Tomorrow Elephant

The Make Poverty History march was by far the largest gathering of people I have ever attended, and I was just awestruck by both the scale and the spirit of the whole thing. It was just… peaceful, with a bit of a carnival spirit. People brought their kids. Old people were pushed along in wheelchairs. Everybody wore white. Well, almost everybody: there was too much human variety present for that. There was a samba band dressed up as pink unicorns. There were many red-shirted members of that hardy species, the Scottish socialist. In all likelihood, there were Trekkies, although I didn’t see any. There were so many people that the march became one continuous band of white around the center of Edinburgh, as the organisers had intended. Indeed, the turnout was even larger than they had expected, to the point where we had to stand on the Meadows (the park where the march started) for hours before we could even get moving. I didn’t mind, though. Apart from the few inevitable anarchists, the march had an almost religious feel to it, especially during the one-minute silence halfway through, when all the church bells in the city rang. In spite of myself, I enjoyed it. There’s a few pictures at my brand-new Flickr gallery, if you’re interested: the makepovertyhistory tag has more.

Nevertheless, I agree with Sam’s observation that there were a bit too many movements completely unrelated to fighting poverty trying to piggyback on this universally appealing cause. The people marching behind us, for instance, had been involved in the recent anti-war demonstrations and their chant (repeated ad nauseatum with a megaphone a couple of yards behind me) was “G8 SAYS – DROP THE BOMB. WE SAY – DROP THE DEBT!” Excuse me? How many of the G8 leaders actually opposed the war?

But never mind: I guess there’s room for everybody in an event involving (apparently) 400 different organisations. Like these saintly gentlemen here, who told us they were just after some “peace wine”:

Sadly, I’m not sure this will make much of an impact on the G8 leaders. The anti-war demonstrations before the Iraq invasion dwarfed even this, and yet they didn’t make one whit of a difference. But it never hurts for a couple of hundred thousand people to get together, feel good about a common cause and spontaneously burst into dance on a warm summer day.

During the march I also stumbled across a quote from John Buchan, engraved in stone outside the Writers’ Museum: “We can only pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to us.” There’s many kinds of debt, and I think we owe Africa more than one variety. I hope the kind of debt the next generation is going to owe us will not be one of guilt.