The People Have Spoken The Ground Has Shifted

Anti-War, originally uploaded by Wazdat!.

And The Administration Has Blinked

On Saturday the forces of justice grew bolder, and the forces of darkness cringed.

A hundred thousand people showed up in Washington D.C. to speak truth to power, and though the media thought it best to cover a has-been hurricane that was not Katrina, killed nobody and revealed nothing of consequence that we didn't already know about Bush cancer, l'm positive that the denizens of the Beltway were amply aware that the temperature of anti-war fever in this country has just shot up.

The Mall was filled standing room only! People spoke there, movingly, about the unfairness of the war, it's dishonesty, and the need to end it as soon as possible. Mothers heard of how the Bush administration lied to their children and put them in harm's way under false pretences.

The horizon was filled with people who joyously shouted as they felt their power.

They chanted. They sang. And they showed that they and this country have turned a corner. Now we go on the offensive!

But the protest wasn't just in D.C., or in San Francisco. It was at my doorstep in Syracuse too.

I came at around noon. We met in front of county Republican Headquarters on West Onondaga. The signs were spirited and beautiful! Passersby cheered us on. We sang. We chanted. We had protesters on either side of the street. There were about 100 of us there, and one right-wing yahoo with a slgn that read: "The Syracuse Peace Council Kills Jews!" Weird! He started confronting us, but we would't take the bate.

Well his antics merely served to spur us on to carry on singing!

And anyhow, he served to show the exact pro-war to anti-war protester ratio that exists throughout the country!

At San Francisco there were thousands of anti-war protesters were gathered at the corner of Mission and 16th and at Dolores Park and marched through the streets.

"In Los Angeles," said Inside Bay Area, " police closed a downtown street to accommodate the protest, which they said drew an estimated 15,000 people." " In San Diego, more than 2,000 protesters marched through downtown to a city park where they displayed mock coffins commemorating the deaths of Iraqi civilians and white crosses to represent fallen American soldiers. On the streets of San Francisco, several thousand demonstrators embraced an array of political groups, including Seligman's, which is trying to get military recruiters out of public school campuses and to bring troops home."

In Syracuse, we were buoyed by a call from Peace Council delegate to Washington who told us of the hundreds of thousands who were there. And of course, that one heckler was there to entertain us as well, with his perambulations and "gems of wisdom." We defend his freedom of speech anyway.

On Marshall St., the crowd was only a little smaller, but no less in high spirits. I had informed the people of the phone call from D.C. I felt a sense of euphoria as I stood there in front of a TV5 camera in my self designed homemade "My Country Doesn't Lie To Me Mr. Bush!" T-shirt.

When I came home, my mother told me to turn on C-SPAN.

I saw something that made me proud of being part of it.

My mother said "Are you seeing this?"

"Mom" I said, "today I was DOING that!"

The next day I saw the Republican attempt.

Melanie Morgan was there, hardly anyone else. Oh, a few people wandered from here to there, and then they had the nerve to say that our guys did not represent the true sentiments of America! Funny how so few people, about four hundred, are experts on how America thinks, when just the day before, the whole of America showed up to tell people like Melanie Morgan what we think of her.

Finally they arrested Cindy Sheehan yesterday. She was peacefully demonstrating with a tactic called civil disobedience. i'm told that the police were entirely civil with her and she is being treated well.

I think of this as a tribute to her persuasiveness, the mood of the country and the fact that few people will allow anything that happens to Cindy Sheehan to be ignored.

Inside Bay Area
New Standard News
Melanie Morgan