Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We still have time to mess this up!

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

In my day, never was longer.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

This fight is for everything.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / March for Our Lives on Saturday June 11, in Washington DC

March for Our Lives on Saturday June 11, in Washington DC

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Saturday was the designated day the March for Our Lives.  So far, I am only aware of one jackal attending.  Did anyone else attained a march yesterday?

Commenter caphilldcne shared pictures from the DC March for Our Lives and was kind enough to tell us about the DC march.

The March for our lives took place this afternoon near the Washington Monument.

I got there as someone tried to disrupt it and sent a few people scattering although they stage speaker let people know it was ok.

Of course there’s always some pro gun nut hiding their face. I was happy about the family standing in front of him. I flipped him off on behalf of jackals everywhere.

Pretty cloudy and cool in DC today so the pics are a bit gloomy.

On my walk home (about two miles) I took a picture of the national archives. Home to the constitution and Bill of Rights that has been so radically reinterpreted by the Injustices. Also a very DC plastered poster of John Lewis urging folks to vote.

Anyway I think the photos just don’t really show the crowd size well.   My best guess is maybe 20,000?   Based on nothing except that’s a large space plus people were coming and going. 

Update: March for Our Lives estimates seem to be more at the 40,000 or 50,000!

Reader Interactions

58Comments

  1. 1.

    West of the Rockies

    Odd that you don’t see any gallows and nooses…

    Oh, wait a minute… that’s because Democrats don’t do that sort of shit.

    Great pictures!

  3. 3.

    Orange is the New Red

    I was at a local rally in our town. Surprised by how many people showed up.

  4. 4.

    Emma

    I attended the Redmond, WA march! Big crowd, at least a couple hundred people and more than a few kids and teens. I do wish local protest organizers for the love of FSM bring megaphones, even if they don’t think attendance will be that high. We made it to a busy intersection and had a guy in a pick-up truck pass by not once, not twice, but THRICE to blare his horn and give a thumbs-down hahaha.

  5. 5.

    Alison Rose

    @Emma:  What’s funny is that usually honking your horn at people holding signs is a way to indicate approval. Most people won’t see the thumbs-down, but they’ll hear the horn and be like “yeah, right on, that guy agrees!”

  8. 8.

    Emma

    @Alison Rose : when he first did that, we did indeed whoop it up until we saw too late that he was doing a thumbs-down. Don’t worry, though, I gave him a different finger when he returned :)

  9. 9.

    Skepticat

    Those pictures are not the least bil gloomy, because resolution, hope, and strength shine brightly in each of them.

  11. 11.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I was going to go to the one in Madison, but I pulled a muscle in my hip at the gym yesterday morning and had to be in recovery mode.

  13. 13.

    FlyingToaster

    Unfortunately, this past week was graduations (8th grade and Suzuki Book 6), so there was no time for going to the Boston march.

    Two weeks ago, WarriorTeen’s 8th Grade class were on their DC trip (after a 2 year hiatus at the school, Fuck COVID) when their phones lit up with news about the shooting. These kids are about to start high school, and they’re scared to death that the Supreme Court is going to take away Massachusetts’ gun laws.

    What works about our laws (and is very different from out in the square states where I grew up) is that it’s all administered by the local police department. Who know if they’ve been getting calls about you and if your neighbors have been calling complaining about you issuing threats — or not.

    Federal law should be a minimum bar, not a race to the bottom.

  14. 14.

    caphilldcne

    @Emma: nice. I did the same to that masked idiot standing behind the very nice family working to block his sign.

  22. 22.

    RedDirtGirl

    I marched across the Brooklyn Bridge with a friend and her husband. Not sure how many people were there, but it felt like a good turn-out.

  25. 25.

    StringOnAStick

    I saw a Tweet thread that when the attempted disrupter rushed the DC stage, a speaker got knocked over and it made a loud popping sound, which many in the crowd suspected was gunfire and it looked like a stampede was about to start.  Thankfully someone got to the microphone and explained it, so the crowd turned back to the stage and stopped the nascent fleeing response.  That’s where we’re at, crowds on such a hair trigger, and who can blame them?

    There was a march here in Bend yesterday, same park as the march for Roe and I am sure a lot of the same people.  This is a liberal town in a sea of red on the east side of the Cascades, and the local marchers are willing to let everyone speak, which means it is always dominated by the same young hot heads who get excited by being able to transgressively swear every 4th word, get cheers, and then get even more into it then do more to encourage anger and bring the crowd down than fire them up and give them direction.  At the Roe march, the crowd started thinning significantly long before the local Planned Parenthood director got to speak, likely because it had degenerated into speeches that were “fuck this, fuck that, Boomers are to blame for everything, both sides do it”, at which point the many feminist Boomers started leaving.  Never once a mention of organizing and voting, nothing about the power of your vote, just anger.

    Long story short, I did not go to the March for Our Lives yesterday here because all my marching experiences here have been like this unfortunately; not productive.  I also know we are surrounded here by Oregunians and I will admit to some fear as well.  I used the time to write to all my representatives instead.

  26. 26.

    caphilldcne

    @Baud: I got the best swag I’ve had in years.  A Fire Island (new movie) tank top, a cocktail shaker from a local org that works lgbtq kids (which was a bit weird but memorable) and I won a nando’s peri peri lemon coconut sauce so life is good. Also lots of smiling happy diverse people!

  30. 30.

    caphilldcne

    @StringOnAStick: writing your reps is a good use of your time. I don’t have senators or a rep but I write key folks anyway as needed.

    FYI there was a person who yelled during a moment of silence and charged the stage which precipitated the speaker pops. Here’s the Twitter thread to which I think you are referring.

    https://twitter.com/fred_guttenberg/status/1535952811174813696?s=10&t=1h4g9UJ82aCxF89VNWbVJw

    i was just walking up when it happened so could not tell quite what was going on and suddenly was in the middle of people rapidly moving opposite me. The speaker did quickly calm things down. I think it was probably a lot scarier closer in.

  33. 33.

    JPL

    OT
    former US Attorney BJay Pak is testifying tomorrow. He’s the attorney from No.GA who resigned rather than follow trump’s illegal orders.

    good times

  37. 37.

    Alison Rose

    @Baud: I love the comments:

    Trump would have yelled show me your tits.

     

    As a dane I can assure you no one in their right mind would sing for trump, in this country.

  42. 42.

    caphilldcne

    BTW – March for Our Lives estimates seem to be more at the 40,000 or 50,000 mark so ignore my amateur estimates. It’s hard to judge crowd size accurately.

  43. 43.

    caphilldcne

    @James E Powell: I mean he’d absolutely have gotten re-elected if he could’ve run for a third term. I was shocked by the backlash tho and the dismissiveness of Hilary. Appalling.

  45. 45.

    StringOnAStick

    @Baud: @zhena gogolia:

    It sure depressed my husband and I at the Roe march; we didn’t go with the group to the county courthouse for more speeches by the same people; like about every other person over the age of 50, we left and went home.  I didn’t add the story about the 14 yo they gave the mike to who ranted that she was adopted, hated it, wished her birth mom had had an abortion so she wouldn’t be here at all, and now a trans girl in the heat of the moment outed herself in a very public setting; I felt like they exploited that angry young girl, a black kid in a very white town who now is out more than she realized probably and before we got to the current moment of danger against LBGTQ individuals, but the other hot heads loved her spilling her guts to the crowd and cheered her on.

    I want to get with the local D party and try to out-organize these people for these events.  This “both sides” crap and no discussion of organizing and voting has to stop or at least get overwhelmed.

  47. 47.

    StringOnAStick

    @Baud: It does seem to make a difference; Kelly could comment more on that since he’s a lifelong resident and we moved her just under 2 years ago.  It did matter with the Oregon redistricting because it was Bend that put Jaime McLeod Skinner over the line to defeat incumbent blue dog Kurt Schraeder, he even said so in a recent interview.  He helped torpedo the drug price negotiation plank for Medicare in Congress, and everyone here remembered that.  More people voted on the D side of the primary than the R side, so I think she will win the general.

    When we lived in Golden, CO we used to roll our eyes at the same hot heads in Boulder.  Looks like they are here in Bend too.

  48. 48.

    Sister Golden Bear

    And just across the bay from me, Proud Boys terrorize a Drag Queen Story Hour at a public library. No arrests at the scene, but the Sheriff’s Office says they’re conducting a hate crimes investigation.

    First-hand account from the drag queen doing the story reading:

    “They were wearing AK 47 shirts. they recorded me on their phones, yelled, called me a ‘tranny’, a ‘pedophile’ and an ‘it’, and totally freaked out all of the kids. they got right in our faces. they jeered. they attempted to escalate to violence.”

    “I left the room with the security guard. we hid in the back office while the other librarians called the sheriff. when the sheriff arrived with backup, they escorted the protesters out. the protestors formed a line, tried to block the library exits and waited.”

    “then i returned to storytime and finished the fucking reading. i eventually got out. i’m safe. i’ll be fine. drag queen story hours have always seen protesters. and i’ve always received hate mail. but today hit different.”

  49. 49.

    planetjanet

    It was a great turnout in DC.  I was worried the drizzly rain would discourage people.  I was not there particularly early, but found a spot at the front fence just in front of one of the jumbotrons.  Many great speakers.  Yolanda King, grandaughter of Martin Luther, King, Jr, said this is not a political issue.  It is a moral one.  It is not about left or right.  It is about right and wrong.  David Hogg really impressed me with a pitch perfect approach.  He noted that there are growing number of gun owners joining the fight.  He got everyone to pledge to vote in November, to vote EVERY November, and keep doing it until we get the leaders we need.  He led a chant to VOTE THEM OUT.  Hogg said just sensible measures like universal background checks, red flag laws, restriction on weapons of war we can cut gun deaths by half.  In ten years, we can save 250,000 lives.  He really emphasized that we have to be in it to fight piece by piece, battle by battle to win.  There is no waving fairydust to make it go away.  We have to change the culture.  X Gonzalez brought the righteous rage.  She has really struggled.

    It was heartbreaking to see the two sons of Ruth Whitfield who was killed in Buffalo.  She had just been visiting her husband of 68 years in the nursing home and stopped off to get groceries.

    It was great to see them allied with both the NEA and AFT leaders in common cause.  This was a big coalition of organizations working well together.  Gabby Giffords group had a compelling memorial of 45442 white flowers for each of the lives to gun violence lost in 2020.  I can provide some pictures.

    I was quite angry at the guy who stormed the stage.  It was a moment of silence.  During the program, there was a clock in the lower corner of the jumbotron.  The speaker noted that the clock stopped at 78 minutes and then let us know that was how long it took for the police in Uvalde to act.  I was weary just from standing there so long on a cool summer day.  To imagine being under gunfire for that long is indescribable.  The silence was broken by this young man screaming about 15 ft away.  All I could hear was “no more guns” and “no guns”.  I could see security wrangling with him immediately.  He turned back and appeared to throw what looked like a silver water bottle back into the crowd.  That is when people around me started running, some tripping.  I just stood around like a dope, but I could see the guy was being restrained.  It was just such a powerful moment of contemplation, then interrupted. Afterwards, one of the organizers said we were all safe, but the miscreant had tapped into the fear that we all have because people are dying everyday, everywhere.

  50. 50.

    eachother

    Gun violence march in the blood reddest state of 50. Mostly senior participants. Short parade route.
    Abortion rights march better attended last week in the rain. Mostly younger participants. Longer parade route.
    We Three drove 10 miles south and decided to stand where we stand for these kind of civil expressions on other occasions.
    There was a completely different vibe. A lot of indifference and mostly overtly negative response.
    I think I was verbally assaulted by the next 18 year old mass shooter passing as a passenger.

  56. 56.

    James E Powell

    @Baud:

    I’m not thinking so much of polls, but of my anecdotal experience with the non-politicals in my life. They never recognized the forces arrayed against him. American non-politicals are unable or unwilling to deal with racism.

    Barack & Michelle Obama had so many moments of wit, grace, charm, and fundamental decency – moments not only never achieved, but never attempted by the last two Republican presidents.

    Since non-politicals are only moved by non-political factors, I naively expected those moments to have greater impact.

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