 38 in the Senate, nearly all of them Republicans. And then there’s the guy in the White House.
Climate change should not be a partisan issue, but for many Republicans, apparently, it is. Party over country and party over world, no matter what.
One marcher carried a sign reading “Don’t Republicans’ grandchildren breathe air and drink water?”
I’m pretty sure they do.