Four years in and counting.Over the last few days, anti-war actions have been taking place all over America (and all over the world) in acknowledgment of the fourth anniversary of the Bush administration's launching an illegal, immoral war of conquest in Iraq.
We-the-People seem to be rising up everywhere and demanding that our badly misused troops be brought home safely and that the neokonzertruppe's disastrous military adventure for profit in the Middle East be stopped NOW.
Sure, there were large and widely-publicized protest gatherings on the Mall in Washington on Saturday. Aren't there always? That's certainly the primary place for activists to see and be seen, donchaknow. But on Saturday and Sunday, and still today, there are also plenty of equally impassioned anti-war rallies being held in lots of other places outside the Beltway as well.
And not just in big fancy places like New York City and San Francisco and Seattle, either. But also -- and, arguably, much more significantly -- out in the hinterlands, in flyover country where people don't generally make that much noise about this sort of thing unless some sort of major sea change is taking place. No more fife-and-drum parades down Main Street -- now they're marching to the beat of a different kind of drummer in between the coasts.
And you'd better believe that a major sea change really is taking place out there in the heartland, friends. It's not just the big city liberals that are mad as hell and are not gonna take it any more. It's Joe and Jane Average Citizen now. It's not just happening on their evening TV news shows any more. It's happening right in their own back yards now. And it's not just radical slackers and hippie-wannabe troublemakers anymore. It's your mom, your pop, your kids, your neighbors, your co-workers -- even the nuns you knew in grade school now, too.
Compare these two quotes from today's MSM newspaper reports and you'll see what I mean. The first is a snippet from this morning's national AP feed:
"In largely peaceful demonstrations Sunday, about 1,000 people in San Francisco closed Market Street, a major downtown thoroughfare; in New York, more than 1,000 protesters converged in a park near the United Nations headquarters. Protests also were held Saturday in such cities as Los Angeles, San Diego and Hartford, Conn."
Contrast that generic statement of the obvious with this excerpt from this morning's Erie Times-News, published in a blue-collar city of 100,000 located in a backwater stretch of the Rust Belt halfway between Buffalo and Cleveland:
Hundreds March for Peace
For an hour Sunday, a 25-foot stretch of chain-link fence in Erie served as a memorial to the more than 3,200 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.
Four metal posts held the fence in the snow-covered grass along East Sixth Street in front of the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory at Parade Street. The fence was put up Sunday morning for the event.
More than a thousand people walked past during Sunday's March for Peace, organized by the Erie Peace Initiative to mark the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. Dozens stopped to hang paper peace cranes or weave the stems of roses and carnations through the fence links.
Veteran Chris Gerhart was the first to turn the metal barrier into something more, placing a flower arrangement on an easel there.
The crowd behind him filled a line a block long and chanted, "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!"
Gerhart, of Erie, spent 14 months in Iraq with the 1st Cavalry and was one of the speakers at the rally in Perry Square before the march. He said the war was more about oil than weapons of mass destruction.
"Save the life of a soldier," Gerhart told the crowd. "Fight to bring them home now."
Erie resident Jennifer Bennett said it's important to remember the U.S. troops in Iraq, who have sacrificed so much.
"I came to protest the war and let my voice be heard," she said at the memorial. "It's time to bring them home."
Bennett was the last to add something to the fence: a red carnation. She said it initially bothered her that the memorial was only temporary. But then she decided that "it's OK as long as it's up here even briefly."
In 12 minutes, the marchers were gone, the peace cranes beginning to fly away in the crisp March wind.
Erie Peace Initiative member Jim Wise and his wife, Sandy, captured the escaping paper birds and placed them in boxes.
"I can't throw this away," Jim Wise said as he gazed at the flags and the ribbons and handwritten notes with messages like "Bring them home."
The couple waited 25 minutes, then began carefully slipping out flowers and placing them in a bucket, some destined for the Pennsylvania Soldiers' & Sailors' Home.
As the Wises dismantled the memorial, drums could be heard from four blocks away in Perry Square. The marchers had returned to the gazebo where they started.
Organizers had hoped to draw one marcher for each U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. Estimates from initiative members put the turnout at not quite one marcher for every three soldiers. Still, the group was pleased.
Yes, I should certainly think that the event organizers in their bright-colored garb were pleased. That's a pretty impressive turnout for a burg that size. When over a thousand people show up to march for peace on a cold, wet, snowy Sunday in a town that's been described elsewhere as "kind of a throwback, like an industrial Mayberry" -- well, that is pretty damn significant by anybody's standards. Even Washington's and San Francisco's and New York City's.
But show up to march for peace, they did. And they did so with gusto. Young, old, and in-between -- college kids, boomers, babies in strollers, WW II vets in wheelchairs -- pink, black, brown, yellow people, nobody cared, because on that afternoon everyone was red white and blue and everyone was there for the same reason: to get their sons and daughters and friends and neighbors out of Iraq and back home safe where they belong.
And that is as it should be. All politics is local, after all. Waging peace is hard work, and it will take all of us pushing together against the reich-wing warmongers to make it happen -- lest the neocons' doctrine of perpetual war win out, and we end up having to watch our own kids go off to get killed fighting for oil in the Middle East when they grow up, too.
(FYI,
here's the link to the article quoted in this entry (though the Times-News does require free registration in order to access their content online and this article will only be posted there for 7 days, it's worth taking the time to register & check out the site if you'd like to understand the different dynamics of living in a place like that as compared to Washington or New York.)
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