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Here's what happened: Around 1pm, people started standing on street corners along University Avenue. These were well-dressed men in suits and ties, well-dressed women in their Sunday best, freshly-scrubbed boys and girls who looked like an advertisement for wholesome American childhood. They were holding anti-abortion signs.

University Avenue is the main drag in Wilmington. If you go shopping in Wilmington, you probably go down this street. I slowly cruised up and down University Avenue, and as I was doing that, more and more well-dressed people pulled into various parking lots, left their cars, and joined their comrades on the sidewalks along the street with their signs.

By 2pm, school busses from local churches (pretty much every fundamentalist church in a 100 mile radius) had joined the fray and disgorged hundreds, perhaps thousands of protesters. University Avenue was lined solid for over 5 miles with protesters holding anti-abortion signs (they did not block driveways or parking lots of course -- they were, after all, polite well-dressed people).

Around 4pm they started breaking up. By 5pm, everybody had gone home. I turned on the local TV news at 5pm wondering what the local stations were going to say about this display of solidarity amongst the local churches. I saw....

Well, nothing.

That's right. Nothing. There was no (*NO*) news coverage of a protest that had pretty much shut down the main drag of Wilmington NC for close to four hours.

Well, I thought, maybe they just did not have time to do a story between the time the protest ended and the time they had to have the news. So at 11pm I turned on the evening news to see the story. And I saw... well, nothing.

That's right. Nothing.

Well, I thought, surely the local newspaper will have a story in tomorrow's edition, telling us who organized this amazing event and what they hoped to achieve with it. So that Monday (the protest was on a Sunday) I opened the newspaper. There was nothing on the front page. Hmm. So I looked at the Metro page. Still nothing.

Nothing.

A major, newsworthy event, and because it did not match the beliefs of the local news outlets (who prided themselves on being progressive and liberal), it got no (zero) coverage.

That was when I came to realize that what we read in the newspapers and see on the television is only a small piece of what really happens in the world. What gets published, what gets shown on television, is only a small piece of the puzzle that is reality, and it has been filtered through an editor's "reality distortion filter", similar to the one in Redmond Washington that had Microsoft vice presidents confidently stating that they would be found "Not Guilty" of being an illegal monopoly all the way up until the day that Judge Jackson ruled "Guilty".

That is why the "IndyMedia" movement is so important, especially in the aftermath of days like May 1, 2001, when police riots occurred throughout the United States -- and at best recieved cursory notice buried in the back "Arrests" pages of newspapers. For example, the Arizona Republic published a photo of one of those arrested, a young girl maybe 18 years old who had blood running down her face -- but no explanation of what happened, who she was, why she was arrested, no nothing. And the Arizona Republic was unusual even in doing that much "reporting".

I do not agree with all the goals of these young people. I'm old enough to know that the world is more complicated than they seem to believe. That does not, however, mean that I condone the censorship of news that is being done every day to eliminate their voices. I applaud their willingness to make their voices heard despite the official corporate censorship, and recommend that you try a dose of IndyMedia daily just to give a hearty "FUCK YOU!" to the Gannets and Disneys of this world that want to deny you the right to hear any voice other than their homogenized corporate message of "buy buy buy!".

--- Eric Lee Green