CT Blue

A couple of days ago I posted about a pro-health care event that was to be held today.

I was always a little dubious about this particular event. The idea was to get people to link hands across the Gold Star Bridge. Now, I have ridden my bike across that bridge (on the sidewalk/bikeway) and no matter how you slice it, it is a long bridge. You either need about a thousand people, or a hundred people with very very long arms. I’d say the number that showed up was a teeny weeny bit shy of a hundred (although they had regular size arms), meaning our numbers far exceeded the number of protesters that got such coverage from the Day when Chris Dodd came to Groton, but let’s face it: framing is all. When you overreach, you don’t look good. We could have made quite a presentable crowd at the Soldiers and Sailor’s monument in New London, but we didn’t make a dent on that bridge.

It also seemed quite odd that while there were a fair number of folks perfectly willing to be organized, there didn’t seem to be anyone who felt responsible to organize. Basic issues like parking appeared to have been overlooked, not to mention that no one actually stood up and said “I’m so and so, I organized this event, and here’s what were going to do”. At some point, people just started walking onto the bridge and started waving signs. In other words, the thing was only slightly better organized than Obama’s political strategy appears to be. (I knew we were in trouble when one fellow kept calling the event a “happening”)

It was a nice bunch, and what it lacked in numbers it made up in spirit.

Reaction from passing motorists was quite good, until these motorists chanced by.

Apparently it’s legal to wave guns in this country, but not signs, at least not on a bridge where you might distract traffic, so we were advised to “move on”, which we did. Now, I would have thought that it was fairly basic that if you are going to do something like this, you would check with the local authorities just to make sure that this type of thing is not going to happen. We were ready to break up anyway, so the intervention of the troopers didn’t have much impact. Parenthetically, they couldn’t have much to do these days, as a total of four cruisers eventually made it to the scene.

Some Groton regulars were there, including Mary Keating (who is in the picture above) and Betsy Moukawsher (below). I think I saw Lisa Luck as well, but I’m not positive.

If Health Care passes it’s fair to say that today’s happening will not go down as the turning point in the battle. Still, every little bit helps, and what we lacked in numbers and organization, we made up in …. well, I’m sure we made it up in something.