Further Thoughts on Peace Presence

As I mentioned before, since I’ve gotten back in Grand Rapids I’ve tried to make a point of attending the local Peace Presence vigil.

They have more information on their website here, but basically it is just a weekly vigil holding up signs for peace and against the war.

The effectiveness of this on national policy has been called into question by my sister, and actually some of these same discussion have been taking place among the group itself via the WMJPC (West Michigan Justice and Peace Coalition) Listserv.

Certainly if these kind of vigils are viewed as the be all and end all of activism, there are problems. But all of the people involved in this vigil are involved in other activities, such as Peace Education at IGE or counter-recruitment efforts at Media Mouse. Taken as a bare minimum from which other activities branch off, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Peace Presence.

All protest activities seek to focus the attention the cause, and remind people about the issues. If these are all useless, than much of the civil rights movement should have been a failure. After all, what concrete benefits were accomplished by Martin Luther King’s March on Washington other than bringing civil rights to the attention of the nation?

My philosophy is that if you have the time, and you think there’s a possibility it might do some good, and you’re reasonably sure it won’t do any bad, than get off your ass and join in. Its way too easy for people to cynics to just sit back and criticize.

The response we get from the passing motorists and pedestrians is really encouraging. Say what you want about Grand Rapids, I get the impression most people are behind us. I’d estimate maybe 50 % of the passing people honk or give us signs of support. Maybe 49% is indifferent. Only 1% of the people are negative.

So it’s probably stupid to get hung up on that 1%, right? I mean there’s no issue that everyone agrees on. And if everyone was against the war, there probably wouldn’t be any need for us to do that vigil in the first place.

But what bugs me is the vileness and intellectual poverty of that 1%.

For example last week we had a middle aged man scream obscenities at us and tell us what miserable people we were. Now I could understand this if we were a bunch of punk kids with signs like, “Hey baby killers, how many civilians did you massacre in Haditha?” or something like that. But at the time of the outburst it was me and two elderly women. One woman had a sign that said, “Honk for peace,” the other woman had a sign “We can’t bomb the world to peace” and I had a sign that said, “No Iraq war.” What kind of a human being sees signs for peace and flies into such a spitting fury?

And then there’s the intellectual poverty. Almost everyone of our critics mentions something about protecting freedom, or how we wouldn’t have the freedom to stand there and protest if the troops weren’t in Iraq.

Yeah, right buddy. I wouldn’t have the freedom to stand here if our troops hadn’t been bombing cities in a small country half way around the world.

Even by its own internal logic, this criticism makes absolutely no sense. “Our troops are over there protecting your freedom to protest....So don’t you dare use it”?

But how anyone makes a connection between the war in Iraq and my personal freedoms is beyond me. Of course this is the same argument that has been used in every foreign war the US has ever fought. Like during Vietnam when every pro-war group called itself something related to freedom. “We need to travel around the world and drop thousands of tons of Napalm and cluster bombs on peasant villages to protect our freedom”.

The logic, as far as I can tell, runs something like this.
1). In the revolutionary war, we were fighting for our freedom from the British.
2). Therefore every war we have fought or will fight since then is to protect our freedom.

I guess at least I should be glad that now it kind of makes sense. I mean in Vietnam it made absolutely no since. We were bombing the Vietnamese to prevent free elections. Now at least there was a terrorist attack on US soil that connects our freedom to the war.

....Of course you’d have to ignore the fact that the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.

....And you’d have to ignore that there was no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

...And that there were no weapons of Mass destruction found.

...And for that matter, you’d have to believe that the terrorists attacked us in the first place simply because they can’t stand our freedom. It had nothing to do with our military intervention in the Middle East.

Ok, maybe it doesn’t make that much sense. But we can agree that the war in Iraq was fought for the principle of Freedom, right? Bringing democracy to Iraq.

........Of course you’d have to ignore that all of our allies in the region besides Israel are undemocratic.

.......And you’d have to ignore that the US supported Saddam Hussein up until the first Gulf War, and gave him weapons during the very years of his worst human rights atrocities. (See this video)

......And that the architects of the War were all on record 10 years earlier giving their reasons why they didn’t think democracy could be imposed on Iraq by invasion (see here and here)

......And that in this war for democracy, all of our allies overrode the will of their people to join us in this war. And that the governments that actually listened to their people were ridiculed by our State Department for being weak and old fashioned (see the Chomsky quote).

.........Or you'd have to be safely cocooned in a shell of AM radio and Fox news. In which case I guess you don't know about any of the previous points.

When the government tells you it wants your sons and daughters to go and die in a foreign land, its your job as a citizen to be critical. That’s the bare minimum of a citizen. If you just say, “Okay, ship them out!”, we might as well have just stayed with King George III and never fought the revolution. If you think you’re being patriotic by yelling obscenities at Peace demonstrators, you've got to sort it out.

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In other news, unfortunately my commitment to give up Caffeine for the anti-war fast has fallen apart. After many set backs and restarts, I think I'm just given up. Instead I'm going to give up cigarettes and alcohol for the duration, and see if I have any better luck with that.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
The influence of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress can be seen in George Lucas's Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, particularly in the technique of telling of the story from the points of view of the film's lowliest characters. The relationship of R2-D2 and C-3PO is very similar to that of Tahei and Matakichi. Also, the characters of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia mirror those of the general Rokurota Makabe and Princess Yuki. Early in the development of Star Wars, George Lucas even considered Toshiro Mifune (the actor who played Rokurota) for the role of Obi-Wan.

Link of the Day
Oakland Police Spies Chosen to Lead War Protest