Report from a Cleveland 9/12-er on the march

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I was there. I participated. The crowd was enormous. Up until 9-12-09, the largest masses of human beings I have ever seen was in London, England in the summer of 2001.

That scene virtually overwhelmed the senses. What I saw in Washington, DC absolutely dwarfed London. From the Stadium in Cleveland, I know what crowds of 30,000 and 40,000 people look like. From working in the Justice center and watching the stadium empty regularly I know what these crowds look like in the streets, and how long it takes them to pass.

On 9-12 I arrived at the Freedom Plaza gathering point early and positioned myself with my back against a wall near the federal triangle train station. From there I could see three streets leading into the plaza as well as the train station outlet. As I said, working just outside the Cleveland Stadium has accustomed me to “crowds”. The movement of people was like nothing I have ever experienced. The amount of space visible just from where I was standing waiting for the march to begin was easily ten times the capacity of the Cleveland Stadium, and was packed solid. And that is viewing the crowd as static. In fact it was constantly moving at a slow walking pace to overflow the area and expand down Pennsylvania Ave. and building up the side streets. One fact that none of the media stories seem to have caught is that the march on the Capitol began over an hour early, no doubt because the crowds were backed up as far as the eye could see in every access to Freedom Square.

When the march began I kept to the side for a while and watched the crowd pass. It continued to be fed by a solid mass of people that continued from out of sight from all three of the streets I could see as well as the train station. When I arrived at the Capitol and found a place to set up, the crowd continued coming in endlessly until it so filled the area around the Capitol that it slowed to a virtual standstill, with Pennsylvania Ave. still packed solid as far as the eye could see. These fraudulent reports of “tens of thousands” and even “hundreds of thousands” are preposterous. A seconds worth of common sense should tell you that those are the numbers for an average days rush hour for an area like this.

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