January 22, 2003

In this issue

AT THE 24TH Street BART station Saturday afternoon, the gates were all wide open. So many people were heading for the peace march and rally, the system operators realized it would be foolish to try to make them all line up and get tickets. Instead a woman was standing off to the side with a big plastic bag full of money, asking people to drop in $2.30 for a round trip downtown. I assume she actually worked for BART; I kind of hope she didn't.

It was an amazing feeling to stand at the foot of Market Street and realize there were so many people on hand nobody could move. Every few minutes, somebody would try to start a chant, but you couldn't really hear it, so instead the crowd would just start to yell, the way you yell at a football game.

In retrospect, the organizers might have thought a little more about how all of those people would fit into Justin Herman Plaza and later, the Civic Center – but in retrospect, I don't think anyone knew just how big the turnout would be.

I looked around as best as I could, and what I saw didn't look like the crowd at a typical antiwar rally. What struck me most was the number of middle-aged people who looked like they'd come from the suburbs, families with kids, balding 40-year-olds in sweat suits ... and there were a lot of them.

The cops never want to make the crowd sound as large as it was, and nobody has a really good estimate, but I've been to Gay Pride parades where everyone agreed there were close to 300,000 people on hand, and they weren't any more crowded than this.

A few hours later, over at the Bernal Heights playground, all the parents were talking about "the march." Everyone had gone – my political friends, the folks who I had kind of guessed would be there ... and some people I would never have expected to see taking their kids on a Saturday morning to demonstrate against the Bush administration. As A.C. Thompson put it to me later, "It makes you really proud of your neighbors."

The antiwar movement has already hit the big time, and the war hasn't even started. You have to wonder what it will be like when the bombs start dropping. And you have to wonder when the folks in the White House are going to start paying attention.