“We should do this more often,” said the woman to my right, and others murmured and nodded in agreement.
Tonight over 50 people from my neighborhood gathered at a busy intersection in Palo Alto for one of several vigils for Cindy Sheehan held in this zip code alone. So many people showed up–the majority middle-aged women, the backbone of many a righteous movement–that the vigil split into two contingents, one on the north side of the street, the other on the south. We stood quietly chatting, our signs and candles held high in the fading light of a late summer day, while people driving by waved and honked and smiled.
Part of the power of our small contingent was knowing that many other small contingents were gathering at the same time. I checked Moveon.org this morning to learn that in less than twenty-four hours the vigil I was attending had gone from zero to its limit of fifty. Just in a five-mile radius alone, I counted hundreds of people confirmed to attend vigils. The rest of today I compulsively checked the Moveon.org website every few minutes, typing in different zip codes I have lived in and playing with the radius limiter to see what was happening in the wider Peninsula/Bay Area. I could see that we who gathered on a local streetcorner were part of a vast, distributed rebuke, not only to a president snubbing a dead soldier’s mother, but also to this entire arrogant, misbegotten administration and its willingness to maim and kill so many young Americans on its own behalf.
“Bye, thank you, see you next time,” said one woman as she snuffed her candle and headed home.
Yes, you will.
Posted on this day, other years:
- The alarming five-year pin - 2014
- The Reluctant Cataloger - 2012
- Theme changed, feeds appear fixed, WordPress upgraded - 2008
- Bobbing to the surface - 2007
- Trip Itinerary - 2006
- We the Librarians? (Go Buy Dan Gillmor's Book!) - 2004
- Bay Area Reporter Seeks History/Trivia Questions - 2004
About 200 of us on the four corners of an extremely busy intersection in the San Fernando Valley. At another busy corner three miles down the street there were even more. As I drove the 7 miles to the one I attended I passed two others which had not been on the Web site when I’d checked the day before. While there were many middle-aged women, there was also a rainbow of children, teens, young adults and older adults. And several dogs.