Thousands protest in D.C.

Nearly 200 people, some of them Pitt students, met outside the William Pitt Union early… Nearly 200 people, some of them Pitt students, met outside the William Pitt Union early Saturday morning, eager to join thousands of protesters from around the country in an anti-war march in Washington.

Graduate student Jonah McAllister-Erickson, who helped organize Pitt Against the War, said that the Thomas Merton Center, an anti-war group, sent 121 buses to the capital, four of which left from Pitt.

After arriving in Shady Grove, Md., the protestors from Pitt rode a packed Metro into the middle of the city where they joined other demonstrators.

Some people at the rally dressed as skeletons and others wore Bush masks.

Stephen Frank Gary, an attorney from Los Angeles, knelt in the field behind the White House under a peace symbol 9 feet tall that he constructed out of fiberglass, nuts, bolts, wire and paint.

“I wanted to do something that was in your face,” Gary said. “This’ll do it.”

Polly Attwood, a Quaker from Massachusetts, came with 30 other members of her community to voice her opposition to the war in Iraq.

“We don’t want our tax money going to kill people in Iraq,” Attwood said, adding that the Quakers have been committed to nonviolence since the 1600s.

While Attwood also said that she didn’t feel that the march would change anything, she believes it did show the large number of diverse people who don’t support the president’s policies.

Pitt senior Lauren Owens said that she has never supported Bush’s policies, but that she had never attended an anti-war protest before this one.

“It was a bit of a dreamlike experience, all the chants and slogans,” she said. “Especially the more extreme chants made it seem it wasn’t real. But it was great to be around that energy and people wanting the same positive thing.”

Owens said that she chose not to carry a sign, mainly because she felt it was easier to listen to other people’s messages when she wasn’t carrying a message of her own.

But many of the protesters had multiple messages that they wanted to voice.

Abbey Lerner, a sophomore at Pitt, said that she thought the protest was somewhat unorganized.

“I thought it was cool, but a little ambiguous. It wasn’t focused,” she said.

Lerner also said that the event demonstrated that the public was fed up with Bush’s policies.

As part of the crowd marched from the Ellipse to 15th Street, Chris Cobb from the ANSWER Coalition rapidly handed out signs to protesters not carrying anything. At one point, she handed out six signs in nearly 10 seconds.

She said that her organization had spent the past month making signs specifically to hand them out during the anti-war rally.

When asked why her group had decided to make them, she said, “Because [the media] won’t pay attention to us unless we make big signs.”

Genifer Harrison and Karen Trietsch, members of Code Pink, who had been with Cindy Sheehan when she first spoke in Crawford, Texas, had known for months that they would come to Washington for the rally.

Harrison, who lives in Dallas, went to Camp Casey every weekend. Trietsch, who lives in Colorado, said that she could only go once.

“But as soon as I went home, I bought my plane ticket for Washington,” Trietsch said.

“Camp Casey had this environment,” she added, referring to both the encampment in Texas and the encampment in Washington. “It’s like you’re home.”

According to the Washington Post, Sheehan and about 370 other demonstrators were arrested on Monday for refusing to move from in front of the White House.

As the crowd moved down 15th Avenue and toward the White House Saturday, they began screaming and cheering at the helicopters circling above them.

“Hey hey, ho ho,” they chanted. “George Bush has got to go!”

Completely covered under a giant paper-mache Statue of Liberty costume, Marjie Olenski towered over the crowd. The statue carried a sign that read, “Not in my name.”

“I’m a 62-year-old grandma, here because I don’t think young people know about Vietnam,” Olenski said, as her husband slipped her a bottle of water through a hole under the sleeve of her outfit. “It’s exactly like Vietnam. The same stories exactly.”

By 6:15 p.m., the size of the crowd gathered outside the White House had decreased, while the police cleared away signs and tourists resumed taking pictures. The tent at the Camp Casey site began to clear out for the first time since 9 a.m.

Pallas Stanford, a volunteer for Camp Casey, said that many of the protesters marching thought the encampment was the final stop on the march. She said the site acted as a place for people to reunite with each other and extend their message of peace.

Lerner said that she didn’t notice any conflicts between the protesters and the police.

“It was non-violent and civil,” Lerner said. “I think it was a pretty amicable experience.”

Saturday evening, most of the protesters from Pitt boarded their buses and returned to Pittsburgh.