Above is a picture taken by my friend Will Davis of the Monroe County Reporter in Forsyth, GA.

Forsyth only has 4,000 people. 700 of them turned out to speak to Congressman Jim Marshall (D-GA 08) about healthcare.

The line was long. The day was hot. More and more people came. Congressman Marshall, a Democrat running in a decidedly Republican congressional district (he’s also my former law school professor), was patient.

Marshall, like the people in his district, opposes the healthcare proposals winding their way through Congress. Marshall went so far as to say he’d vote against all five of the present proposals.

The crowd got a little rowdy, but people feel passionately on the issue. You’ll see though that they were not really a mob. They were not really protestors. They were citizens turning out to tell their Congressman they are greatly opposed to Barack Obama’s agenda.

And he listened. The media, of course, will not cover gatherings like this because there really is no news and it is not in a major metropolitan area. But peaceful assemblies like this are far more common than those we’ve seen on television — and even those were not chaotic masses of angry people as the media would have us believe.

This is American democracy in all its glory.

Consider this an open thread.