Saturday morning, me and my family woke up at 5 am to go to a peace rally in Washington D.C. It was something my mom had been planning for a while, and we were all very excited, even if we had to wake up that early. To top it off, I had a bit of a hangover, as it was my last night to party with my brick friends. B.T.B.D.
After four hours in the car, we spent a while trying to find parking. We ended up parking right next to our opponents, the pro-war activists. They had much fewer people. After a bit of a walk, we got to the front of the white house, where there were already masses of people. You really get all types at these things. There were some Buddhist monks it looked like, which handed out acoustic cd's full of songs against the war. A little chinese lady was yelling at the White House (George Bush specifically) the entire time. Apparently she's there everyday. There were also people on stilts, people dressed up as death, military uniforms, and many more I'm not remembering.
Everyone had crazy signs too, my family included. My dad made one that inferred that Bush would be joining Hitler in Hell, which I thought was very fresh. One said that the GOP was on LSD, which didn't really make much sense to me. The highlight of course was my brother Griffin, who wore a shirt that said "Pogo sticking for peace", and then pogo-sticked every possible moment that he wasn't exhausted. Approximately 1512315 people took pictures or video of him, you can find them on YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WDee5OQBrqc
You can see me in the video too, apparently. So that was pretty cool that he got so much attention.
My friend Jim goes to school in the city and I got to see him, which was very cool. We took a break from the peace protesting and went and got Burger King, (which I actually had for breakfast as well), and some really cheap Arizona Iced tea, which was very exciting. (it's all about the little things!)
People such as Cindy Sheehan and Ralph Nader spoke, but I missed them. After a long while, we eventually started to march to the Capitol building. I don't know the exact number of how many marched, but it was in the tens of thousands. It was a very large protest. Along the way, we chanted several peace slogans. About half of the way down, pro-war activists were along the sidewalks, and there were several arguments. Their were plenty of police and fences to ensure there wasn't violence. However, the arguments did get pretty heated and me and Jim broke off from my family to watch and join in a little. Many sarcastic comparisons to Nazi's and such ensued.
Once we got onto the lawn of the capitol building, we all lied down and rested for a bit. It's very tiring, protesting wars. I ended up getting pretty sunburned. Many people got arrested on purpose in something called a "Die-in", where they lay across the street and pretended to be dead. Me and Jim actually participated, but in a legal place - on the lawn right in front of the Capitol building. We then made jokes about being zombies and how you can't sneeze when your dead - we are very immature people, aren't we?
Shortly after the die-in we left, as we were all very tired. The next day I left for Bristol, where I'll be studying the next three months, but that's for another post.
I felt a little bad during the rally because I'm not really a die hard pro-peace person. I'm not really a die hard anything, for that matter. Generally I just want to have lots of fun, fall in love, have some babies, and just make my way through this world without too much trouble. Doesn't that just make it all seem so easy?
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