Twenty-one-year-old Ingrid O’Brien, an international development major at Brown University in Providence, sees one key and inspiring difference between the protesters of the past and present. “There’s no draft now,” she points out. “Rich kids aren’t going . . . but people are still really angry about it. It gives me hope that Americans really have a conscience.”
Certainly, there is evidence that American anti–Iraq War sentiment is growing, in both in size and influence. The 2006 election, as well as public polling, attests to that, as does the relatively diverse crowd at Saturday’s protest, which included everyone from college students, to self-proclaimed “soccer mom-suburbanites” with their kids, to veterans of several wars — of all races and ethnicities. Many who I spoke with in the crowd were planning to stay and participate in a UPJ-organized lobby day on Capitol Hill. Their energy suggests that political action and public demonstration are working in concert — an important development. Now it is time to wait and see who’s listening.
Or does it matter? When asked who the protesters were trying to reach with their message, 21-year-old Sarah Lawrence College student Vera, who declined to give her last name, offered this: “It’s sort of like, who gives a fuck about an audience — it’s about having a voice.”
Deirdre Fulton is a freelance writer living in Washington, DC. She can be reached atdb.fulton@gmail.com.
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