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Sunday, Apr. 21, 2002 / 9:30 p.m. ~Glaring Omissions, and The Big Picture~ Yes, I know, this is my fourth entry of the day, I know, and your point would be...? I was just re-reading my previous entries, enjoying it actually, checking stats, noticing some regular readers had only read whatever the current page is, but a lot of people do that, a lot of people have short attention spans, don't want to read a lot in a diary, they like to scroll, and I've done it too, so that's cool, but still, I enjoyed reading it. However, I noticed I omitted certain things. Not a lot of things, just little things, because there were so many little things. There were a LOT of people on our bus. I only mentioned the few I had contact with. I didn't really mention the coordinator, who sat in front of me, and on the way up chatted with the driver (who's been driving buses to demonstrations with this coordinator for some 20 years!) to keep him awake. Their chatter woke me up several times during the night/early morning on Friday. She stayed in D.C. to go to the Sharon demo tomorrow. I didn't mention the Eurotrash dude who was with the Italian woman from the action center. Skipper said he is her boyfriend, came here from Venice, but I don't care who he is, he was way cool, had these wraparound sunglasses like from some 1965 French New Wave film, this black tshirt, these amazing forearms, long and lean, a thin, wiry frame in his straight leg jeans, and this light brown hair, straight, parted on the side, cut with a hint of bangs, again, very 1965, very Euro, and I wanted to talk to him, but he was young and shy. There was the guy I met at the Communist table at the Nader Rally last week (was that last week?), the guy whose name is the same as my father's, and I wanted to say, "Hey, did you know your name....?", but I didn't. I'd sat down right in the front of the bus Friday night, as we boarded, the second seat, by the window, and waited to see who'd sit next to me.... the Russian? The Italian? Carlos? The guy with my father's name? They all kept moving and I had the double seats to myself. This was a good thing, I can't imagine if I'd had to sleep sitting up the whole trip! Not that sleeping curled in a fetal position across two narrow bus seats is a picnic either. But there were many more than the ones I mentioned, including the 46 year old who was clearly hitting on the young woman while we sat in the parking lot waiting and waiting for the buses to appear. They'd neither one been to a D.C. demo and when I said this was my fourth they gasped. Hah! Me, a seasoned vet. Hardly, hardly at all. And Adam had come to see us off, waiting with us, waving as we all got on the bus, 11:00 at night, not even going because he was to play a gig up north on Saturday, but wanting to go, an American Jew wanting to make a statement, an American wanting to speak out. I also didn't mention that part of my distaste for our Muslim friends in the bus caravan with us stemmed from the fact that we waited on them to get in the buses so we could leave, we waited on their guy to go park his car, hours after we'd all arrived, ready and willing. They made us wait. We stopped for them to pray, before sunrise, waiting in our bus while it idled on the side of the highway, or wherever we were, it was dark, who knows? 45 minutes. We waited again when they had to stop because their bus' toilet stank and they all complained. And on the way back? The return trip? We were all to meet on the buses, ready to leave at 7:00 p.m. sharp. The Muslim bus leaders boarded our bus over and over again, from 5:30 on, asking where our people were, why weren't we ready to go? Their people were starving, hadn't eaten since Friday, they said, they, with coolers filled with food, bags of chips out the ass, complaining to us. And we said, Fine, go, why travel as a pack, as a caravan, we'll be fine, you'll be fine, go. Oh no. Get your people, we must go. But we have until 7:00? "We said meet here by 6:00, to leave at 7:00", well, regardless, it's only 6:30, it's not 7:00, hold your horses, unwind your panties, etc., etc., and I could only think how pushy they were. How this was the action center's bus trip and their mosque raised last minute funds so they could join us and apparently they didn't all pay, it was one pig fuck after another for the rest of us. It was uncomfortable for a while there, it really was, even though they blessed us and wished us a safe journey, there was an air of falsehood, of insincerity about the whole thing. And, yes, Caucasians were the minority yesterday. We were. Plain and simple. The focus was on sympathy for the Palestinians, and though there were stickers plastered everywhere, reading "We are all Palestinians", I never felt it. I may be a half Jew, but I've never felt particularly oppressed. Maybe it's about time I do! Actually, living in the South as I do, I have encountered racial prejudice towards me, for having white skin, but other than that, I'm good. It was an interesting journey. And the bus was freezing a good bit of the time, and everyone complained, and the cranky pissed off driver said tough shit, basically, Greyhound wouldn't turn the heat up, why should he? It stays cold to keep the driver awake. He didn't want to be there, something about coordinating with the other bus drivers just really got to him. I overheard him telling one of our organizers that he told his wife he was going to cancel, and she told him he was definitely not, he couldn't do that to our people, he's been with them for 20 years or more, as I said (in fact, he's the dude that drove us up to protest the NATO bombings!, what was that, two years ago?), so he drove, but begrudgingly.... I found him rather whiny. I'm sure there's more. I'll think of it. I'll think of things Sandy said to me when he came up to sit next to me and we talked, about his dogs, my cats, his family, my lack thereof, just getting to know you stuff, which he'd been asking all day, and I'd been thinking, Hmmm.... why is he asking me so many questions about myself? Duh. You know, I think the best part of traveling is coming home and reflecting, especially once you have the pictures. It helps so much to put it into perspective. When you're there, you're too close to it to see it. You need to back off to get "the big picture". Which is what I'm getting now. Cost of the War in Iraq
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