5,000 to 10,000 people in port of Oakland.
Somewhere between 10,000 to 30,000 people in New York.
That’s just two places quickly off the top of my head.
Portland Oregon is going to be kicking up a march similar to these on the 12th soon as well.
I haven’t researched too much into LA, or other areas which are active.
Estimates are anywhere around ~3,000 to 5,000 arrests total combined…so far.
To me…I watched the live footage on November 17th, not on news (they were covering Michael Jackson and Penn State issues) but on livestream.com which had a constant stream of any live camera rolling they could get feed of.
That mass at the march and at Foley square, not counting Union square - as there were no camera shots coming from there to see - was…insanity.
It was so dense; I’m quite sure the reported estimates of near 20 to 30,000 weren’t too far off.
I even flipped on my computer capture camstudio to snag a clip of just how massive it was because I honestly could not believe that I was seeing anything that large of a protest in my life.
I really had thought the spirit of America had died long ago with the last thing people gave that much of a shit about being racial inequality, which the movement ended 11 years prior to my birth, so I’ve never seen America try to move and push for anything socially to change.
I’ve seen protests, plenty, and they usually are a couple thousand at best and fizzle out within a week or so and are on issues I can’t even comprehend people bitching about; like animal rights or the like.
So I’m not really sure how many people is really the count here for what you might consider enough.
I wonder if the current age of insta-news removes the impact of numbers…for instance…aside from the never-before-or-again-accomplished Civil Rights movement March on Washington which had between 2 and 300 thousand people; the average marches and actions were between 1,000 and 20,000 people depending.
The famous Selma to Montgomery marches were only around 600 some-odd people.
Going back farther, the union movements of the 30’s - the now infamous “Ford Hunger March” in Detroit was somewhere in between 3 and 5,000 people.
There are 70 major cities and over 600 communities across the nation actively involved in these protests; that’s not counting small groups that get ignored [reasonably] (like, for instance, the poor bastards standing up here in Alaska in the middle of winter - all 12 to 20 of them; what the hell, I still can’t figure that one out…I’m sorry, but it’s too damn cold up here to be standing outside protesting like that! Wait for spring!).
I know you said intuition, but why hasn’t your intuition found these volumes impressive already?
Considering, as I’ve pointed out, it’s at least as large as previous social revolution movements on the average in regards to marches and protest actions…there could quite easily be 100,000 or so people that would show up if there was a Woodstock of the Occupy movement held, or if there could be a charismatic leader like Martin Luther King Jr. were to appear somewhere. Both of which may still happen.
Then again, the latter may not - the Occupy movement is kind of about, “We the people…”, concepts and not one man speaking…but we’ll see.