The Crowd Makes It Clear More of This Is Wanted
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I VT) held a rally in Tempe, Arizona Thursday night. What they said were on the same themes they’ve been talking about lately, but what they proved is the enormous interest.
They reserved an arena for the event and anticipated 7,000 people but the crowd was much bigger and quite determined. Having approached the area an hour and a half early I had to abandon the last couple of miles of cars at a standstill trying to get in and park in a private lot and walked the rest of the way. That was just the beginning. The lines snaked around whole city blocks but were actually twice that because the entire length one side of the sidewalks were people walking away from the arena trying to get to the end of the line. The lines had snaked back on themselves.
Even starting in line an hour early there were still people in those lines just making it in an hour after the event started. But all were in a good mood. The last some thousand people didn’t fit in the arena and went into a large parking area with a video screen for overflow viewing. And it was an enthusiastic crowd. The Arizona Republic stated the crowd, inside and out, came to 10,000.
Most were happy to talk about why they were there. There was Bridgette from Phoenix who was excited to see such a turnout. She was there with her gay friend Kip. Both had grown up Mormon. Kip had just had a recent long talk with his brother about politics. They have opposite views and didn’t make any headway on those points but did manage to have the conversation, which they took as positive.
There was Lisa, a teacher from a nearby school. She is teaching history to seventh graders. Currently she’s teaching them about the civil rights movement. She considers Ocasio-Cortez to be her bad ass hero.
Also Pam who is retired from working at stores in the area. She was hoping to see more people of color attending. There were, but less than she expected. And there was Krista, also of Phoenix, there to show support and to hear encouragement about the future of women’s rights, gay rights, resistance to the reckless way important civil service jobs are being eliminated, and to the way deportations are being done carelessly.
Both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders got the crowd fired up. Sanders put an emphasis on the need for grass roots work to make any resistance effective.
They will hold a rally together in Tucson this coming Saturday.
Clearly this was more of a crowd than they had anticipated and it would seem that’s the message. That there is a lot of hunger for an alternative and people need to demonstrate that and see it to encourage still more. The popular vote was lost by less than two percent, and if those people make their presence known then the apparent cultural change that brought Trump into power comes back into perspective as something that is by no means irreversible.
