ISSUES IN THE NEWS:

On the March: A Report on the March for Women's Lives 2004

Outside the crowd, you needed a sweater to ward off the chill. In the crowd, some people were shirtless. In the spirit of the moment, one girl had taken off her shirt and covered her breasts with stickers, creating an impromptu bra.

There was an easiness amongst the people there. Part of it was the instant comradery that always occurs when people band together to share a moment in time for a cause. But there was more.

The "more" was due to the fact that there were so many of us... so many. When I left at around 4--missing, I'm sorry to say, both Hillary Clinton and Ani DeFranco--1.5 million people had already signed the sign-in sheets. There were still many left to sign. But what was more amazing was that some people were just getting there. It was, without question, the largest gathering of people to descend on Washington, ever. My own educated guess stands at a little over 2 million people.

And we could feel not just their body heat, but their power.

"We won't go back!"

"Never again!"

People stabbed their fists in the air and shouted. Some of them, like myself, had been there before and done that; but now there were 20-year-olds and 12-year-olds.

The route of the march, itself, was short. Yet, there were so many assembled that, by the time the first ones were returning, half of the people had not yet stepped out.

Lining the streets of our route were the inevitable anti-choice people, holding their pictures of decimated fetuses, 4,000 times actual size. Most of these were men over the age of 50.

We're told not to respond to them, but it is hard. The arrogance, the bible-thumping--they're hard to ignore. It's the true ignorance of some of what they believe, however, that really makes you want to shout. (And some of us did.)

Still, I had a certain amount of pity for them. They were all so serious, so dour. While we sang and chanted and smiled and hugged, they stood their disgusting signs beside their grim-reaper faces.

They changed no one's mind; they only tightened our solidarity. They reinforced how important it was that we take back the country from people just like them.

They were in the clear minority and the only ones who caused any trouble. Luckily, they were arrested, while the daughters and mothers and grandmothers (and husbands and fathers and grandfathers) marched on, arm-in-arm, ready to do battle to maintain our rights to our own bodies and our own lives.

I saw one woman with a T-shirt that said, "Stop bitchin', start the revolution."

I think, perhaps, we did.

Editor's Note: While Ms. Lambert estimates over 2 million participants in the march, The Sun reported "several hundred thousand."