CODE PINK RALLY REPORT: I confess I did not feel entirely in sync with the “celebratory, creative” approach that the feminist organizers from Code Pink For Peace had planned for their pro-peace events in DC yesterday. But Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, and a raft of other great creative and dedicated women were scheduled to speak. And the timing was great– coming so close to Dubya’s final-final decision on going to war. (Has this been made yet? Good question. I like to argue that until we see the very first US cruise missiles launched, there will still be time for him to “stay the dogs of war.”)
But the organizers were asking us all to wear pink. Ugh.
I felt more in a somber, black-wearing mood. A mourning, Women-in-Black mood. So I dressed in black, but as a concession to the CodePinksters I rounded up some scraps of fuchsia fabric and tore them into makeshift scarves for myself, Barbara, and the other folks we were traveling to DC with. (Is there a fuchsia in this, I wonder? Oh, never mind.)
Well, the rally was great. The speakers were all tremendous. Nearly everyone, including the many brave guys who were there, was wearing something pink. Some of the “creativity” seemed a little out of place amidst the talk of war– except that the idea, as I understood it, was to celebrate life, to celebrate International Women’s Day, and to celebrate solid human values of caring and creativity in place of– and as antidote to– the gathering clouds of war.
The most welcome surprise among the speakers was “Granny D”, the 93-year-old peace activist Doris Haddock who just a few years ago walked across the US of A as her witness against war.
Call me an ageist if you will, but I’d never encountered Granny D in the flesh before; I’d only read a few news stories about her Peace Walk. So I guess I was expecting a dear, if still feisty and committed, “little old lady” with good pro-peace values whose main importance seemed to be merely her advanced age.
Well, that’ll teach me to under-estimate people in their 90s: she was an absolute pistol! She spoke out loud and clear with the most well-considered, succinct, and smart political advice I’ve heard anyone give in a long time. Her main emphasis? Focus like a laser on the November 2004 elections in order to turn things around.
So listen to your Granny, folks. You can find her here.
I estimate that the number of participants was between 15K and 20K. The 1.5-mile march from Malcolm X Park down 16th St. to the White House was uneventful. The original plan had been to “surround the White House”. That task used to involve making a cirumference around a couple of city blocks only. Now, given how far they’ve pushed out the WH security perimeter it involves making a human chain around a huge, multi-block chunk of that part of DC.
I’d say we more or less achieved it, but the organizational clarity of the event sort of got dissipated by that point. Some of the organizers were focusing on trying to negotiate entry into Lafayette Park for small numbers of participants– and there were a few arrests along the way there.
I’m hoping that those were some of the DC Police Dept’s “celeb arrests”, such as happened on a regular basis outside the South African Embassy there throughout the 1980s– you’d see Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, and whoever being photographed stepping into one side of a paddy wagon; and then within minutes they’d step out again as free men. Last fall, though, the DCPD turned very ugly against– was it the October antiwar demonstration? They herded people into parks, kept them there for hours, and then booked them without even– it now seems– giving them the required orders to disperse.
News coverage of yesterday’s events seemed surprisingly prominent on at least the evening’s ABC and CNN broadcasts. It looked to me, though, that the mainstream newsies just loved focusing in on the arrests and the small but ultra-vociferous presence of counter-demonstrators, rather than on the thousands of people who’d come from many parts of the country to take part in a peaceful act of anti-war witness.
What else is new?