I marched today!

[melannen]

I thought I wouldn't be able to because we'd swapped work schedules around, but then we had to swap back at the last minute, so I marched after all!

Here, then, is the cyberpunk future we have earned:

Hundreds of thousands of angry citizens stand on the wide boulevard, waving signs and chanting, jammed shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall. In the background of 12th Street is a massive neoclassical monument to bribery and graft, emblazoned with the golden name of our corrupt chief of state. Every window but one has the curtains closed; in that one, a tall, pale-skinned figure dressed all in black stands watching the shouting crowd, sipping something from a glass, periodically blocking the light of the crystal chandelier in the room behind them.

Block after block of badly-arranged amplifiers blur the speakers into an unintelligible echoing roar. I want to hear what they're saying so I jack into my pocket computer; all the newer information networks are inaccessible so I tune to the official government FM radio station, which is carrying the same audio as the amps. It's on a forty-five second delay, which makes the timing of the cheers disconcerting - but it's fine, because nobody around me can tell when to cheer anyway. None of them remember how to use FM radio so I try to explain what's happening (on a forty-five second delay.)

An 18-year-old bisexual Hispanic woman with a buzz cut, truckloads of charisma, and absolutely no fucks left to give for anybody's bullshit stares down the crowd for six minutes and twenty seconds, standing with her friends to change the world. You see them via a giant LCD screen that glitches out every few minutes into jagged lines of color. A fifth grader explains she organized a protest at her school because one of her eleven-year-old classmates was shot and killed last month. Ahead of us the blue-and-silver-haired white lady raises her sign that says "I WILL NOT BE OLD AND IN THE WAY" and blocks the screen again. "STOP BEING IN THE WAY, OLD PERSON," the people behind us shout.

Nobody around you has any idea what's going on because they don't have the radio feed.

Suddenly the screens all stop glitching and turn to plain blue with a list of subway stations. A voice - now perfectly understandable - repeats over and over in monotone "This event is ended. Please follow the instructions on the screens to leave the area."

"Are we marching?" everyone asks. "We were supposed to march, right?" "Toward the White House or the Capital?" "I think the White House?" "Is the President even here?" "No, duh, it's a weekend, he's golfing." "We're marching whether we're supposed to march or not."

We march. The monotone voice keeps intoning.

Somebody hands me a sign to wave that says "This IS a dystopia".

We go to the NMAI and have hominy-black bean and mushroom-potato soup. A little girl on the train home has a hand-drawn protest sign on a piece of construction paper and boots made out of unicorns. The official government radio station has switched to replaying the Lyndon B. Johnson presidental tapes from 1968. I get ice cream and post to my blog feed.


(No, but, how amazing are the Parkland survivors though? No wonder Fox News was convinced they were ringers; you couldn't have picked a better, more photogenic, articulate, resilient, resourceful, passionate set of spokespeople if you had gone to Central Casting. There's a meta joke in Les Mis fandom about how Les Amis de l'ABC are all unrealistically attractive and intelligent and competent but the Parkland kids outdo them. In a couple decades someone will try to do a movie based on them and fail to find any movie stars that have as much screen presence as the originals. Sucks to be their enemies.)

Comments

[recessional]

With the sheer number of school shootings y'all get stuck with, pure probability means you'd've EVENTUALLY had to have a bunch of Perfect Publicity Examples.

Just sayin'. =\

[melannen]

I know, right? Eventually, folks, you were going to hit someone who had the resources and passion and luck to GET HEARD. Oops! Maybe you should have stopped it yourselves sooner.

(They weren't all Parkland kids - there were amazing kids from all over the country on that stage, including Newtown survivors who are the same age as the Parkland kids, and I am very glad I found the radio feed because they were all great speakers who will absolutely be ruling the world soon - but it was the Parkland kids who hit the zeitgeist just right to get heard and had the organizing skills to do something about it. And the chutzpah to stand on an international stage and say "the only reason you're listening to us and not them is because we're well-off and photogenic, and we know that. So we're going to use that to make you listen to everybody else, too." They're pretty great.

And one thing this rally did wayb etter than the women's march is they didn't give celebrities the microphone just because they asked for it. They gave it to people who need a microphone instead.)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Some of the Florida survivors met with kids at a Washington D.C. school who experience a different sort of gun violence. I'd been wondering about that missing part of the conversation, and the kids were on it. And they asked questions. I'm just, these kids (all of them, not just Parkland's) know change is needed and some of them are using their spotlight.

The only portable fm radio I have is my walkman, which hasn't been used in Years.

[melannen]

They were really good at alternating mass shootings with other kinds of gun violence at the rally! And the kids talking about urban violence were all really amazing, too.

Pretty much every smartphone can get FM radio - that's what I used, just my smartphone!

"FM radio reciever" was one of my main criteria when I bought it, because my old offbrand MP3 player had one and it was super useful for things like hiking trips and weather emergencies, and the salespeople were like 'oh, yeah, phones all have that these days, you just need to download a free radio tuner app.' Most people don't realize they are carrying a portable FM radio at all times, though. (Whence our dystopian cyperpunk future.)

You do need headphones for good reception, at least for mine, because the headphone cords act as a radio antenna, so IDK if these modern smartphones with no headphone jack work as well, but they probably have something - WiFi and GPS and cellular broadband are all radio anyway, so if you're putting those in you might as well do FM/AM too.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

_{I don't own a pocket phone.}

[melannen]

In that case you're excused. :D (In that case, what do you listen to?? I used my walkman right up until I got the mp3 player with the radio built in. Right now I have my phone, my old mp3 player, and also a portable wind-up combined radio/flashlight in the emergency kit. Do you just. Not go around with headphones in all the time? :O)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

At home to a boombox, which can play CDs. I've never had an mp3. (I stopped using the walkman through a combination of tiring of the tapes I owned, the rechargeable batteries being a pain, and the muffs being aged.)

[skygiants]

A couple of decades? I give it five years.

(Well, OK: I give it 12 months from the first major gun legislative victory that can be attached to their names.)

[melannen]

That would only be fifty weeks from now, since the governor signed a law in their name in Florida! (A relatively sucky law, but it was a start.)

I was kind of hoping the media would give them a little time to be more awesome first, though. :P

[copracat]

A little girl on the train home has a hand-drawn protest sign on a piece of construction paper and boots made out of unicorns.

Honest-to-God had a moment of wondering where I could get unicorn hide boots. Then a moment of noes! not unicorns! before I fell out of your true story.

[melannen]

....I think maybe they weren't real unicorn leather, that is the one not-quite-true thing in the story. But they sure looked like they were made of unicorns!

[jesse_the_k]

Thank you so much for this truly heartwarming report.

Also, FM radio for the win. (Official gov't radio being CSPAN? NPR?)

[melannen]

CSPAN/WCSP-FM!

The main NPR stations were covering it too, but with reporter commentary and cuts to other marches, and on a several-minutes delay. CSPAN was just doing a plain live audio feed from the stage. (WPFW-Pacifica Jazz & Justice was probably also covering it, with much better commentary than NPR, but I stopped looking once I found it on CSPAN.)

[egret]

Thank you for marching!

I listen to NPR on my phone on the NPR app, but it blocks alarms so I can't listen in bed if I need to get up in the morning.

[melannen]

I... have a real alarm clock... (mostly because I don't trust myself to not let the battery run down.)

But I bet there's a radio app that has a sleep timer - I usually listen to podcasts on a podcast app with a sleep timer. (though I realize that not everybody lives in a place where they can pick up five-six public radio stations on FM. :P)

[white_aster]

I am amused as hell that in the end you were so failed by the technology that you listened to it on over the radio waves. :) We were lucky and were close (a little too close, really) to one of the screens/speakers.

[melannen]

We were reasonably close to a loudspeaker, but idk if it was an issue just where we were (way down at 12th Street), but we were getting it from three different widely spaced speakers not quite in sync with each other- so it was loud, but the speakers were a loud and completely unintelligible WawawaWAWAWAwawa. In the music we could get enough of the bass line to sort of recognize it, basically, but nothing high-pitched or with any speed or color, and most of the songs they chose were not ones designed to carry well with a bad audio setup. (What the hell is wrong with a good rousing chorus of We Shall Overcome, anyway???) And of course the jumbotron kept glitching so we didn't get good visuals either.)

But we will always have radio!

I actually stood there going "yeah, probably the only way to get everybody intelligible audio with this layout would be individual headsets tuned to a radio broadcast" and then I was like... WAIT, but I have a radio and headphones on me, I wonder if anyone's broadcasting--

What they really needed, with 800,000 people there, was something that *didn't* depend on everybody hearing the same speeches. Multiple stages with different speakers along the whole route? More chants, and songs that were actually designed for a large crowd and bad audio? AN ACTUAL MARCH? The women's march, at least where I was, had better audio but something of the same problem - there was nothing to do as an attendee but try to get as close to a screen as you could, so why not just stay home and watch on TV... Well, the setup they're using plays well for the home audience, which is probably what they were aiming for anyway.

[white_aster]

I only saw the bit about there being no marching the day before, so my guess is that they just weren't sure how many people they were going to get. I mean, telling several blocks of wall to wall people on multiple streets that they now needed to merge and march would have been recipe for chaos. The police were already trying to safely provide space between the crowds for safety. So I get it, but yeah, I imagine that the acoustics reverberating off the buildings of Pennsylvania Ave got pretty wonky.

The "what do I do but stand here and be a head to be counted" is pretty much my feeling about a lot of rallies. I'm not terribly interested in musical performances, which take up a bunch of time at these things. Speeches are sometimes good, sometimes a great way to trigger my embarrassment squick response. I might not have gone at all except for friends coming into town for the event, for just that reason. Unfortunately had to leave fairly early because the young kids in our party got scared with all the heavy talk of dying kids, but from what I heard of later, I liked how many actual victims spoke, as opposed to them just letting celebrities speak.

[melannen]

The speakers were definitely great! And I am really glad they decided not to let any adults speak. Too bad probably at least a third of the marchers didn't hear them. the fact that we were on the part of the route that was hemmed in by marble definitely didn't help, yeah.

I have been to local-issues marches and rallies that are in the hundreds-to-thousands ballpark and they can be really cool to participate in (with enough people to feel like it's a crowd but lots of interaction and *motion*). Of course, they were also mostly run by original civil rights veterans who actually, like, did songs we could all sing and call-and-responses that were adjusted to work for the crowd size and were aiming to pump up the crowd, not speak to the nation. The people doing the big nationwide ones really do seem to just be aiming at the TV feeds. (Even the science march last year - which we could at least all see the screen and hear the speeches - was basically nothing but the crowd being talked at.)

[white_aster]

I've never been to any of the smaller rallies, but they sound really neat, and yeah, definitely different than the large ones where it's difficult to work as a cohesive whole. The science march we kind of skipped a lot of the programming and mostly came back for the actual marching. :)

[stellar_dust]

From the way it looked on the Washington Post feed online, ya'll FILLED THE ENTIRE MILE of Pennsylvania Ave from the Capitol to the White House, so there probably wasn't a lot of space to march TO anywhere! You completely filled the march route just by being there.

[melannen]

Yeah, pretty much. And at least a block down each of the side streets and people on the mall, from some of the photos I saw!

But we managed to march at the Women's March - mostly because there was no way in hell we were getting out of there *other* than as an organized march. We could certainly have marched the route starting from wherever we were (which is what I assumed we'd be doing, and is what a lot of people ended up doing) but they had also run out of time on the permit, so maybe they weren't allowed to tell us to do that.

If they know these things are going to be too big for a march they need to stop calling them marches. :/

[sara]

Aw, some day I want to march on Washington. Failing that, I suppose I will keep marching on the Washington capital that's out my back door and where I can use my employee parking pass...which is what I did on Saturday. Good turnout even if this town is small enough that we can't really march-march the way one does in Seattle (marching on Seattle is an all-day affair and one really wants to bring a sack lunch).

[melannen]

Marching on Washington is an experience that I am glad I have had, because it is an experience (you don't bring a sack lunch to a big march in DC, you bring something you can eat standing up even if you have no elbow room), but honestly marching on state capitals tends to be more fun and probably has a bigger effect per capita! I should do that more often, except our state capital's public square area has the nation's crappiest public transit (for a state capital) and some of the world's crappiest parking, so I hate going there.