Winged Victory

On any given day on Denver, Colorado’s 16th Street Mall, you can find busy streets peppered with street performers, political activists, and religious fanatics. When you mix together those ingredients with the Democratic National Convention, you get a cocktail too potent for many Americans to swallow easily.

The DNC has clogged and gridlocked lower downtown Denver (known locally as LoDo) with people and traffic, yet the sites to be seen aren’t really anything new, just a lot more of the same.

Street corner preachers have new out-of-town friends working next to them, putting religious tracts in the hands of unsuspecting passersby. The pro-life hucksters are no longer alone in vigilantly ruining outdoor diners’ lunches with pictures of aborted fetuses. Now giant billboard trucks will pass by those same popular eateries as often as lower downtown’s heavily congested convention traffic will allow.

Product placements from granola bar manufacturers and condom brands crowd the usual street corner merchants, now amplified with a plethora of Barack Obama merchandise. Young people comb the streets hoping to register others to vote while John McCain supporters assemble and trade barbs with conventiongoers. A heavy police presence works to keep the peace, while hippy activists wish for it on a grander scale. Anarchists, by definition, aren’t organized enough to do much of anything, but they’re there too.

With so many groups competing to put their free speech in your overwhelmed ears, you would think that it all would blend together into one massive street corner haze. Yet one social activism organization was making people stop in their tracks to take a tract, and think differently about our world. No, it wasn’t the environmental groups. On day two of the DNC, while pundits discussed Hillary Clinton’s upcoming speech, the people on the streets of Denver were all talking about StopBirdPorn.com.

Advocating against the estimated 48 million bird watchers or voyeurs of the world, this excited group of activists took to the streets of the DNC Tuesday in hopes to lobby against what they find a perversion: watching animals for pleasure through binoculars. They endorse stiff penalties for anyone in possession of bird pornography, and ask for citizens to help discourage senior citizens from bird watching and, instead, to channel their energies into socially accepted activities.

“It’s time to stop these sick peeping Toms,” said one of the street-corner activists, who requested anonymity. “People who take pleasure from watching these unsuspecting victims must be stopped.”

If there were any bird watchers in the crowd, they were too embarrassed by their actions to offer any rebuttal, and there certainly wasn’t any pro-bird porn lobby working the streets in opposition.

While the speeches of the DNC garner the attention of the national press, it’s of public interest also to recognize the highly organized and peaceful demonstrators surrounding this historic event. Today, many in attendance of the Democratic National Convention took notice of those advocating against the bird pornography scourge. The day would become known for unity, thanks to Hillary Clinton’s speech on the convention floor. Yet, the spirit of coalition actually started in Denver that morning, when StopBirdPorn.com delivered conventiongoers a platform issue that everyone seemed to be able to come together on. Apparently the solidarity carried over into the Pepsi Center’s convention floor, as a once broken party healed.

That, dear reader, is change you can believe in, even if it is for the birds.

—michael j. salamone