At the 9 a.m. kickoff, the couple of hundred home-grown revolutionaries were swallowed by the vastness of Dilworth Plaza, which provided a base for people with various grievances, mostly against Corporate Greed Inc., but also against the government, the war - and one guy's shouted beef with fluoridation.
Under the stony gaze of William Penn on his pedestal and relaxed police across the street, they held up their signs and chanted their chants. Leaders requested peace, nonviolence, respect, no blocking traffic, no property damage.
Very Philadelphia.
While OP has some leadership, it is as diffuse as fog, collaborative and communal. Leaders hate that word - sounds undemocratic? - and call themselves facilitators. Some things were planned, some things happened spontaneously, some things happened not at all.
Such as no P.A. system. (It's been ordered.) Maybe the reason the revolution won't be televised is that it needs sound.
At 9:05, some began singing "America the Beautiful."
Is this OP or the tea party?
Some of them were there, because this where Right and Left converge to confront the self-indulgent, bonus-grabbing masters of the economic universe both sides assail.
Left and Right found common ground in condemning wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - some on moral grounds, more on economic grounds - the Wall Street bailouts, the Detroit rescue, the Big Bucks that saturate politics, and the Federal Reserve.
They diverge when you talk about the size of government. The Left wants it bigger; the Right wants it smaller.
While many signs assailed big banks, only a few attacked capitalism. This wasn't so much an anti-capitalist crowd as a capitalism-isn't-working-right crowd. At this moment, it's hard to deny that.
