I don't know how many people were there. Who could count? I saw airplanes circling overhead and helicopters in the distance. Maybe they could get high enough to see the scope of it. I couldn't. There was no trash can or tree or bus stop overhang I could climb on top of which would allow me to see everybody. I tried. All I could see was people and more people, people with banners, people with earth flags, people on stilts, people dancing, people making music, people chanting, people with signs, people with microphones, people holding hands, people speaking, people laughing, people taking pictures, people crying.

I don't trust the media to do anything for me. Not even to count. The newspaper headlines and captions and police estimates always seem to be off by a power of ten. If it's a hundred million protesters around the world, they would say ten million. If it's a hundred thousand people, they'll say ten thousand. Or a few thousand. I do not know what the numbers are. After all, how can any one body calculate the number of drops in a rising tsunami of people? I do not trust these sources.

For every person who showed up at one of these protests, I believe there are several who for one reason or another could not be present in the flesh. Maybe for every one person who showed, there were a hundred or a thousand or a million who were with us, who believe the war is wrong, but who could not attend. What do numbers mean, anyway? What is their purpose? To validate, to congratulate, or to diminish?

I always cry. Someone I did not know took what felt like fifty pictures of me looking at the crowd and crying, holding tight to Andre's hand, chin trembling, emoting, smiling and crying. Afterwards, when he had taken his fill of pictures, he thanked me. I asked him if he was a reporter. I could tell, somehow, by the angles of the shots he took. He had circled my head, had gone down on his knee, smoothly to take pictures from below me. He told me he was, yes, a reporter. Some local paper in the Mission. I do not know exactly what the name of it was. Sadly, I do not speak Spanish. The man had kind eyes, a red beard, strawberry blonde dreadlocks. He asked me why I was crying. I tried to be coherent for him. He seemed like a nice man. Gentle.

I tried to explain to him that when I come out to events like these and see the magnitude of support there is on the side of peace, when I come and stand among hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who believe, I get so proud of us, I get so happy, so inspired—I see old people and young people and people of all different races and religions coming together and it seems like a miracle. The beautiful and ecstatic enormity of the people coming together, though, is matched with the horror of what is happening. This insanity of war. Does this warmaker even know what it means? I stand here and I'm with hundreds of thousands (or millions—who can count?) of people who have some understanding of what war means, what absolute horror war is, and I am an empathetic channel for all of it. I feel what I'm feeling, but I also feel what everyone around me is feeling. So it's magnified for me somehow. And at the same time, I do feel this pride. You never know what will tip me over the edge. I'll see a bunch of women walking together carrying a sign that says Post-Menopausal Women for Peace or I'll see a bunch of college professors carrying signs that say "Ain't Gonna Study Your War No More," or I'll see someone holding up a picture of a child that has been mutilated or killed as a result of some bomb dropping somewhere, and I'll just lose my shit. At the women, at the professors, at the baby. At the size and depth of the crowd. At the power we have when we stand together. At the power we don't even realize we have. And at the power this godawful American Government has to destroy the whole world if it wants to.

I tried to sum all of that up in a few coherent, well-articulated sentences for the young man, because I was crying, see, and it seems important to me to be articulate when I am weeping.

I have great difficulty writing about this war. I have written almost nothing on the topic. No poems, no songs, no journal entries online or private. Almost nothing whatsoever. It is a raw channel of pain and grief in me that I skirt feeling all the time by going numb. I listen to KPFA (the only news source I trust) and I cry and I cringe. I feel so impotent when it comes to this. I feel so very impotent. My words seem inadequate to even capture, outline, or sum up the grief in me; and completely insufficient to take that pain and use it as fuel towards movement. I do not know how to turn this thing around. I feel embarrassed to admit that. I feel embarrassed to be understood as American. I feel very American in my giving in to feelings of inadequacy, rather than just standing up and committing myself to the task of changing this situation regardless of how huge it seems and how small a creature I am. I don't want to say any of these words out loud. I want to leave this country, and pretend to be from somewhere else. (You don't have to tell me that's a cop out. I know.) I know I would not feel safe in a world with the United States in it. I want to fly to another planet, another solar system, far far from this one, and settle in, raise some vegetables, cultivate a small peaceful community, pretend that I don't care if the people of this planet Earth destroy themselves and each other.

I am not proud of myself. I stand among the throngs of people who believe in peace and I weep.