My friend Barbara lives in San Diego and was among the 400 or so activists who got up early on New Years Day and did an Impeachment action during the Rose Bowl Parade. Here's her account of it, which is posted at afterdowningstreet.org and reposted here with permission.
Barbara also took pictures, and here's another account of the action, with yet more links and pictures that are well worth checking out.
We left San Diego at 1:30 AM and got to Pasadena at around 4 AM. The metro runs all night long so that was easy enough to find our way to the parade venue. We were told to look for ORANGE. At first we were so excited because there was ORANGE everywhere! After being rebuffed by the first group I approached, we understood that one of the teams playing in the Bowl was orange so it would not be so easy to find others. Wrong again. People were very helpful and mostly positve in these predawn, cold hours. When they saw ARREST BUSH and IMPEACH they were only too happy to direct us to the area where others had camped out all night long. The IMPEACH group was much smaller than we had hoped but that did not dampen their spirits. Ours either! We each got a sign and began walking the streets. It was too cold to be still. As the sun came up, the crowds kept getting bigger, constant traffic past where we stood. We were directly across form the press area. For an hour or so we were photographed continuously. I decided then to break out the www.afterdowningstreet banner and display it while we had the chance. Some of the remarks we have all heard but on this day they seemed downright comical.
COMMIES, no that would be our biggest trading partners.
GET A JOB, hello! it's a holiday.
LOSER, not really, I'm retired and doing okay.
YOU LOVE HILARY? um, no, in fact I don't know anyone who does.
So it went until they closed the street. By then the crowd was so big that we had no where to go but scuttle off to a side street. We were heartened to see that IMPEACH signs were everywhere and what a cheer for the CHAIN GANG! We passed the next 2 hours walking and talking and getting our photos taken. When the parade ended, we fell in behind the Jesus crowd which had some how gotten to the head of the line first. The CHAIN GANG was great and the giant CONSTITUTION incredible. The speeches by Cindy Sheehan, and others were short and to the point of why we had all come so far today. IMPEACHMENT, RESTORE THE CONSTITUTION, JUSTICE FOR AMERICA.
There were no refuse cans or receptacles anywhere so the whole parade route was trashed! We know why there were no trash cans in the whole city of Pasadena, don't we? Better to trash the city than take a chance on SOMETHING SCARY ending up in a dark trash can that no one can see. It sure made it easier for the recyclers as their treasure was right there on the sidewalk and in the street for the taking, like gold nuggets in the sand.
We had been on our feet for 9 hours by this time. We stopped for lunch and made it back to the metro for the drive home. The news reports we listened to seemed to go out of the way to suggest no one or nothing disrupted the Rose Parade. Don't believe it, we were there, maybe 4oo of us, standing quietly, being seen, generating conversation and maybe even a bit of conscieince for some.