Beyond A.N.S.W.E.R: A View From Inside the March

Tamyrlin79

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Mon Sep-26-05 01:08 PM
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Beyond A.N.S.W.E.R: A View From Inside the March

Edited on Mon Sep-26-05 01:09 PM by Tamyrlin79

Crossposted at DailyKos

First, let me say that this march was very energizing and a wonderful event. However, I believe that this result was achieved in spite of A.N.S.W.E.R. and the organizers, not because of it.

As has been well-reported by now, most of the people at the march tired of the rally and were ready to march. It was supposed to start at 12:30 p.m. But at 1:30 p.m. the announcer stated that they only "had a few more speakers", a couple of poets and such and that the march would begin shortly. At that point was when most people who were at the rally started moving towards the street where the March was supposed to start. And we hung out there for an hour. And the speakers kept talking. And we marchers talked among ourselves about how irrelevant many of their issues were to this march and about how by continuing to keep speakers going, they were more interested in hearing themselves talk some more rather than to actually do some marching.

Then, about 2:30 p.m., yes, THREE hours into the supposed-to-be-only-one-hour rally (and they had to have known that they had more than an hour of speakers lined up...) and two hours after the march was supposed to start, we marchers had simply had enough. The line of people started moving. By damnit, we were here to march on the White House, and nothing was going to keep us from it any longer.

Personally, I found the whole scene symbolic: about our leadership in the anti-war movement and the democratic party and about our response to it. Both leaderships seek to use us for their own agenda, and we are happy to listen them for a while. But, ultimately, we are there for our agenda, the moral issue that drives us there, and, though patient, we will not wait forever. After a time, we will go around the blustering leadership and start the march for ourselves.

The fact is that this march exposed a serious need for our movement going forward: an anti-war organization that can be a vessel for organizing around the cause and issue the majority of Americans support, which is the crime in Iraq. That is where we have consensus, and that is what the organizers of the protest should express in their speeches and planning. You don't go to a gay rights march (which I have) and hear speakers talking about tax reform or some non-relevant issue. And, we should not have an anti-war protest that also promotes speakers on Haiti, or palestine, or even Afghanistan. Those causes may be right, but they are not the causes the american people showed up to protest this weekend. Nor are they causes around which there is anything close to a concensus. Thus, by promoting these issues, they divide those who they should be unifying, to unite those who come around a concensus position. The consensus was there, but it was in the march itself, not on the speakers platform. Some of the speakers did speak to that consensus, but many did not. Rather than a patriot-fest that united the crowd, revved them up, and got us marching, we had a rally that divided the crowd, didn't inspire (other than Cindy), and lost the attention of the vast majority of those present.

If those who support "freeing palestine" or Haiti or even Afghanistan, they should have had a booth for passing out literature and speaking and such, and held a separate rally for promoting their pet cause at the event. At the gay rights marches I've been to, the main speakers all addressed consensus issues: marriage, sodomy laws, health care, non-discrimination. The further fringe issues, like, for example, the emerging area of transgender rights, were addressed in rallies held in parks or squares in other parts of Washington, D.C. over the same weekend. This was, in fact, the place for a rally for Haiti, or Palestine, or anything else that was not a part of the consensus position. They had a place at that march, but clearly our organizers had very little concept about what that place was. And our leaders clearly lacked the political sense to figure that out.

So, I call for a re-thinking and a re-vamping of the structure, leadership and organization of the Anti-War movement. Either strengthen an existing organization (UFPJ, Veterans for Peace, Veterans Against the Iraq War, etc.) to the point that they can pull off this sort of event on their own (and hire some people with a modicum of political savvy to plan it), or start a new organization that will pull everything together and put priorities where it should: around consensus positions and goals. The only thing holding us back now is ourselves.