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On
Sunday, August 29, 2004, approximately 500,000 people
gather in and around Manhattan’s Union Square
park, awaiting the signal to march uptown to Madison
Square Garden where the Republican National Convention
is about to begin. In the weeks preceding this march,
the news media has worked hard to frighten demonstrators
into staying home. Night after night, there are warnings
that dangerous Anarchists may be plotting to do unspeakable
things in New York City, terrorists might be planning
to attack the city, and the police are preparing for
mass arrests. (On Tuesday, August 31, the police do
conduct a mass roundup, arresting more than 1,000
protesters, and 200 individuals even before they begin
to march from Ground Zero to Madison Square Garden.)
Fortunately,
these hysterical warnings did not work. Instead, hundreds
of thousands of people from all walks of life—black,
white, brown, gay and straight, Catholic, Protestant,
Jew, Hindi, Muslim, atheist, Socialist, Communist,
Democrats, anti-Bush Republicans, and Anarchists gather
to protest the war in Iraq, and to demand the removal
of G.W. Bush and company from power, There are Vietnam
Veterans, veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, veterans
of the current war on Iraq, mothers pushing strollers,
grandmothers carrying children, children carrying
peace signs, elementary school students, high school
students, college students, doctors, lawyers, truck
drivers, brick layers, writers, artists, famous actors,
actresses, and musicians. Filmmaker Michael Moore
and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson lead the demonstration,
and the crowd surges behind them, chanting and singing
and shouting, beating drums, blowing whistles and
horns.
One
group of demonstrators carry flag draped coffins,
a graphic display of the fact that to date nearly
1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq, most of
them after George W. Bush declared victory in his
war. Thousands more have been wounded. Parents of
soldiers who’ve died in Iraq carry photographs
of their loved ones. Why, they ask, did the Bush administration
sacrifice their child? Why have tens of thousands
of Iraqi citizens been killed since the invasion began?
Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people had nothing to
do with the attacks on September 11, 200l. Iraq did
not have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq did not
have biological or chemical weapons, long-range missiles
capable of reaching our shores. The United States
military destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure in 1991,
a decade of sanctions against Iraq killed at least
500,000 Iraqi children, and the Iraqi army war was
a paper tiger. According to the Central Intelligence
Agency, Iraq never posed an “imminent threat”
to the United States.
Demonstrators
have also gathered to express their anger over the
Bush administration’s determination to sell or
give our country to multinational greed-driven multinational
corporations. We do not want these corporations to
cut down the last stands of old growth forests. We
do not want them to drill for oil in the Artic wilderness.
We want our government to acknowledge the threat global
warming poses to our world. We want Mr. Bush to take
action to save endangered species, to clean up our
poisoned rivers and lakes, and to preserve our national
parks for future generations.
People
have come to New York from all over the country and
the world to proclaim that the Bush administration
is not acting in our name when it launches preemptive
strikes against other nations. The government is not
acting in our name when it attacks other countries
in order to build a more peaceful world; when it supports
tyrants and dictators in order to promote democracy;
and when it turns Iraq into a free fire zone in order
to show the Iraqi people how much we care about them.
We are here to grieve not just for our own dead and
wounded soldiers, but to mourn all of the women and
children in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been blown
to pieces as they sat down to breakfast or worked
in their fields. Many in this vast crowd lived through
the tumultuous and tragic Vietnam Era, and we had
hoped that our country had learned its lesson—that
we would never fight another illegal, unjustified,
un-winnable war. We had hoped that the trauma of Vietnam
and the tragedy of 9/11 would convince our leaders
to refrain from acting out of revenge. We had hoped
that never again would we never have to watch our
nation divide into hostile, hateful, camps.
On
Monday morning, the Daily News and New York Post,
display lurid photos of masked demonstrators running
from a paper dragon that, according to these papers,
was set afire by anarchists. There are photos of demonstrators
with their hands cuffed behind their backs and policemen
making hundreds of arrests. The Post’s headline
reads: BUSH BASHERS HIT THE STREETS. Below this headline,
a female columnist writes that demonstrators were
a mostly white, affluent folk who shared “a blind
spot to history.” Exactly which “blind spot”
is unclear, but the contempt this columnist has for
the half million marchers literally leaps from the
page.
Not
surprising, really. To the right wing ideologues who
believe the United States has a god-given right, indeed
an obligation, to rule the world, even mothers and
fathers who protest the loss of their children in
Iraq are traitors. But no matter what the news media
may or may not say about last Sunday’s march
in New York City, 500,000 people braved the summer
heat, as well as threats and warnings to say that
the war in Iraq is not, and will never be, in our
name. Killing for peace is not in our name. Poisoning
our world is not in our name. Jeopardizing the health
and welfare of future generations by ignoring the
peril of global warning is not in our name. Planning
to construct Star Wars and to build a new generation
of atomic weapons, when forty to fifty million Americans
live in poverty, is not in our name.
At
the height of the Vietnam War, John Lennon sang, “All
we are saying is givde peace a chance.” That
is what those of us who have been marching, for decades,
are trying to say. Just give peace a chance. If we
don’t pursue peace rather than war, our relatives,
our friends, and our neighbors will keep coming home
from faraway places in flag draped coffins. After
fifteen years of fighting in Vietnam, the United States
was forced to depart that country, leaving behind
a legacy of sorrow, bitterness, and distrust. Mr.
Bush refuses to say when the 130,000 American soldiers
in Iraq will come home. That’s because, like
Richard M. Nixon when he ran for office in 1968, the
resident in the White House does not have a plan to
end this war. When asked about the poor, Marie Antoinette
apparently said, “Let them eat cake.” Mr.
Bush and his followers say, “Let them eat bullets
or bombs or missiles lies.”
Last
Sunday, a half million people marched peacefully through
the streets of Manhattan to demand not only that the
war in Iraq end, but that George W. Bush be given
a one-way ticket back to Crawford, Texas. Mr. Bush
and others in his administration should be tried for
war crimes, but for now we would be delighted to see
him soundly defeated in this November’s election.
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