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.”
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?