Last summer I broke my leg. I’ve pretty much healed but I still walk slowly and worry about being knocked over in a crowd. Clearly, I couldn’t go down to the Mall on April 5th to participate in the Hands-Off rally which made me sad. I’m 92 years old now and have marched in demonstrations since the Vietnam War but this one was clearly beyond my reach.
My neighbor Susan told me that her friend in a senior residence on Conn. Ave. near the Beltway was organizing her friends to stand on the West side of Connecticut Ave. waving signs to greet cars and busses coming into the city. I was invigorated! We could do the same in our very large co-op on Veazey Terrace.
First we made colorful notices announcing our activity on April 5. We put up the notices in five elevators in our building. Management took them down. We put them up again, this time we did it at night. Same result. We found other places in the building which residents would see as they exited the building. The buzz of excitement was palpable as neighbors whom I had passed in the hall for years but never really spoke to beyond ‘hello’ were asking me for information. At that point we realized not everyone had poster board and magic markers for making a sign so another neighbor organized a sign-making gathering on the balcony outside our lobby, scheduling it for two days before the Rally. More than 50 neighbors turned out for it for that so we knew we had hit a nerve.
I tried reaching the local PBS station, WAMU, just down the street from our building but got no response. Same with the Washington Post. Then I sent a short notice to our very local newspaper, “The Forest Hills Connection,” and that elicited great interest. I wrote a piece for the paper which featured a 100-year-old resident of the Van Ness North Co-op who had been organizing and picketing and marching for even longer than I have. The paper published it, our building listserv reprinted it, and we were ready to roll.
What I wasn’t ready for was a call the night before the rally from the local NBC-TV station asking if they could interview the organizers — by now we were three — for the 9:00 a.m. news. It was just the break we were hoping for. The live coverage was seen by people as far away as Australia!
Our signs said Hands Off many things–social security, Medicare, science, our freedom, our lives! My neighbor Philippa Strum said: “I joined the protest because I am concerned about assaults on the rule of law and the independence of judges, which are crucial to our democracy.”
We wanted to give people a chance to show their strong feeling about what the government is doing and how it is hurting lots and lots of people. Things have gone off the rails and we are here to say
“Hands off….no more!”
After waving my sign for an hour a neighbor and I drove up Connecticut Ave. to the Beltway. All along the route there were pockets of people holding signs while cars passing by honked and passengers rolled down their windows to show support. But of all of those groups, the Veazey Terrace gang was the largest–more than 60! We formed a single line all the way down Connecticut to Van Ness St. and up almost to Windom Place. We didn’t achieve my dream of a human chain from Dupont Circle to Chevy Chase Circle but we did give people a chance to be part of something larger than themselves, and to demonstrate democracy in action. We’re ready to do it again!
–Barbara Green, Third Act DC Member