Reflections on the Day of Protest

What do Republications, Pagans, Grandmothers, Communists, Veterans, Catholics, Artists, Green Party Members, Palestinians and Anarchist have in common? On Saturday February 15th, 2003 it was “no war”. The day started out overcast in Sacramento with a real chance of rain. But the threat of bad weather didn’t keep thousands of people away or from exercising the freedoms that they still have, to express heart felt disagreement and dismay with their government. It was a worldwide day of protest. From Republicans for Peace, dressed in suits to white haired grandmothers to anarchist flying their black flags it was a mixture of humanity I had not seen in many years.

The signs were simple. From “No War” to the funny “Duct Tape for Peace”, and “Somewhere in Texas is a Village Looking for Its Idiot” and “Bush Can’t Go Back to Texas Because They Execute the Mentally Challenged!”. A more seriously inspired sign read “How Many Lives Per Gallon?”. But the message was the same: Peace and a plea for the governments of the world to listen to their citizens and to reason.

A small group of flag waving protestors protesting the protestors stood across the street shouting slogans to bomb and liberate Iraq. A squad of police moved in to keep the pro-war demonstrators on the sidewalk and away from the peace demonstrators on the other side of the street. But it was a peaceful day. Drummers approached trance state as a crowd of people of both sexes and all ages danced to a frenzy. A more than life sized puppet of Bush with an oilrig on his head moved among the crowd, telling people “Don’t worry. It’s ok. Its just a little war.”

Small children listened to folk music and painted each others faces while speakers talked of the hundreds of thousands of children who have died due to the starvation and lack of medicine that the US imposed sanctions have resulted in. One woman spoke of her group’s efforts to buy $20,000 worth of chemotherapy in Pakistan to take to Baghdad to treat children dying of treatable cancers, treatable cancers that are going untreated. After spending weeks traveling through the desert to get the medicine to its final destination and returning to the US they received a letter from the Treasury Department informing them that they have been fined $20,000 for the crime. Did they pay? No. They wrote back telling the government that they would raise another $20,000 to buy more medicine to again take to the dying children.

The protestors that gathered around the world do not support Saddam Hussein—they support the people of Iraq and the Palestinians who continue to be slaughtered by the Israeli army.

The crowd was enraged with Bush’s statement that the UN was an “ineffective debating society” if it didn’t go to war with the US. Obviously anything that doesn’t agree with Bush’s plans and desires is “ineffective”.

War in Iraq has been non-stop with daily bombings and the destruction of the country’s infra-structure. The US drops leaflets over Iraq telling the Iraqi people that we do not want to cause harm to the citizen or the landmarks of Iraq but we do so every day. The water systems have been destroyed so clean water is impossible to get, food is practically non-existent, medicines have bee reduced to aspirin. The sanctions have prohibited the importation of children’s pencils because the lead, in theory, can be removed for the development of WMD’s. The people of Iraq live their lives faced with imposed abject poverty, starvation and diseases. But they have not lost their ability to joke or to smile or to offer condolences when the Columbia space shuttle met with disaster.

Tony Blair says that it will be the moral thing to do to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. We obviously have two sets of standards for morality. We allowed Idi Amin to liquidate millions of his people—as we have with Baby Doc Duvalier and other US supported dictators. We have moved our military bases into former eastern bloc countries with the intent to improve the living conditions, economy and human rights in those countries but the opposite has occurred. They have become even more repressive but this time with US support. Bush is willing to settle the North Korean nuclear crisis with “diplomacy” but only offers war to Iraq, which has no nuclear weapons.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield are dangerous men. Dangerous to the environment (a recent article pointed out that under Bush’s short term in office there has been more degradation to the environment than any time in the last 40 years), dangerous to the economy, and the major threat to world peace.

The Bush administration demands that the rest of the world act according to its instructions but ignores world opinion. It repeatedly says that the United Nations must take action but refuses to agree with UN decisions—and in fact the Republican Congress has refused to allow the US share of United Nations dues to be paid for years. The US has rebuffed World Court decisions also and says it will again with a recent World Court call for the US to stop the executions of foreign nationals who have been denied access to their foreign offices and their own legal representatives. The major rogue nation now at large in the world is the United States.

The US sponsored repression of the Palestinians is instrumental to the world conflict we are faced with today. It is time to stop supporting right wing Israel and to support human decency and justice. Let us put humanity before profits and peace before war.