I had originally planned to simply post these pictures to the comments of Timroff's diary, but there are too many pictures and too many comments in that diary already. So I'm going to take a crack at this myself.

For those who had been previously living under a rock and have only now just surfaced and your first news is what you see here on Daily Kos, there was a Peace March today in Washington DC. Many, many sister demonstrations were planned across the country, but the big one was in Washington.

After the fold, my pictures (and be warned - there are about 38 of them) and some commentary on the day.

First, I did this march's photo journal differently than I did the last one. The '05 march pictures were kind of navel-gazey in that most of the pictures were of fellow bloggers. Since we had so many people with so many cameras covering the Blogger's pre-event and marching, I decided to focus on random things that caught my eye among the throngs of people who attended.

As you know from Timroff's diary, we all met up at Starbuck's close to the rally area an hour before the rally was to begin. I got there at about 9:15 and bloggers were already in attendance. My last accurate headcount put our total, at the start of the actual marching, at aminimun of 58. Pretty damned impressive. I'll note also that in our group were folks from Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Albama, and Iowa, in addition to the local DC/MD/VA attendees. Some rode 24 hours on buses to get there for this - truly putting their mouths, bodies and especially their feet where their principles were. I was proud to be associated with Daily Kos when I saw how committed many of these folks were.

So to the photos, in no particular order. I'll do individual pictures or groups of related pictures preceeded by a little bit of contextual commentary.

Washington DC Peace March, January 27th, 2007

A couple of children on the march caught my eye. The first young girl had obviously hand-made her own sign, and I had her show me both sides. She's our future leadership, and therefore the future looks bright. I find it sad, though, that even a child knows what our President and his administration don't seem to realize:





I was impressed with these two young boys, who had obviously gone out and gotten rocks that they had written "Peace" on in marker. They were selling these for $1 a piece, with proceeds to be donated back to the march organizers. I bought one.



Some of the signs were incredibly creative:









Some just made me feel encouraged about the future:



You can't tell from the picture, but the peace sign was covered in glitter and it shone brillantly in the sunshine:



Some signs were more than just signs - they were paper-puppets and headgear:







These signs told about where the carrier was from. I saw many signs from many states across the country.





I came across these guys who clearly have a high opinion of Jim Webb:





I liked this lady and her friend. It reminded me of the real lives living in worry about the welfare of a loved one in pursuit of a senseless, immoral war:



My favorite display in the whole march was the "Backbone". It was literally a backbone, many feet long. On it was written "impeach, indict, convict". It took many people to carry the backbone, and it was carried high over their (and our) heads:





The anarchists were out in force. They marched before the march actually began, changing "the streets belong to us". They were marching on streets that had not yet been closed. I saw them much, much later doing the same on Constitution Avenue long after the march had concluded and streets had been re-opened:





This many really stuck with me. He walked slowly, with a cane, but he walked:



There were these people who had this bicycle decked out with drums and percussion instruments who went around and grooved for peace during the rally:





There were a few others that I liked as well:





And here are the last ones, just general crowd shots as we made our way through:











And there, folks, you have it. Timroff was correct - it was really difficult to get going once the march actually started. I've heard the estimates of attendance, and I can't say how many were there - but we ringed the Capitol. We were /packed/ in with each other, all marching, all speaking out against the war.

Oh... and the counter-demonstrators were so ridiculous as to be insignificant. There were about 40 of them (I'm being generous) who were fenced off way back from the march route carrying signs like "Saddam was bad" and "I support our troops".

As if we don't. As if we didn't stand and march for six straight hours /because/ we support them.