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Anti-war rally

For what it's worth
January 16, 2007 10:58:04 AM

070112_protest_main1
The signs say things we’ve heard many times:

WAR IS TERRORISM WITH A BIGGER BUDGET;

KILL ONE PERSON, IT’S MURDER. KILL THOUSANDS, IT’S FOREIGN POLICY.

And it seems that most of the 500 or so people gathered yesterday, January 11, for United for Justice and Peace’s anti-escalation protest outside Park Street Station have been to this sort of rally before.

It also seems that some, despite themselves, are wondering if protests like these actually mean anything anymore.

One protester stands silently in a black burqua, estimates of the number of Iraqi war dead written across her cheeks. Another is dressed in desert fatigues. One hand-lettered sign suggests, helpfully if clumsily, that we REGURGE . . . ITATE THE SURGE.

But for all the loud chanting, the jeremiads hollered into megaphones, there’s a also a palpable feeling of rueful resignation. The president, it’s clear, doesn’t listen to anyone. “The situation is quite clear to everyone except, it seems, this administration,” says Susan, a protester from Cambridge. “It’s completely deteriorated.”

So why should George W. Bush care what a bunch of people crowded in the cold on Boston Common think?

I approach Patrick, a bearded, middle-age guy from Plymouth.

Why are you here?
To protest the war and occupation.

Do you wish more people were here?
[Emphatically.] Yes.

Are you disappointed a more sustained and substantial anti-war movement hasn’t emerged over the last four years?
Absolutely.

Do you think that this rally will change anything?
[Pause.] Ugh. [A rueful laugh.] I hope so.

He sure doesn’t seem to be listening to anyone else.
No, and he’s probably not gonna listen to us.

John, from Brighton, is 22 years old. During Vietnam, people his age flooded the streets almost weekly, agitating for the end of a grinding and pointless war. Why does he think things are so different these days?

“A lot of older people have said that when they were younger, people protested the war. But nowadays, the people who were protesting the war back then are supporting the war now. I don’t want to believe that that’s gonna happen for us, but I believe it’s important for the young people of today to understand what’s going on.”

So why does it sometimes seem that very few of them do? “They’re being brainwashed. With the major media outlets, they read what’s gong on and they think it’s right. Their parents tell them it’s right. They’ve got to think for themselves I suppose.”

Dan “The Bagel Man” Kontoff, the veteran activist and former Green Rainbow Congressional candidate, draped in a kaffiyeh and stuck all over with buttons, sees something else at work: mindless consumerism.

“The problem is, back in the Vietnam war, you didn’t have yuppies. And now you have yuppies. The big, guzzling cars — there’s global warming, and who’s paying attention to that? It was 50 degrees last week. I drove by South End and Back Bay and could smell wood burning. The problem with people these days are their priorities. What are their priorities?”

The speakers take turns at the megaphone: Guantanamo ... Abu Ghraib ... stop-losses ... redeployment. Someone starts talking about Israeli depredations against the Palestinians, and someone tells him to stop.

“Why can’t he talk about Israel?” a protester yells.

“We’re trying to keep this focused on Iraq.”

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A few minutes later, a speaker announces that Howard Zinn is in the crowd. He’d just been there to listen, but the octogenarian activist, bundled in a heavy coat and ski cap, dutifully makes his way to the microphone and speaks extemporaneously. 

He says that, watching President Bush’s speech on Wednesday, he was disturbed by the Commander in Chief’s failure to betray any emotion whatsoever as he committed the country to what Republican Senator Chuck Hagel called “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”

Zinn, who looks frail, is drowned out for a moment by a passing ambulance siren. He mentions the word impeachment. As the crowd erupts in massive applause, an elderly protester behind me who’d been having trouble making out Zinn’s words, smiles broadly. “I heard that one!”

“This is exactly what we need,” Zinn says. “People in every little town” across America need to gather together and make it known that they won’t be ignored. “We have not had representative government for a long time.”

Two men with saxophones stroll through the crowd, gently lowing “America the Beautiful.” In the distance, a cowbell is struck.

One speaker exhorts the crowd to write their senators and tell them to cut off funding for the war. We’re at a critical moment, she says. Even “mild mannered” Harry Reid she says, has just confessed that Iraq is worse than Vietnam. “Finally, it’s dawning on them... We need a sense of emergency right now.”

At the same time, another speaker later points out, some Democrats are cynically treating the war like good strategy — sitting back and allowing Bush to hang himself with his own rope, waiting to reap victory in 2008 as more soldiers die.

It’s up to us to make it known to our Congressional representatives that we weren’t messing around when we voted in Democratic majorities two months ago. “Call them. Then call them the next day. Then call them again. Voting isn’t everything. One demonstration isn’t enough.”

A guy handing out flyers exhorts someone making her way into the subway: “Call your Congressman!”

She turns and looks at him with a baffled expression. “Who is he?”

In the shadow of the Park Street Church, Dave from Brookline is selling bus tickets for $75 to the nationwide demonstration in Washington DC on January 27. A lot of people have asked for information, he says, but few have bought tickets. He’s hopeful more will in the coming weeks.

“It’s clear that public opinion in the country has turned dramatically against the war and that the administration is just flying into the face of that,” he says. “The problem, I think, is that organized movements in general are very weak in the country now.”

By this time, it’s really quite cold and people are starting to leave. It’s suggested that the crowd warm itself with some chanting.

STOP THE WAR!
STOP THE WAR!
STOP THE WAR!

The voices are loud and impassioned.

But who’s listening?

COMMENTS

I would love to go out to rally against this war , but the goverment keeps us busy by electing not to education our children. Which means that I have had to spend so much time just trying to advocate for our children who have learning disabilties and have not been allowed to receive an education or work skills. Our twenty year son has tried repeadly to locate work , but the last job he was excited about , they let him go for he couldn't not pass the math and written test so that he could learn to sell windows. It is not right to spend any more money on this war. We need to put money into NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND SO THAT WE CAN EDUCATED OUR YOUTH! Instead of making kids , find themselves without work skills and no education , so that have no choice but to go into the arm services but just obtaining a GED What kind of choice are we give our youths who don't have the resources to be able to get an education. The Arm services just keep sending us notices for our two son's , looking to get them to go out to war . As a Mom it pains me to see what schools can do to kids by not giving them the services needed in order for them to find success within their livies. We have two grown son's 23 and 20 who were never allowed to recieve an education They spend more time in jail then school. It's not right!! Diana Calzada Mokler 671 202 9012 We must absolutely not go to war. I knew the minute Bush said we were going to war in 2003 that things were going to get worst for the youth in this country as far as education was consern. If you don't educate children in the way they learn , they will fail. Our youngest son failed 6th, 7th 8th and 9th grade twice and our school district would not give him services when he was young enough to have kept him from failing in school and damaging his self esteem, as a result he turned to drugs, I believe he was self medicating for he suffered from depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive behaviros. This morning the police came to our home to place him in jail. Even though we can't hire a lawyer , our consern is that he will end up doing time for just being in association . Our children are smart they do not desire to have a dismal future , simple because his school would not help educate our son. As a MOM I have been an emotional wreck, just trying to keep our homelife as normal as possible. It makes it difficult to keep up with what is happening in the outside world. Our son wasn't allowed to vote because he had a straight warrent out on him . It is not right how indirectly the goverment can still create havoc in the lives of families.

POSTED BY rally AT 01/13/07 10:20 AM
The Democrats are advocating a wider regional war with their talk of withdrawal. They must want Iran and Syria to start a war with Iraq and for the Turks to start one with the Kurds. Their talk of withdrawal is actually the way of "escalating" the war in the Middle East. Why don't they talk of what will happen to the Middle East if we withdraw? They want this escalation so it can get even worse and then the U.S. can go back in and take over the whole Middle east so we can have cheap oil.

POSTED BY Adam Bell AT 01/16/07 11:05 AM

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