Free to Walk or Not Walk

Who has the crowd pictures from Sunday's Freedom Walk? Where are they? There are some close-ups of people, but you can never get an idea of the throngs in attendance from that. We need a shot similar to what we saw when Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the Lincoln Memorial, of a mass of humanity surrounding the Reflecting Pool.

It couldn't be because hardly anyone attended, could it? Most of the press reports stated that "thousands" marched, but I guess you can hit that threshold with anything over two thousand. In These Times was willing to offer a number, suggesting that only about a third of the 15,000 people who signed up actually showed. I guess 5,000 people don't look all that compelling from a helicopter. There is a bright side to the whole thing, though. According to these pictures taken at 2:00 Sunday afternoon and published by AMERICAblog, the marchers were very clean and tidy.

On the down side, as I was looking around for crowd pictures, I came across this post from a protester who was arrested at the Freedom Walk. Read his whole post for the details, but I'll just quote his description of the event gearing up:

The scene that greeted me was fairly strange. A prominent sign declared "Signs and banners prohibited"--which may or may not have seemed like a non sequitur to the other "freedom walkers," but I didn't talk with any of the walkers to find out. Everyone was issued a "Freedom Walk" t-shirt and required to wear it--a signal, along with a tape wristband, that one had been processed and deemed safe. Along with people bearing large organizational signs--"AOL," "HUD," "Justice," and so forth, so groups could find to each other--the whole thing looked homogeneous, hyperorganized and somehow infantilized. I found myself thinking of the old TV series "The Prisoner." On a small stage, an Air Force band played tunes, with a pretty good female vocalist singing country and other favorites, in dress blues.

Yep, sounds like it pretty much lived up to expectations.