Travel, one hears, is broadening, and certainly we’re getting a new perspective on a few things. Yesterday, for instance, there were protests in Madrid, Bilbao, and Barcelona called by unions and NGOs to show solidarity with Palestine. The march here passed directly under our balcony and felt historic in its majesty and intensity. I filmed for close to an hour; here’s one portion, which starts with a brief rally before resuming the slow walk. The street is one-way and is three lanes wide plus a bike lane.

I have friends of all religions and certainly don’t want to downplay the complexity of the situation in the middle east, but I am also a math person, and I can’t help noticing that we’ve gone from an eye for an eye to at least 40 eyes for an eye, with no end in sight. The power of this protest was in its size, a slowly flowing river of humanity. It was frankly quite moving. My husband and I were both riveted, standing at the windows until the end.

Like everything in Spain, this protest was very well organized. Slow-moving police vehicles bracketed the marchers fore and aft, implying that this was a permitted event, and everyone was orderly in the context of what they were doing, which was of course designed to be disruptive at some level.

Nothing could be less effective than a protest that doesn’t inconvenience anyone.

I took part in two DC marches, the Million Mom March for stricter gun control in 2000 and one of the reproductive rights marches, which were all called March for Women’s Lives, in the 80s. Participation in each of those events numbered in the low hundreds of thousands. I’m no crowd estimator, and it’s hard to compare a crowd of moving people to a static crowd. I have a video, but there are a lot of trees.

Nonetheless, I’ll have a go: I believe 30 rows of 20 people each passed my window every minute, which in 40 minutes would be 24,000 people. This is not implausible. I feel all of my assumptions are on the conservative side.

Why do I have to compute this? Because I can’t find the information anywhere! There’s not the slightest reporting of this in any US news source to which I have access, including the vaunted New York Times, to which we continue to subscribe despite its penchant to disappoint. The Guardian doesn’t seem to have a search (my bad?) plus keeps popping up to bug me for money, which since I fed it not two days ago makes me very annoyed. The announcement of the protest showed up at something called aa.com, but not the reporting of the aftermath.

I don’t think we should continue to call this the information age. Though if I were seeking information on the Kardashians I’m sure I would be overwhelmed.