At the Mass. Statehouse

[Lexingtonian]

Things began well last night. I came out of the Park Street T station exit on the Common and firetrucks were going by, all sirens and flashing lights, up the small street toward the statehouse. I was a bit hopeful but there wasn't any smoke in the air, and especially none billowing out of the domed edifice whose gates bear the dictum "Abandon all hope ye who enter here".

This was a little after six. What I'd gathered from TV and online news so far was that things were, happily enough, apparently degenerating into an anarchic chaos inside the Constitutional Convention session. Yesterday things were fairly orderly but both sides combined to defeat two amendment proposals that tried to compromise. On the evening news they showed Jared Barrios, the state senator representing Cambridge and gay, trying to propose an amendment legalizing and endorsing gay marriage as the news folk tried to summarize the events of the day so far, and that was sign enough to demonstrate that the thing was utterly getting away from Finneran and Travaglini. (This is a Good Thing.)

So I was definitely in a good mood. They weren't letting people into the statehouse so I joined the demonstrators out in front of the building. RationalRose has told wonderfully about what that was like in her thread
( http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1115309 )
and I obviously got there long after she'd gone. For about an hour and a quarter there were maybe thirty of 'us' there holding up signs and chanting at the traffic and the dozen or so counter-demonstrators. Traffic is messy at the small intersection diagonally across from the statehouse, so we TV camera-toting guys wandered by half a dozen times. It was dark, though, so that footage is never going to air- the daytime crowd was larger and louder and had so much better lighting, their pictures are on the 'net in the paper and broadcasts. Over on the other side about half the counter-demonstrators were kids between six and twelve holding signs about things they had no clue about because their parents made them, and it was a little sad. Fortunately for them, they and their parents left once it really got dark. Rose has told about the slogans the folks with the megaphones did, but honestly, those got a little boring and something of a drag emotionally. 'Separate/church and state' just loses its pull after half an hour. I tried to spice it up with some harmless funny ones. I mean, if you're confidently in the right, humor should come easily! "Hey, somebody should want to marry your kid, right?" The cops were pretty happy at the behavior of almost everybody at the end- impressed, really, at the essential respectfulness and reasonableness and determination of the demonstrators, when I and some others talked to them.

Anyway, the traffic died down around quarter past seven and the counterdemonstrators shrank to about three, who were hoarse and depressed and had unreadable signs, which left very little audience or verbal sparring opportunity. It turned out security was letting people into the statehouse, though, so most of us went through the south courtyard- where the statue of Mary Dwyer is, the most famous of the four Quakers the Puritans hung in 1659 (her on the Common), in the first major object lesson of American history about the inability of theocratic government to suffer critics who have integrity and determination.

So there were a few hundred of us outside the House chamber, some of long presence and many of us new influx. Arline Isaacson was more or less the principle figure, rallying the crowd to songs and good cheer. The various State House employees scurrying about, straight out of Hieronymus Bosch or the Hunchback of Notre Dame, were quite amusing.

More to come later....