I posted this earlier today as a comment in Stand Strong's diary Wanna Be A Freeway Blogger?
Upon further reflection, I realized that I had never fully told the story of what we did that day, and that it needed to be given its own diary, if only for posterity.
On the day before the war started back in '03, A group of friends and I formed an organization called Artists For Peace, which undertook a sizeable project to protest the impending invasion. We selected 5 major arteries into Cleveland, Ohio's downtown district, and for 10 blocks or so leading up to the edge of the downtown district, we put up small signs on every single telephone pole and tree that simply said:
Invade!
More, including Thumbnail photos, on the flipside
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At the intersections that marked the edge of downtown, we posted signs that said:
Welcome To Baghdad! Population 6,000,000 (3,000,000+ under age 15)
Heading in the opposite direction, we posted larger signs that said:
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Victims
with photos of Iraqi kids and teens taken by a Case Western Reserve professor who had traveled to Baghdad earlier in the year.
The last sign we posted said Now Leaving Baghdad! Invade Again Soon!
(Sorry, don't have a photo of that one in use, but here's a photo of all of the signs we produced)
We started posting the signs at 3:00 am. We had five teams of two walking both sides off the street, armed with clear packing tape and heavy duty staple guns. We were done by 5:00 am. I took these photos between 8:30 and 10:30 am.
ALL of the signs had been removed by police by 2:30 pm.
One team went back out to put more signs up once we realized that the afternoon rush hour traffic was going to miss out on seeing the "Victims" signs, and were promptly detained by police for 3 hours and given citations for posting illegal handbills -- the case was eventually thrown out of court when we showed that the police were guilty of selective enforcement -- we found an old bumpersticker saying "Dole/Kemp" on a pole which we had also posted our Victims Project sign on. Our sign was removed by police, and as you can see by this photo taken the day later, the sticker was left untouched.
Did any of this make the news? Not a chance. The court case garnered a small story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer a few months after the fact. But other than that, it was a fairly futile effort that was, for me, one of the most amazing things I have ever done as an activist.
You see, I know that thousands of people saw those signs. I heard people talking about them. I saw one at a friend's house. He was unaware of my affiliation, and when I asked him where he got it, he said "Oh, I was driving downtown one day, and saw hundreds of these on Chester Avenue. I thought they were really powerful, so I jumped out of my car and grabbed one when I saw police taking them down across the street."
Tomorrow I will post on another project that our hearty crew undertook during the first few monhs of the war.
Cllick on the Thumbnails for full size photos!