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How
Big Was My Rally
October 30, 2002
By The
Plaid Adder
 To
read media coverage of the 10/26 anti-war protests, you'd
think there were seven of them taking place simultaneously
in D.C. alone, some much better-attended than others. Estimates
swing widely from 200,000 to "hundreds." The truth is that
nobody really knows how many people were there. But here's
something I learned in Washington, D.C. on October 26: standing
up matters more than being counted.
First, let's clear this up for anyone who was still wondering:
the D.C. crowd was huge. I don't know exactly how huge;
all I know is that after about noon, whenever I looked around
at the crowd, I couldn't see the end of it. We were near the
beginning of the march; we cut out on the last block to watch
the parade go by, and about 30 minutes later when we still
couldn't see the end of it we stopped waiting. I don't know
enough about crowds to know the difference between a hugeness
of 200,000, a hugeness of 100,000, and a hugeness of 75,000.
But even without this knowledge, even a novice like me can
sense the hugeness in her bones, and that's what really
matters - even if the media never reflects that experience.
Here's why.
Benedict Anderson, one of the most influential contemporary
theorists of nationalism, argued in his groundbreaking
Imagined Communities that the newspaper was crucial to
the invention of the modern nation-state. His theory goes
like this: the experience of picking up the newspaper, and
knowing that all across the country thousands of other people
were picking up the same newspaper and reading the same news,
was vital in allowing people to imagine themselves as part
of a national community. The idea that they are part of an
imagined community is foundational to most people's experience
of nationality, and it's through the media - now, TV and radio
and the internet as much as the newspaper - that individuals
have historically connected themselves with this larger national
community.
Think, for instance, about the tremendous emotional impact
that the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks had on everyone
in America, and how important the media were in how those
of us outside the actual zones of impact experienced that.
For me, anyhow, media coverage of 9/11 reminded me that no
matter how disaffected I might be with my government or my
President, I could not escape my imagined community; looking
at those images I became an American all over again, whether
I liked it or not.
What has happened as the major media outlets are more and
more concentrated in the hands of a few major corporate giants
is that the 'imagined community' created by the media has
started to seem more and more like an Orwellian nightmare
in which no sane person would want to live. The despair so
many of us feel when we turn on the TV or open the New York
Times has to do not just with our anger at what we see as
a distortion of the 'facts,' but with our sense that we are
losing our access to our imagined community. Once we no longer
believe in the accuracy, objectivity, or even reality of what
the media shows us, we have lost a vital link to our fellow-Americans.
How can we ever know who we are as a people or as a country
if we have to reject everything the media tells us? Without
the newspaper, the TV, the radio, how do we know who this
'American people' we're supposed to belong to is? What can
we know, except that the America imagined by our mainstream
media is not a country we can or want to be part of?
That's how I felt, anyhow: increasingly isolated from this
country I still belong to, exiled to an outer darkness of
skepticism and dissent. Then I got on the bus. And I stood
on a street with - I don't know - a huge number of other people,
and all of a sudden, I had a whole new imagined community.
I don't know who most of those people were. But I know a
few things about a few of them. I know one of them was a soccer
mom. I know one of them had family in Iraq. I know several
of them were from New York. I know one was a fireman. I know
this because they had written these things on placards and
were holding them up. All across Constitution Gardens and
all down Constitution Avenue, people were writing their stories
in magic marker on posterboard, cardboard, foam core, whatever
they had bought or built or found handy, and holding them
up for each other to read. We became our own newspaper, our
own TV show, our own story about who and what America is.
And everyone who was there could read it, no matter where
they were standing. So many times the speakers up at the top
of the hill looked out and said, "I wish you could see this...this
is the real America." And those of us who were there
felt it, even if we didn't all have as good a view as they
did.
This is what marching does. There's a reason they call these
things 'demonstrations.' We demonstrate for our leaders, our
politicians, and yes, of course, for the cameras. But we are
also demonstrating for each other. What we demonstrate for
each other is that we are America. These thousands and thousands
of people standing in these parks and streets - the thousands
and thousands of people standing in parks and streets in cities
all over the country - we're America, as much as or more than
the America imagined by our media.
Are we the only America? No, of course not. But since
our media will not connect us with each other - will not show
us how to imagine the thousands and thousands of other Americans
that share our ideas and passions and fears and hopes - then
we have to find other ways to do that. And looking out over
thousands and thousands of people holding their signs in the
air and saying who they are and why they're standing there,
today, with you, we finally understand that we are part of
a different America, an America that may never be pictured
on the front page, but which is not for that reason any less
real.
So let the media count us however they want to. They can't
take away what we learned there. And so they can't change
the fact that for - I don't know - a huge number of people,
America will never be the same again. And that's what
really matters.
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