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like the Palestinians to have a voice in the U.S. That's what ANSWER is mostly known for, as to controversy. I think we should be paying special attention to marginalized groups and voices, even if their spokespeople are not polished and P.R.-saavy. They don't often get a platform and they may have something to teach us.
For one thing, in this instance, the Palestinian cause is huge in the Arab/Muslim world, and central to animosity toward the U.S. We don't often hear about it from our war profiteering corporate news monopolies, and virtually never from a pro-Palestinian perspective. We really do need to understand this point of view--and anyone who thinks that it is not central to the Iraq war is foolishly uninformed.
Another oft-cited item is the Mumia movement. I, too, find them kind of boring and one-note, but I have to admire them for their persistence, and I did read about the Mumia case, and I think there is cause to protest his imprisonment. Would that all unjustly imprisoned black men had such advocates! I really detest the way some DUers have dissed this group--mindlessly, reflexively, it seems. And, again, we are talking about people who have been marginalized and disempowered. Belonging to ANSWER and helping organize events may be their only chance to express what they have judged to be injustice.
Why pick on them so much? It reminds me of bad parents who pick on one kid--the runt of the litter, the snot-nosed one, the difficult one, and badmouth him, and slap him upside the head. It seems stupid and low-minded.
ANSWER is a big tent, like America should be. It is a refuge for the UNHEARD. And I think we should just shut up sometimes and LISTEN. Maybe we won't agree. Maybe the speaker is unconvincing. But what is the harm of listening--and of being PROUD of listening, and promoting it as a value?
Finally, I really disagree with those who say that a protest like this should be "one issue." The Iraq war is NOT a one-issue situation, and stopping this particular conflict is NOT going to prevent other wars just like it, nor address the conditions that have made such a crime possible--including our corrupt election system in the U.S., with Bushite corporations controlling our vote tabulation with SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code!
If we had had a transparent, verifiable election in 2004, we wouldn't be in this mess--with the president never listening, and Congress never listening, not even to 400,000 people, or however many HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS protested yesterday.
The Iraq war is intimately connected to injustice, here in the U.S. and abroad. We have for too long permitted U.S.-global corporations to prey upon the world--and on ourselves!--and we have for too long permitted an humongous military machine to suck the life blood out of our country, while providing us with nothing that even remotely resembles "defense." When the crunch came, and we were actually attacked, on 9/11, they STOOD DOWN. They couldn't even defend the Pentagon!
Some Department of DEFENSE!
This is an aggressive military machine, with more weapons of mass destruction than anybody on earth--and a standing temptation to fascists and to global corporate predators, who now have grabbed control of it.
What are we doing with this bloated military machine? What is it FOR?
And the fact that there is NO ACCOUNTABILITY for these things--for unilateral war, for torture, for Halliburton looting, for $5/gal gas prices, for tens of thousands of slaughtered Iraqis, for poor blacks in New Orleans left behind to rot and die, and all the rest, is what we should be addressing. WHY is there no accountability? What's wrong with our system that these things can happen?
If we don't solve that problem, we CAN'T STOP THE WAR. We have no power to do so. We can put a million people in the streets, and our rulers can just IGNORE IT.
And if they aren't worried about elections, because they've got that all sewed up now, then we MUST try every way we can to change that. Because without that power--the power of the vote--they have no REASON to listen to us.
Anyway, you see my point. A "one issue" antiwar campaign is a hi-jackable campaign. NIXON hi-jacked it in 1968--just as LBJ had hi-jacked the peace theme in 1964. LBJ!!! The 1964 PEACE candidate. (I have a long memory!)
Cindy Sheehan certainly knows this. She does not restrict herself to the war. The war cannot, and should not, be seen in isolation from everything that made this unjust war possible.
I think we made that mistake in the Vietnam war movement. We didn't address the fundamentals--or we didn't stick to them: an economy based on war, which had never been demobilized after WW II. The restless search for "enemies" to keep the war profiteers fat and profitable. And the creation of an underclass of slave-wage workers and cannon fodder.
There were voices then--voices crying in the wilderness about the threat of Corporate Rule, and the threat posed by maintaining a war machine, and the ill health of a war economy. Perhaps if we had listened better. Perhaps some of those voices could have been heard.
There WERE consequences to the Vietnam War. Our government didn't dare try anything like that again for 40 years. And some of the worst crap that the Reagan-Bush criminals were up to was stopped (especially in Central/South America). But we had a more responsive democracy at that time--with no Diebold and ES&S choosing our office holders.
So now we have to ask HOW IS IT that 400,000 people protesting in Washington DC can be ignored?
We MUST ask it. And if we don't, what we're going to get out of all of this is a War Democrat who pays lip service to progressive values, and who will therefore get a "honeymoon" period in which to blab at so-called "peace talks" ad infinitum, with the occupation extended for years, at the constant risk of expanded war, and--mark my words--a military Draft (which Bush can't do).
We have got to look at the bigger picture--how we got so DISENFRANCHISED, and what it means, and how to fix it. And it's not all bad. We were disenfranchised for the very REASON that our votes as Americans are the most powerful force in the world for CURTAILING global corporate predators and warmongers. They can't afford to permit transparent, verifiable elections here. Think about that!
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