How to break into prime-time news: An effective media tactic from -- surprise -- Falun Gong

After sending a long and busy day touring Washington DC with some friends the other day, I took the Greyhound bus to Fredricksburg, Virginia and joined up with the American Indian Movement's Sacred Run, which has spent the last three months crossing America on foot. My son Joe, who has been on the Run since last February, hasn't bathed in four days but is otherwise doing really well.

Fredricksburg is the site of a 1862 Civil War battle wherein the Confederates held off the Union Army long enough to re-group. The battle involved lots of house-to-house fighting and a whole bunch of death. Yuck!

Despite its grisly past, however, Fredricksburg itself is really CUTE and there's a historical marker on almost every building downtown. After the Runners finished setting up their tents down by the Rappahannock River and had a chance to look around, one of them said, "Jane! Guess what? There's free internet access at the local library!" Free internet access? Wow! I am now typing this at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation computer center. Apparently there is one in every library in Virginia. Bill Gates is the new Andrew Carnegie. Go him.

Meanwhile, back at the Rappahannock, we got our new schedule. In just two more days, the Run will be over. We will street-hike into DC, rally at the Lincoln Memorial and that will be that. On to a new subject: When I toured Washington DC with my friends, we saw at least 5,000 Falun Gong people standing in bunches on EVERY corner and holding up signs accusing China of harvesting organs off Falun Gong members before putting them to death -- and apparently transplanting the organs into well-heeled Americans.

The Falun Gong people were holding up LOTS of horrible photos. It was a total blitz of the nation's capital. There were grisly pictures on every corner. And it was VERY EFFECTIVE. The pro-Peace/anti-Bush people might consider doing something like that too -- with LOTS of photos of America's homeless, America's crippled soldiers, America's dying sick people, America's out-of-work refugees from Corporate Welfare, America's Iraqi and Afghani torture victims, America's financing of the killing of children in Palestine, America's election fraud statistics, America's leaders in their mansions and limousines bought with taxpayers' money, etc.

These photos would really make an impact on the DC tourists. For sure.

And maybe those of us who still believe in patriotism and democracy might also do this once a month in every large city in America. A single occasional protest march is easy for the media to ignore -- but not this. Not if all these photos are out there on hundreds of street corners in every large city in America once a month where millions of Americans will see them -- and finally be forced to come face to face with the cold hard facts that they are carefully being kept from seeing on TV. And maybe Americans will finally be able to "get the picture" that Bush is destroying our country -- and ripping us off.