The propagandists at Xinhua say there were “tens of thousands” at the DC antiwar demonstration yesterday. The VOA says more like five thousand. However many people you agree showed up – the AP says “several” thousand – the number is pretty pathetic. In a country of three hundred million, if you can’t muster up even fifty thousand people against a war, the event is basically meaningless, barely even news. You could probably drum up more than that for fly-fisherman’s rights. (From having been at many demonstrations, my eyeballs tell me even the VOA number is exaggerated.)
According to the same AP article, about a thousand counter demonstrators showed up. I can sympathize with them, but I wonder if their presence just gives publicity to and magnifies the puny crowd the Sheehanites generated, gives an excuse for the media to spend more time on the non-event.
What’s interesting is why this low turnout when, according to many polls, the public is supposedly massively against the war. If they are so antiwar, they certainly are pretty apathetic about it. This is another example of why Iraq is not Vietnam when filling the streets with demonstrators was a simple matter.
This also may mean that the public opinion polls themselves are not a decent measure of how people really feel. Although pollsters try, polls in general are particularly poor at measuring the depth of people’s convictions or natural human ambivalence. Ambivalent people don’t tend to get on a bus to go to a demonstration.
Maybe if Ron Paul, not Cindy Sheehan, led the antiwar movement, more people would show up. His supporters sure don’t suffer from ambivalence.
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