So I guess the word got out to Imshin of Not a Fish! that I had been describing her on the Main Page of JWN as a “sassy (if sometimes irritatingly provincial-Israeli) working mother”. She recently changed the title of her blog to Not a Fish (provincially speaking), indicating that she has a robust sense of humor.
Then, around the same time (this was last Sunday), she wrote a great and lengthy post that seemed quite clearly to deal with the charge that she was “irritatingly provincial.” I thought it was so articulate and expressed so much of what many of my Israeli friends seem to feel in one way or another that I urge you to go read it.
She wrote another one, a couple of days later, with her recollections of the inter-communal confrontations inside Israel in October 2000 that left 13 Israelis of Palestinian ethnicity (whom she calls “Israeli Arabs”) and at least one Jewish Israeli person dead. Again, written from the heart and expressing an important take on those events. Read that one, too.
Then yesterday, she had a great little post with a link to an amazing web-based resource called “Grow a Brain” that has onward links on many topics Israeli and Middle Eastern.
So darn it, now I have to go into my Main Index Template yet again and take out that “irritatingly provincial” bit about her.
Finally, on a lighter note, this from my son Tarek in Boston, which he sent hoping it would bring “a smile for your day.”
I was just on the phone with him. I told him it reminded me of the time about 12 years ago that I took him and the other two kids to Normandy. I took some great pix of them clambering around on top of some of the old tanks that are there as part of the memorial of the D-Day landings. One of these pics I sent to my Dad in England, with a caption of something like “the triumph of youth over militarism.”
Now, my Dad had actually been on the Normandy beaches– he went over on about D-plus-4, I think. He told me a little sternly, “My dear,” he said (rocking back and forth on his heels– or am I only imagining that? JM, I miss you!) “–My dear, if it hadn’t been for people fighting in tanks like that you probably wouldn’t even have been here.”
Food for thought, yes. My personal take is that it may have been the US Civil War that was the hardest one for Quakers to take a pacifist position on….
Category: Antiwar (vintage)
Setbacks for the monarchs of spin
Lots happening that I’ve been wanting to blog about. First, a good discussion about the utility of war developing on the Comments board under the next post down: check it out.
Second, the emergence of details on the great story of how Colin Powell and the Pentagon brass out-maneuvered Rumsfeld and the neo-con Pentagon suits in order to get Washington to take the Iraq dossier back to the UN. A good story on this today in the Wash. Post
The story, by Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks, starts off:
- On Tuesday, President Bush’s first day back in the West Wing after a month at his ranch, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell walked into the Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli.
In what was billed as a routine session, Powell told Bush that they had to go to the United Nations with a resolution seeking a U.N.-sanctioned military force in Iraq — something the administration had resisted for nearly five months. Powell, whose department had long favored such an action, informed the commander in chief that the military brass supported the State Department’s position despite resistance by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the U.N. resolution, quickly agreed, according to administration officials who described the episode.
Thus was a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration’s Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, simply was not working.
The effort by Powell and the military began with a t
Not exactly “umbrage”
After yesterday’s quick post here on a topic Juan Cole had raised that seemed to me to equate participating in antiwar marches was the equivalent of “marching for Saddam”, Juan sent me a well-expressed and thoughtful e-mail in response. Then he put a reference to this discussion up onto his blog. Right down at the bottom of this post today, he wrote:
- Helena Cobban took umbrage at my saying originally “march to keep Saddam in power” because she felt it was a slur against anti-war protesters, implying that that was their goal. I wasn’t, however, talking about other people; I was talking about my own ethical stance. I knew for a fact that Saddam was not going to be overthrown by internal forces and that he was committing virtual genocide against people like the Marsh Arabs. For me, marching against the war would have been done in knowledge that it would result in Saddam staying in power. She wants me to apologize. I’m always glad to apologize. I don’t see what it costs you to say you are sorry about hurting someone’s feelings inadvertently. But I didn’t mean, in my own mind, what she read me to mean, in the first place. I think an anti-war position was ethically defensible; it just wasn’t the position I was comfortable with. I think it mattered, too, whether you actually knew and interacted with Iraqi Shiites and Kurds very much.
I am certainly happy to accept his explanation, viz., that he was talking about his own choices not anyone else’s. Maybe I’m overly sensitive. There have certainly been many slurs thrown around to that effect against opponents of the war.
I’m not so happy to be described as “taking umbrage”. I grew up in a family where people were constantly accusing others of “taking umbrage”. I take it to mean some kind of a passive-aggressive hissy-fit, which I think belittles the seriousness of the points that I raised. “Offense”, maybe I took. “Umbrage”, no.
Also, I notably didn’t ask Juan to apologize (though I gracefully accept the apology he offered.) I suggested he might want to enact a little remorse over the affair. A small point, maybe. But I am very interested in the mechanistics of how people get beyond differences, and I tend to think that a process of remonstrance/reproach followed by discussion, (preferably enacted) remorse, and then reintegration is more effective at building or repairing longterm relationships than the traditional western sequence of accusation, confession/apology, and forgiveness.
Anyway, back to the larger issue: I have known and interacted with many Iraqi Kurds and Shi-ites, though probably not as many or as closely as Juan. It was a terrible dilemma, fuguring out how to be effective as non-stakeholders (outsiders) in helping them throw off the yoke of Saddamist, authoritarian misrule. Just as it still is, regarding the people of Burma, or North Korea, or a number of other rights hell-holes around the world. Juan says he “knew for a fact” that Saddam wasn’t going to be overthrown by internal forces. I can’t be quite as definitive about that as he was; but certainly, it looked highly unlikely that that would happen anytime in the foreseeable future.
But he seems to assume it was internal rebellion– or externally launched war. That there was, in other words, no other alternative.
I wonder if he says that about North Korea or Burma?
Maybe I know war better than he does. I have lived as a mother of small kids through one, for a number of years. And I have studied wars and their tragic sequelae in a number of places throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. My main conclusions? War is always (a) massively harmful to the rights and even lives of large civilian populations, and (b) unpredictable.
Now I happen to agree with Juan that, broadly speaking, it was unwise (and possibly also, given their level of terrorization, unfair) to insist that the Iraqi people should be left with the total responsibility of liberating themselves. But still, the only alternatives were not between war (= infliction of massive rights abuses from a distance) and doing nothing. If we ever come to a point in human affairs where those are the only choices, it’ll be a truly tragic day.
But no, there were other options available–theoretically, at least. So what we need to do is start working hard to persuade people to make those theoretical options a real possibility. Like my suggestion of having the UN create a robust UNMOVIC-style operation devoted to “monitoring, observing, and verifying” the compliance of various autocratic regimes with the UN’s own human-rights instruments. Or perhaps, through the rapid expansion and upgrading of something like the new Nonviolent Peaceforce.
Goodness! If human ingenuity can invent the atom bomb, theater missile defense systems, “Daisy Cutter” heavy ordnance, and all those other whizz-bang instruments of death and destruction, surely we can design and start implementing their nonviolent equivalents in short order– and for a fraction of the cost!
Meantime, I’m sure Juan won’t take amiss my reminding y’all of this: the casualty toll in Iraq continues to grow.
Marching for Saddam?
In his “Informed Comment” blog, Juan Cole recently wrote:
- I wasn’t exactly for the war, I was just unable to bring myself to march to keep Saddam in power.
I don’t think that implication is at all a fair one to make. As someone who marched and undertook a lot of other activities to try to prevent Bombs-Away Don and his cronies from launching that disastrous war, I never for one moment thought I was “marching to keep Saddam in power”.
I think Juan should know my work and my writings well enough to know that. And he probably knows enough other people in the anti-war movement that, on a moment’s reflection, he would recognize that his blanket charge against all the anti-war marchers/protesters/activists is unfounded and unfair.
Juan has been so wise on so many issues in the Middle East that his slur hurts. I know he shares with me an strong commitment to the wellbeing of the peoples of the Middle East. In that same post he gives as the reason for his support for the war (which he admitted was “tepid”), Saddam’s record of iterated genocides against Iraq’s Kurds and Shi-ites. Unlike the whole elaborate constructs of fabricated nonsense about Iraq’s alleged WMDs, or its alleged links with Al-Qaeda, the argument about Saddam’s appalling and incontestable record of human-rights abuses is a serious one to which opponents of the war need to give intense consideration.
I have started to do this. Back at the end of June (and again at the end of July), I argued here on JWN that yes, we should all–governments, NGOs, and the global citizenry–have dealt far more effectively with the Iraqi human rights situation all along, but that, crucially, there were certainly ways of doing this other than, and probably much more effectively than, the launching of a war.
The one I have proposed is the creation– for Saddam’s Iraq, or perhaps for North Korea, Burma, or other grossly rights-abusing totalitarian regimes today– of a human-rights UNMOVIC.
I would love for Juan to retract his slur and (as a way, perhaps, of enacting his remorse over expressing it) to join with me in brainstorming ways that the rights situation of people living under totalitarian dictatorships can be improved in ways other than the unleashing of that unfailingly destructive and harmful instrument, war.
What d’you think, Juan? All that and a new semester of teaching, as well?
Quaker gathering
I am still here at the annual session of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I have been a fan of Quaker process for a long time, have worshiped with Quakers for some years now, and finally joined the RSF in early 2001.
What I love about Quaker process is the embodiment of the idea that every woman and man on the earth has a connection to the spirit and can, through quiet, spirit-led discernment, connect with a portion of it; the embodiment of the idea of human equality (i.e. no ministers!); and then, the fact that this strange body of people has found a way to continue in existence, bearing witness to the traditional Quaker testimonies of truth, peace, and simplicity, for just over 350 years now. And has done it–in my branch of Quakerism, anyway– without having any paid clergy or mammoth, cumbersome bureaucracy to maintain.
The way the RSF has done this is through a strong emphasis on congregational self-governance. For example, in Charlottesville, members of the Meeting community have a total of around eight to twelve opportunities to worship quietly together each month. But in addition we are encouraged, once a month, to take part in a Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Business at which the business of our Meeting (congregation) gets decided. So we are called a Monthly Meeting.
Then all the Monthly meetings in (roughly) the Chesapeake watershed area are part of what is called Baltimore Yearly Meeting. So once a year all the Quakers in Monthly Meetings in this area are encouraged to take part in the BYM session, which takes larger-scale decisions.
And so, through many periods of persecution, the Religious Society of Friends has survived, and has supported some pretty inspiring social witness by individual Quakers and groups of Quakers even at times when the costs for such witness were high.
This was the first time I was able to get to Yearly Meeting sessions, and it’s been a great experience…
RE-CONNECTING, RECHARGING:
RE-CONNECTING, RECHARGING: Okay, we U.S. citizens all know that our government is doing many things around the world that are highly damaging (as well as a much smaller proportion, I’d argue, that are helpful). A lot of us feel fed-up and frustrated about this.
But one problem is that, ever since the Bushies launched the war against Iraq, and then won a totally unsurprising battlefield victory against a force far, far smaller and more backward than the US/UK expeditionary force, the anti-war movement that had been building prior to March 17 has had to shift focus and direction.
No problem with that. That’s what life is, responding to new challenges… I reckon we in the antiwar movement are up to it
But the problem, as I see it, is that when we moved to the new stage, evidently the slogans we’d used until then lost their relevance.
“Stop the war”– well, yes, in a way the war is still going on, but the slogan has lost its bite since April 7.
“Stop the occupation” maybe? not bad, but also not terribly zingy.
“Bring our troops home” — that’s still a good one. In fact, one we could expand on a whole bunch. As I wrote here recently, wouldn’t it be great if everyone’s soldiers got to go–and stay–back inside their own national homeland?
But we don’t just need to re-jig our slogans. We also need to re-connect with the energy we all felt (and indeed, generated) as we took our various actions against the war in the weeks before March 17.
So here, as a gift to JWN readers from Christian McEwen, a poet from NYC and Guilford, Vermont, I’m bringing you a wonderfully lively description Christian wrote about two of the mammoth demonstrations that New York saw in February and March this year. I’m really happy to post it here, in the hope that it can help us all to re-connect with some of the excitement of those days. Thanks, Christian!
ANOTHER BUDDHIST LESBIAN FOR PEACE (#2) : NEW YORK CITY
by Christian McEwen, March 2003
There were 125,000 at the demonstration. Or there were 250,000, possibly even as many as 300,000. As usual, people fought about the figures. But no one disputed that the crowd was enormous, that under that bright spring sky the march stretched from 42nd Street all the way down Broadway to Washington Square. ‘NEW YORK WANTS PEACE,’ proclaimed the banners. And, ‘NOT IN N.Y.C.?S NAME!’
War had been declared less than three days earlier, and for most people, this was the first chance they?d had to voice their disapproval. The crowd was tough and noisy and marvellously wide-ranging. There was a group of ?Raging Grannies & their Daughters,? there was a flock of middle-aged gays dressed up as nuns. There was a young woman on stilts, with the tarnished green face and flowing robes of the Statue of Liberty. There were housewives and teachers, poets and business-people, parents with babes in arms or pushing strollers. A man in a Bush mask clutched the globe of the world with bloody fingers, bowing and cringing like Uriah Heep. Almost everyone was chanting or drumming or carrying signs. The blitz on Baghdad had started the previous night, and this was a city which knew, all too well, what it meant to be the subject of an attack. ‘9/11 SURVIVOR AGAINST THE WAR’ read one sign, and, ‘NEW YORK REMEMBERS ITS OWN SHOCK & AWE.’
Inching down into the thirties, in those first congested blocks, I rubbed shoulders with a small group of restaurant workers, each carrying an identical square sign printed both in Spanish and in English. ‘I WORKED AT THE W.T.C.,’ it read. ‘AND I SAY NO TO WAR.’ I stopped one man to thank him. Such testimony seems crucial, especially now, when 45% of Americans blame Saddam for what happened on September 11th.
‘The one thing has nothing to do with the other,’ the man said emphatically. Other banners reiterated that same point. ?’RAQ DID NOT DO 9/11,’ read one sign, clumsily printed on someone?s home computer. Throughout the march, there was a consistent effort to name and clarify the issues, in words that even the most casual passer-by could understand. ‘GET IT RIGHT,’ one sign read. ‘THIS IS NOT WAR. THIS IS A BIG COUNTRY SLAUGHTERING A TINY COUNTRY.’ And, ‘WHEN SADDAM INVADED KUWAIT, HE TOO SAID HE WAS ‘LIBERATING’ IT.’ One woman carried a picture frame encased in thick transparent plastic. ‘WE SEE THROUGH THE LIES,’ it read.
One of the most egregious lies is, of course, that with the outbreak of war, protest itself has become ‘unpatriotic.’ Demonstrators did their best to counter this, trying again and again to wrest back their own version of patriotism from the authorities. ‘PRO SOLDIER, ANTI WAR,’ read one sign. And, ‘I DO SUPPORT THE TROOPS ? BRING THEM HOME NOW!’ Sizeable numbers carried banners labeled ‘PEACE IS PATRIOTIC’ or ‘PATRIOTS FOR PEACE.’
In an earlier protest, on February 15th, would-be marchers had been penned like cattle behind the barricades, unable to reach the U.N. Plaza or to hear the speeches. Saturday?s demonstration (long planned) had an official permit from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Nonetheless, it was clear that many still felt democracy was under seige. One young man draped himself in an American flag and gagged himself with a strip of duct-tape. Another carried a banner quoting Robert Byrd, the Democratic senator for West Virginia, ‘TODAY I WEEP FOR MY COUNTRY.’ The yearning for a leader one could admire, a Gandhi, a Nelson Mandela, was at times almost palpable. ‘ASHAMED TO BE AN AMERICAN,’ read one sign. And, ‘MY LEADERS EMBARRASS ME AND TERRORISE THE WORLD.’
Not surprisngly, hundreds of marchers focused on George Bush. Their banners ranged from the rueful, ‘AND WE THOUGHT BUSH WAS PRO-LIFE’ to the joyfully outrageous, ‘GEORGE, IF I SAY YOUR DICK IS BIGGER THAN SADDAM?S, WILL YOU CALL OFF THE WAR?’ But most were punchy and antagonistic. ‘DROP BUSH, NOT BOMBS!’ read numerous signs. Others read simply, ‘GEORGE BUSH = WAR CRIMINAL,’ ‘SAVE THE WORLD, IMPEACH BUSH’ and (over and over) ‘REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME.’ One, with handmade papier-mache masks depicting Ashcroft, Cheney and the President, denounced all three as ‘ASSES OF EVIL.’ Another, showing a small tree laden with fruit, read, ‘THE BOMBS DON?T FALL VERY FAR FROM THE BUSH.’ Yet another carried a large photograph of the President, along with the statement, ‘I REGRET I HAVE BUT 250,000 LIVES TO GIVE FOR MY COUNTRY.’
The sense of urgency and outrage was very strong. IF YOU?RE NOT OUTRAGED,’ read one bumper sticker, which many people affixed to their shirts or jackets, ‘YOU?RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.?’ But this was New York after all, where even political correctness is not permitted to be boring. The Statue of Liberty stalked down Broadway, wearing a sign that read plaintively, ‘IS MY VISA UP YET?’ A group of young people carried a banner urging us all to ‘FRENCH KISS FOR FREEDOM.’ The gay nuns swayed back and forth with the crowd, laughing and chanting in unison. They wore white veils and glittery gold eye-shadow, with peace and star-signs scrawled around each eye. ‘HEY HO! THE POPE SAYS NO!’ Their signs were fiercely legible and to the point. ‘WHAT PART OF ?THOU SHALT NOT KILL? DON?T YOU UNDERSTAND?’
I gave them the thumbs-up as I passed, and one, seeing my own sign (‘ANOTHER BUDDHIST LESBIAN FOR PEACE’) exclaimed delightedly,?Oh a dharma sister!? and gave me a smacking kiss on both my cheeks. It was a sweet, giddy moment, rising like an irridescent bubble to the surface of the river, and replaced almost immediately by another encounter, in this case by a blizzard of brilliantly printed dollar-bills, descending like green manna from the sky. Looked at closely, it appeared they had been issued by ?The Untied States of Aggression,? and were worth precisely ?One Deception.? A short paragraph explained that ?This note contains websites which reveal tender, public and private truths about 9/11 and the War on Freedom.? Among those listed were globalresearch.com, truth-now.com and whatreallyhappened.com.
My feet were sore by then, and I felt hungry and tired. But the sky was still blue overhead, and the chanting and drumming never faltered. ‘MONEY FOR PEACE, NOT FOR WAR!’ ‘FUCK BUSH, PEACE NOW!’ and (again and again), ‘THESE STREETS ARE OUR STREETS!’ As we arrived at Union Square, I walked alongside a new mother carrying her four or five month old child; she was bouncing and kissing him as she marched. Ahead of me were golden-skinned young men (and a handful of young women too) their naked backs covered with signs and slogans printed in red lipstick and black marker. Someone was blowing bubbles into the faces of the crowd. The chanting and drumming had reached a new crescendo.
We turned into the narrow canyon of Waverly Place, our numbers massed and concentrated between the tall dark buildings, and for a moment it seemed impossible to imagine we would not be heard. Surely this torrent of urgent, kindly people would be listened to. Surely our clarity would prevail, our warnings reach some interested ears.
‘OSAMA KNOWS. ORPHANS MAKE GREAT SUICIDE BOMBERS.’
‘BOMBS DROPPED IN BAGHDAD WILL EXPLODE IN AMERICA.’
‘IRAQ TODAY, WHERE TOMORROW?’
Not everyone agreed with us, of course. At the corner of Washington Square, a man stood on his own, holding up a brightly colored poster, ‘VOICE OF THE NEW YORK MAJORITY. WE SUPPORT OUR PRESIDENT & TROOPS AND PROTEST THE PROTESTORS.’ Next day there?d be a pro-war rally at Times Square. It would draw only 1,000 people (a miniscule number, in comparison to the peace demo), but the media would give it lots of coverage. Signs would be unabashedly vindictive. They would say things like, ‘GIVE WAR A CHANCE!’ and ’12 YEARS OF DIPLOMACY IS ENOUGH.’ One man would carry a picture of the twin towers burning, with the slogan, ‘KILL OR BE KILLED.’
Our own march had been peaceful, all along its route. But less than half an hour after arriving at the park, an ugly confrontation took place between the police (anxious to clear the streets now that the permit had expired) and some youthful protestors (newly empowered and keen to keep on marching). Two mounted officers were knocked off their horses, eight policemen were pepper-sprayed, and several others injured. 91 demonstrators were arrested. It was a tawdry end, for both sides, to a march that had been so warm and purposeful and open-hearted.
Back in Washington Square Park, a small circle was sitting quietly in meditation, and children were chalking peace-signs on the asphalt tiles. People were eating or smoking, or talking on the ubiquitous cell-phones. Discarded signs stood propped up against the thin wooden lattice of the fence.
‘THIS LAND IS OUR LAND, THEIR LAND IS THEIR LAND.’
‘IF BOMBS WERE SMART, THEY WOULD REFUSE TO FALL.’
‘WAR IS EASY, DO THE HARD WORK OF PEACE.’
Other banners reiterated that same point.
YARD-SIGN UPDATE: At the end
YARD-SIGN UPDATE: At the end of a post last Sunday, I wrote that I was going to put yellow-ribbon bows onto the two peace signs we have in our front yard. I did that, Monday. They looked pretty good, I thought. Wednesday night, the signs got uprooted yet again.
These are really pretty and effective signs, that have been designed and sold at cost by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice. They have white writing on a blue background. One side says “Stand up for peace”. The other says “Say NO to war.” CCPJ is already well into selling the second thousand of these signs, and if you drive around our hometown you’ll see them on many, many front lawns.
Our home has a prime frontage onto a busy crosstown street. Thousands of cars drive past each day, and when the University of Virginia is in session we have hundreds of pedestrians, joggers, and cyclists walk along our sidewalk each day, too. It’s a great place to have pro-peace signs.
Since I first put peace signs out in mid-January, they have been stolen, broken, defaced, or punched through on at least six occasions. For a while, after CCPJ had sold its first batch of 1,000 and before the second batch came in, I had to replace the stolen or broken signs with handmade ones. (And I can tell you that ‘Magnum’ brand supposedly permanent markers do NOT keep their hue when subjected to severe snowstorms.) Later, however, I built up a back-up supply of the CCPJ signs in my garage, and would simply replace the signs that got stolen or defaced.
For some reason, yesterday morning, when I saw that the signs had been taken away yet again, I felt sick to my stomach, and more violated than I had on any previous occasion. Maybe that was because I’d personalized them with the four hand-made yellow bows. Anyway, I felt quite fed up, and started thinking that maybe having the signs simply stuck into the soil near the sidewalk meant they were just too easy for hostile passers-by to interfere with. (Previously, I’d considered, and quite rejected, the idea of electrifying them somehow.) But maybe, I speculated yesterday, I could suspend them, instead, from some of the tree-branches that hang over the property beside the sidewalk??
So this morning I walked along the sidewalk with the dog to scout out the possibilities. Yes, definitely some very likely looking branches there… But as I walked, I looked down into the little stream that girds our property, some 20 feet below the road — and there they were! My beloved signs, still decked out with soggy looking ribbons: one in the stream, the other beside it. Both a little scuffed looking…
Well, as you can imagine, for now they are firmly back in solid ground, doing their job of quiet peace witness.
But I still wonder about the sad people who feel compelled to uproot, seize, and sometimes deface and mangle these signs. What about those values that the US was built on: free speech, and private property?
And they would do this even to signs that have yellow bows on them?
Yesterday, some pro-war people from around our area staged a counter-demonstration to the antiwar demonstration that CCPJ and its allies have been maintaining every Thursday afternoon for many years, on a busy intersection near the downtown mall. (I was not there at yesterday’s antiwar demonstration. But I was there last week, and I noticed at the time that a middle-aged white guy standing across the street seemed to be watching our arrival and arrangements fairly closely… )
Here’s how Daily Progress writer Reed Williams described the initial encounter between the two groups yesterday:
Antiwar activists arriving for a weekly demonstration outside the federal courthouse on Thursday found that their stretch of sidewalk had been occupied by flag-waving supporters of war in Iraq.
If this was not startling enough for the protesters, who are accustomed to gathering more or less unchallenged every Thursday at the Charlottesville intersection, one member of the pro-Bush camp ordered them to leave.
?Get out of here,? Robert A. Myer snarled. Then the 71-year-old Fluvanna County resident began to taunt a woman toting a ?Say No to War? sign…
Well, it turns out I do know the woman in question. Poor her, having to put up with such misbehavior! But I’m quite confident that she handled the “snarling” and the “taunting” calmly and well.
I also think, poor Robert A. Myer. He must be a deeply troubled man. Does he have a loved one serving in the forces, and is he sick with worry over that person’s fate, I wonder? Or what else might be his problem?
Really, we in the antiwar movement have to find good ways to talk to these sad souls. I mean, surely we can find a way to be civil with each other, and to treat each other with respect and empathy, even if we disagree??
Please send me your comments.
YELLOW RIBBON SHORTAGE:
YELLOW RIBBON SHORTAGE: Yesterday, I wrote that I was going to buy some yellow ribbon and make bows to put on the peace signs in our front yard. So I got to the local craft supplies / “notions” store around 5:30 p.m., and the ribbon department was nearly totally out of yellows.
The point of this, you’ll remember, was to send a message of support for US troops– while totally not ignoring the devastation being rained on Iraqi troops and civilians and without diluting at all our family’s stand against the war.
So all I could find was two spools of very thin (maybe 3 mm.) satin ribbon. I spooled it quickly over the thumb and little finger of my left hand to make multi-looped bows of as much volume as possible. Made four of them. Tied one to each side of each of our yard signs. They looked pretty good as I did them, though when I stepped back they looked a little wimpy.
Saturday night, I bumped into my friend “jailbird” Michele at a potluck. (You remember Michele from this post; and this one. She’s the person who started the idea of doing an antiwar sit-in in our local Congressman’s office on March 20th.)
On Saturday she was once again really upset about the war. Her daughter’s boyfriend joined the Marines about six months ago. “They lied to him!” she said, again and again, shaking her head in disbelief. “They said he would just be able to learn computers! They said he would never go anywhere near the front line of any war.”
The young man’s recruitment had been a sort of long-drawn-out seduction campaign by the recruiters, who started when he was only 16. (“Only 16! It’s an outrage!”) Michele and her life-partner had tried and tried to explain to him that there were other ways to learn computers. But the recruiters relentlessly maintained the seduction.
He signed up shortly after his 18th birthday. Trained in California. And a few weeks ago was shipped out to Kuwait. (“They lied to him!”)
Michele said her daughter bursts into tears whenever she thinks about it.
I can imagine that young man, and so many other young men and women like him, stranded out there now in a continually threatening “hostile enviornment”, in a place where so many pro-war pundits had promised them– promised all of us– that the entry of US troops would be “a cakewalk”.
A cakewalk, by the way, is a sort of fun contest people used to engage in at county fairs here in the US; also, a jazz-era dance. What it is NOT is what those young soldiers have been sent out to endure.
Yeah, Michele, they lied to all of us.
MORE ON MICHELE AND GLADYS:
MORE ON MICHELE AND GLADYS: So I wrote here Thursday night about the civil disobedience action that some Quakers and others here in Charlottesville undertook that afternoon. What I failed to put in was any part of the lovely statement that Michele Mattioli had prepared, that explained what they were doing. Here are some extracts:
We are citizens who oppose war. Killing people is never the way to solve a problem…
We love our country, which is full of generous and kind people. We support our troops by doing whatever we can to stop the war and bring them home. Killing and risking death damages these men and women, and we demand an end to the war so we can receive them back into our communities to get on with their lives…
Violence only begets more violence, and there are non-violent ways to deal effectively with tyrants.
The old world order in which power resided in guns and money is crimbling. Millions of people are standing up to say that true power comes from justice, love and compassion. This new power is welling up and will prevail.
During the action Thursday, shortly before the police came, Michele came out of Congressman Goode’s office and told the antiwar protesters arrayed outside that she had been a Montessori teacher for more than 20 years. “And I always used to tell my children, over and over and over, ‘Don’t hit! Don’t hit! Use words!‘” She got a huge cheer for that.
Also, in my earlier post I mistakenly described Gladys Swift as a late-70-something. She is in fact 80.
And later, she told me she was really upset that the police refused to arrest her. They put her with the one 16-year-old taking part and only gave the two of them some kind of summons to appear later for a scolding.
What kind of ageism is that??
Anyway, I also didn’t quite get the end of my earlier post written well. What I should have written was, that if Mr. Goode can’t be persuaded to represent his constituents more effectively, why, then maybe at the next election we’ll just have to look for Mr. or Ms. Very Much Better!
New York Demonstration
I was one of the lucky ones yesterday, at the anti-war demonstration in NYC. That is, New York’s finest (the cops) actually graciously allowed my daughter, her fiance, and me to join the stationary “rally” for which a permit had been given… That is, after the courts had denied a permit for an anti-war march.
We wanted to join a small “feeder march” being assembled by the Quakers at 53d St & 2nd Ave. We arrived on the V-line subway from Brooklyn, got out at 51st and 3d Ave, hoped to cross easily to 2nd Avenue to find the Quakers. (“We’ll just listen carefully for where there’s a big silence,” I told the future son-in-law.)
Fat chance. The cops were not letting anyone cross to 2nd Ave, even. (The rally was in 1st Ave.) At every intersection they had closely guarded barriers, and they funneled us ever further north with promises that we could cross eastward one or two blocks further up… Thousands of anti-war demonstrators from many parts of NYC and elsewhere were being herded north– away from the rally–but moving along good-naturedly. We became quite a large group of people moving north along the broad sidewalks. Why, it even looked like a march!
At 59th St, they finally let us cross east. By then, it was too late to join the Quaker group, so we walked right on over to 1st Ave and walked a couple of blocks south to join the main body of the rally between 56th and 57th Sts. We “arrived” there at just about noon, the time the event was scheduled to begin. We could not see the head of the rally at all, but watched the whole event on a large screen half a block ahead of us.
The prayers and invocations at the beginning were very moving: a black Baptist Bishop, a Muslim imam, a woman rabbi, a Hispanic Catholic, and the keening prayer of the Chief of the Lakota Sioux. Then, there was an amazing constellation of speakers, including my old favorite Archbishop Tutu. Pete Seeger came out, despite the intense cold and his advancing years, and led a song. The crowd around us stamped their feet or jogged in place to try to get warm. Some notable signs I saw: “Stop mad cowboy disease”, “Duct and cover!” and even a quote from Ovid pinned to someone’s backpack.
Shortly after 2 p.m., I needed to leave. Getting out of the pens the police had made for us was almost as hard as getting in. When I did make it back to 2nd Ave, and then again at 3d Ave– each time, there were barricades up with the police still preventing people from moving east to 1st Ave. Some of those people had been trying to get through for the past two hours. Mostly, the police just seemed businesslike and very firm, stamping their feet and exchanging grimaces about the dire cold.
At one of the intersections I passed on my way out, however, the police were all in riot gear, unlike all the others I’d seen. They were standing around seemingly just spoiling for a fight. Nearby were parked coaches from the prison department, ready, I surmised, to be loaded with arrestees. I didn’t have time to stop and make a clear assessment, however.
And just about all the way over to where I got on the F train at 63rd and Lexington, the traffic was at a complete standstill…
The effect of the court order banning a march, and of the way the police then played their role, was that a lot of people who had come to join the event, including some who’d come hundreds of miles to do so, were prevented from exercising their right to assemble peacefully. Probably, the effects on traffic and on non-demonstrating New Yorkers, were just as bad or worse than what would have been caused by allowing a well-planned march. The police ended up making a hundred or fewer arrests. But they certainly cleaned up on their overtime.
* * *
DRIVING HOME WITH GARRISON KEILLOR: After the rally I drove south. I had dinner with a family friend at Haverford College, in Philly; drove some more; got in late to the home of another friend in DC; left the car outside; went to bed totally knackered
This morning, I found DC magically blanketed in 7 inches of fresh snow, and more coming all the time. I was eager to get back to my hearth and home here in Charlottesville, Va., and figured the going would only get worse for the next couple of days.
It took 40 mins to dig the car out. I knew the drive would be tough but I had warm clothes, food, water, a cellphone, and set off around the beltway to I-66.
The first couple of hours, I had “Prairie Home Companion” on the radio. Garrison Keillor was hilarious. I really haven’t listened much to him recently.
The most hilarious parts were when he was skewering the Bush administration. Lots of jokes about duct tape– of course. And then, a great riff when they were talking about reports that the “Rapture” long awaited by the evangelicals had just taken place. (Asked whether this was true, the ‘President’ said, “Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?”) I shouldn’t spoil the suspense, in case you’re waiting for the re-runs. But I will just reveal that most of the truly righteous souls taken to glory in the Rapture turned out to be Lutherans…
Here’s the thing, though. If even fairly mainstream entertainers like Garrison Keillor are so openly mocking of the Bushies’ present war preparations and scaremongering, shouldn’t the Bushies be paying a lot more attention to that?
Here’s another thing. I wasn’t around in the US during the Vietnam war. And I know the American involvement there grew up differently from the assembling and possibly imminent activation of a massive invasion force that we see around Iraq today.
But it strikes me that the kind of coalition that I saw firsthand in New York– labor unions, black and Latino organizations, churches and other faith groups, public intellectuals, members of the US Congress, etc etc– is a pretty impressive anti-war force to have assembled already… and thus far, the “really big” phase of the war hasn’t even been launched.
Plus, the international dimension of the peace movement is very evident, and very important. We were trying to rally near the U.N., where just the day before French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin received unprecedented applause for his plea to try to avoid war. We were rallying, too, on the same day as millions of other folks from all round the world…
This is not the 1960s. The worldwide anti-war forces are, I firmly believe, in far stronger shape today.
And then, duct tape??? These guys simply can’t be serious.