How Can You Tell You're at a "Grassroots" Protest?

How Can You Tell You're at a "Grassroots" Protest?

1). Almost all the protest signs are hand-lettered.

2). There isn't a tour bus to be found

3). Nobody is wearing a Ché shirt.

I took an early lunch today and went down to the TEA Party protest at El Presidio Park in downtown Tucson. I took a digital camera to record the scene. I don't think there were a thousand people in attendance at any one time, but given the amount of traffic in and out, I'd say there were well over a thousand who showed up - many if not most like me, who could only spare about an hour away from work. Here's three crowd shots from the same position. (I'd do a panorama if I knew how and thought I could post something you could actually see:






And that's just a portion of the crowd. I'd like to see what it looked like from the upper floors of the nearby buildings.

There were a LOT of people with hand-lettered protest signs. Here are some of the better ones:


















No Ché, but a Bob Marley T-shirt did make an appearance:


Of course, some people did make use of printers and graphics programs:






But no Debt Star.

While there was a lot of Obama-bashing, there really wasn't a lot of anti-democrat signage, it was mostly anti-political-party stuff. Neither major political party got much love at this rally. But there's always some:




She also had this to say:



And, of course, there was some free-enterprise capitalism going on. The Kettle Korn guy:


And the hot-dog vendor with a LONG line:


But by far, my favorite was this kid whose mother loves him very much!




I'll be really interested to see how the legacy media covers these events as opposed to the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Well, that question has been answered.