"Any National Park Service attribution of crowd figures for this or any event is incorrect.
The National Park Service DOES NOT PROVIDE crowd estimates."Tell the above to the people that I am personally acquainted with who were there and who heard the accouncement over the PA system who were also nearly deafened by the roar of the crowd. In fact, here's a personal account by a close friend that I partnered with in LE over 40 years ago:
"Dick,
I needed to wait a day before commenting on our trip to Washington, DC. I was exhausted. Two nights without laying my old bones on a bed did me in.
My son Patrick, my daughter-in-law, Kris, and I drove all night from michigan and arrived in Vienna, VA, at 4:00 AM on Saturday morning, 9/12. We found an open Mickey D's in an otherwise black, empty city, had a maaarvelous breakfast, then parked at the empty Vienna Metro Train Station and caught a few zzzzzz's. Took the first train into DC. While we slept, there had been a transformation; when we awoke people were coming out of the woodwork from every direction. The train was packed, wall to wall. I was standing, scrunched next to a local gentleman who asked, "What the hell is going on?" I explained there was going to be a little gathering of Patriots at the Capitol. He confessed he had heard about it........he looked a wee bit perplexed, then said, "It's Saturday morning man, this train is usually empty!"
The rest of the day was the experience of a lifetime. Arriving at Freedom Plaza at 14th & E Street NW, we and all the others poured up out of the Metro Station into a sea of more people coming from every direction of the compass. We were engulfed by the largest crowd of people I had ever seen in my life. I was amazed......truly amazed. No pushing, no shoving, no dirty looks, no cursing, no profanity......passageways opened up easily into and out of the crowd. No obscene signs or placards...........just the facts, the truth. Everybody as polite as hell, even the cops were smiling; people were thanking them for doing what they do.
The march to the Capitol building up Pennsylvanis Ave from Freedon Square that began at 11:00 AM was a happy, orderly march. We had no idea where we were in the crowd, perhaps near the middle. We unfolded our chairs on the farthest edge of the reflecting pool across from the Capitol building, at least a quarter mile as the crow flies from the bottom of the Capitol steps. That was as close as we could get to the speakers stand. The mass of people extended farther than we could see to out right and left and to the rear of where we were went out of sight up the mall towards the Washington Monument and, although we didn't have a view of it, extended for blocks up Pennsylvania Ave in the direction of the White House.
It was announced from the speakers stand, that the National Park Service estimated the size of the crowd at 1.5 million people. The cheer that went up was like nothing I have ever heard before, a roar, it reverberated from the buildings and rolled like a solid wall of thunder, almost taking your breath away.
People from every State in the nation had come together with one mind; We had carried a message to Washington that the Administration and Congress could not deny hearing........or so I thought.
We took the train back to Vienna, VA, and had a very gracious dinner with good friends of Kris and Pat who lived there.
At 8:30 PM we were back in the car and headed home to Michigan. Tired, smuggly satisfied, happy to have been a part of something big and wonderful; perhaps even a watershed event in our nations history. We turned on Serius Satallite Radio and tuned in the news programs much to our chagrin. It was quite a let-down to learn that we had apparently taken part in a non-event. Even Fox News gave it short shrift........."a crowd of tens of thousands"........and a less then lack-luster commentary. And the other stations?..........what a laugh.
As for the National Park Service estimate?............I assume someone there must have spoken without authorization; truth to despotism is anathema, better to make-believe it isn't so.
We had apparently passed into and out of a third dimension. Whereever we had been was obviously not where the news media was, on another latitude perhaps, and not even close. Whatever our eyes had seen and our ears had heard had apparently occured in a vacuum, not in the real world.
It is enough to know that we do exist and we are not going anywhere. Our government has stepped off into deep, dark water. We'll still be here in November of 2010, in fact, we're just getting started, and we'll not forget what tens of millions of us need to do.........Throw the bastards out on both sides of the aisle.
After I wrote this, I went to the below noted website. Here are more comments from a few Michiganders. They must have stepped through into that same wierd third dimension Pat and Kris and I did.
Doug
http://912marchondc.ning.com/group/michigan"
