Peace is Where You Make It

Four years in and counting.

Over the last few days, anti-war actions are 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 neokonzertruppen'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.

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.

And you'd better believe that a major sea change is taking place. 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. And it's not just happening on their evening TV news shows -- it's happening right in their own back yards. And it's not just radical youths and Gen-X troublemakers -- it's your mom, your pop, even the nuns you knew in grade school.

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 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:

"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!'

"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 they were. 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 CultureKitchen's. *ahem*

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 necons' doctrine of perpetual war wins out, and we end up having to watch our kids go off to get killed fighting for oil in the Middle East too.

(FYI, here's the link to that article quoted above -- though the Times-News does require free registration in order to access their content online and articles only get posted there for 7 days, it might be 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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