any plans for a second march in LA on March 20th? i am interested in protesting but i am reluctant to join the ANSWER coalition march route starting at Hollywood and Vine. the antiwar movement is enormous and complex and i feel that the March route(s) should reflect this. can anybody who knows the planned march route please post it here? is it a straight line? what about alternatives? two parallell routes on adjacent boulevards? three parallell routes? converging around the CNN building? visibility is always a problem. how about just spreading out?

if, at a gathering of twenty thousand people, everybody just takes five steps away from the nearest person every two minutes (staying on sidewalks if necessary), the expansive effects would be huge, peaceful, and unstoppable. if one extrapolates the effects in a city like los angeles over the course of four or five hours the possible results resemble the real interaction that is in fact creating unprecedented levels of dissent world wide.

if we aim to energize and inspire more and more ongoing activism in the weeks and months and years to come, i think that events like the upcoming protest on March 20th should demonstrate to participants the kind of dynamic and challenging and constructive experience that we can all have when we take action against the masters of war. the World Social Forum is one successful example of a huge and complex event with mutliple focal points - hundreds of different focal points in fact. there are many good criticisms of the WSF but it is generally conceded that the diversity of focal points is one of the reasons for the growth and influence of that forum. for the same reasons, i think that for a group of people as huge and diverse as we can expect on March 20th, marching in a single straight line will actually degenerate much of the very constructive energy that will be brought to this event.

i believe these upcoming global protests will be truly historic in proportion and i think that if we can create a new more complex protest experience on March 20th and/or in the future, that we will inspire and achieve still greater things as a community, not just as a select group of organizers. massive events should not only be end results for organizers - massive events should be the beginning points of thousands more projects and actions of the participants. i know that most of us go to these protests not only to vent and exhaust our dissatisfaction but also in hopes of recharging our energies for the even greater battles ahead. those hopes may not come true right away, but most of us can't help having them so let's talk about them and try to make them come true as soon as possible, so that we can solve bigger problems.