Demonstrators a mere shadow of yesteryear

We who live in Denver year around are consumed by having the Democratic National Convention in our city.

It's hard to get news or information about much else. Katrina II may be closing in on New Orleans, and the Colorado Rockies may be making another late season miracle run for the playoffs--but you're hard-pressed to find out about it.

Millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been lavished on extra cops, equipping them with riot gear and high tech security apparatus--all to fend off the anarchists, rioters and demonstrators who are drawn to national political conventions like moths to a bright light.

So far, knock on wood, those drawn to Denver have been a major disappointment. They can be counted in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, and except for the press, would attract very little attention or notice. They have not been disruptive, or even disrespectful. What they've really been is pathetic.

The salad days of demonstrating may be over. The internet and social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and UTube may well have eclipsed street demonstrations. Blackberries, cell phones, I-phones and texting have made communication so personal, so quick and intense, that putting on a show in the street for the evening TV audience may not matter as much anymore.

The overwhelming sense you get from what demonstrators are out there, is that they're old and trying hard to recapture the glories of yesteryear. There are very few young protestors and demonstators, who seem to have moved on to the impersonalization of high tech, which has become their mantra.

MoveOn.org and their ilk seem a lot more powerful, and to have captured the younger generation, than street demonstrations, arrests and provoking the police.

With one day to go, maybe there will still be a major street ruckus, but it really feels like the world has changed. Just as the anachronistic roll call of states at the convention lacked its old drama, which Hillary Clinton's motion mercifully put out of its misery, street rumbles aren't what they once were, either.