Appearances and opportunities, Part I

To some degree, I was encouraged that several thousand citizens traveled on their own dimes in mid-week to protest the Federal Government's swallowing of the Nation's healthcare system. On the other hand, I was somewhat dismayed by how the event unfolded. As I sat here on my little farmette in Northwest Ohio and observed the goings-on in D.C., I was struck by how such an opportunity for grass roots activism had been squandered.

The estimates that I have seen regarding crowd size places the number of participants somewhere between twenty thousand and sixty thousand attendees. A nice crowd, but not an overwhelming one. In fact, it appears that the impact of the assembly may have been undermined by the AARP and AMA capitulations. There was, however, another aspect that I found more disturbing. Something that sucked the air out of the protest and colored it with a sense of overdone hype.

Congresswoman Michelle Bachman was the prime mover of this event. See Part II.