We had a fun and uneventful day of freeway blogging on September 11, 2019, showing our banner to close to 16,000 cars going by. There were an average of 65 cars per minute going by and the banner was up for over 4 hours. The use of the American flag was new this year. The purpose of it was to say that it is a patriotic event to investigate 9/11. It appeared that the combination of the flag and the banner were well received. We always assume that when the driver honks it is because he or she agrees with us 🙂 That may or may not be the case but why not?!
We (it’s the royal we) had perfect cooperation from law enforcement for this freeway blogging event. They know us by now and we have a reputation for being safe, careful, respectful of everybody, knowledgeable, and having good intentions. This makes it so much easier. We used the same plan that we developed in cooperation with the local highway patrol office at our meeting with them in February, 2010, nearly ten years ago. That is that we notify them a few days in advance of the date, time and place of our planned peaceful demonstration and freeway blogging event. We assure them that, as before, we are committed to safety. We ask that they notify the officers on patrol, the local law enforcement and the 911 dispatcher of our event. The purpose of this is to ensure that everybody involved expects us. Nobody is surprised when some drivers inevitably end up calling 911 even though that number is supposed to be used only for emergencies. People abuse that number all the time. Anyway because everybody in the loop has been notified they can take whatever response they want to take and they do not need to treat the fact that we are doing a peaceful demonstration as an emergency. They don’t guarantee us that they won’t pay us a visit up on the overpass in the event of a call but this time they did not visit us. We would have been happy to be visited up on the overpass anyway. We are sure that some drivers called to “report” us and our event. Who cares? It’s the First Amendment, freedom of speech. Here are some pictures from our event. Many thanks to my friend James for taking the ones that I am in.
