At 5:30 a.m. Saturday, the nation's capital will be quiet. The endless streams of commuters will be obsolete as the crowded interstates will be mostly empty. It will be a Saturday, and the thousands of government workers who bring Washington, D.C., alive every morning will be at home asleep.
But at 5:30 a.m., Franklin Street will be bubbling with energy as nearly 400 people pool outside Internationalist Books to depart for what is expected to be the largest anti-war protest in the nation's capital since the Vietnam War.
UNC students and area residents will flood the modest bookstore -- where visitors sit on the floor and a worn-out couch casually discussing policy issues -- and board seven churning charter buses bound for the march on Washington.
The 400
Nearly 200 people from Chapel Hill and Carrboro attended the protest in October that attracted about 100,000 -- a turnout officials said was the largest anti-war demonstration in Washington since the Vietnam protests of the 1970s.
Local organizers say that the event will be predominantly peaceful but that, as in the October protest, they will be met by counter-demonstrators who also plan to rally on the National Mall and then boisterously greet the protesters as they march to the gates of the Washington Navy Yard.
Nationally and on campus, the peace movement has escalated as military preparations for a possible war with Iraq have been stepped up.
At Internationalist Bookstore, preparations for the march have taken over normal business operations. For the past two weeks, the store has buzzed with energy as people have filed in nonstop asking for information about the bus tickets and the march. With the bookstore fielding nearly 100 calls a day, tickets for two of the buses sold out in one day.