Noah Johnson's Protest Record, August 22, 2002
All text and images copyright Noah Johnson, 2002. Please do not reproduce without permission. Noah Johnson may be contacted at streak@well.com
On August 22, I and a couple thousand other people decided to head to downtown Portland and make our views known. Our beef was that George W. Bush was in town to raise money for Senator Gordon Smith's reelection campaign, and we wanted to make it known that we objected to a wide variety of Bush's policies.
I, personally, was tired of protestors being called unamerican or unpatriotic, especially being that it was my patriotism that was motivating me to spend my afternoon doing this in the first place. Accordingly, I made sure that my attire and my sign could not be mistaken for unpatriotic save by the very dimmest of observers.
Yes, I was and am well aware of how goofy I look in that outfit. Please disregard the imbecilic expression in the first photograph.
The above were taken at the initial meeting place for one group in the march, which was at 1:00 PM in the waterfront park by the river.
No political protest is complete without folksingers, so we had this nice family group doing several numbers while more people arrived. I spent the time on the curb, waving my sign at cars as others were also doing, garnering the occasional supportive honk or thumbs-up.
More and more people gathered, and a little after 2:00 PM we started off for the south park blocks at 8th and Burnside, where other activist groups were gathering.
