I’ve got a gripe with the antiwar movement, or with whatever organization or group of organizations qualifies as an antiwar movement here in the year 2007, four years into a disastrous war in Iraq with no end in sight.
Here’s the essence of my gripe: I want to march against the war. I want to put my feet where my heart is. I want to make my opposition known to the powers that be.
I want to carry a protest sign and walk with thousands of like minded citizens – people of all races and creeds and walks of life, a wide ranging cross-section of my compatriots.
Problem is, I’m not hearing the call. If massive demonstrations of this type are occurring, like the kind that occurred during the later years of the Vietnam War, I’m not hearing about them.
To those of you who are activists trying to mobilize antiwar sentiment, I believe this is a failing on your part.
And don’t even try to use the excuse that, as a person who has strong feelings against the war, I should be more aggressive in seeking out or in some way making these antiwar actions happen. I’m not the activist that I was in my twenties.
Back then, during Vietnam, I was on the barricades. I marched, I demonstrated, I licked stamps to stick on mass mailings. I helped organize demonstrations. I gave speeches.
Now I’m a guy in his late fifties who has a business to run, and a number of people who depend on me to provide the opportunity of making a living. My time is taken up with permits, regulations, taxes, insurance and contracts. I don’t have time to be an activist.
But, while my circumstances in life have changed, my views have not.
I hate this war. I hate everything about it. I hate the lies that got us into it. I hate Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. I hate the torture and humiliation. I hate the damage it’s done to our country’s reputation. I hate the loss of civil liberties and due process. I hate the escalation (surge) and the insane threats to Iran.
I want to express my opposition to this war along with thousands of my fellow citizens. Is this too much to ask?
It’s not like it should be hard for you, the antiwar leadership (whoever you are), to find me. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. I write a left-leaning column for a weekly newspaper. I have been known to bash George Bush. I have a web site where I post my left-leaning columns. I visit liberal blog sites on a daily basis. I’ve posted on Daily Kos, I watch Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart. I listen to public radio.
If I don’t show up in your target demographics, who does? Why isn’t anyone contacting me?
The thing is, I’m not as connected to the activist community as I was in my twenties, when Vietnam was grinding on year after miserable year. Back then, I belonged to what we called "the Movement." Those of us who were part of the Movement were in the loop. We heard about every planned political action long before it took place. We were professional demonstrators.
I remember how lonely it was on the antiwar barricades in the early years. We were easily dismissed as fanatics and crazies in those years – a bunch of scruffy hippy peaceniks out to stir up trouble.
But the later years, the early seventies, were different. Opposition to the war had spread to every demographic nook and cranny of America. Ten of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, showed up at the marches and mobilizations - students, workers, teachers, housewives, clergy, doctors and other professionals.
I want to be a part of that kind of political mass movement again. I want to shake up the warmongers and profiteers. I want to cause headaches for the top brass and head honchos of the military-industrial complex. I want to seriously annoy George Bush and Dick Cheney. I want to march.
And I don’t want to wait for timid Democrats in Washington to grow a collective spine in order to affect events. Nor do I want to wait two more years for this president to leave office. I want to march. Now.
We are the majority according to all the polls. All you - the leaders of whatever exists today as an antiwar movement - have to do, to get me and thousands like me to show up at the next big demonstration, is to let us know. But don’t think you can build a movement just by sending out a glut of emails. A lot of us delete those unsolicited forms of communication. It all tends to look like spam after a while.
You can start with emails, but you’re going to have to back it up with some old fashioned ways of getting the word out - mailing lists and phone trees. Maybe even knocking on doors.
And please don’t call me just to stand with a handful of people on some street corner holding a sign and waving at cars. I don’t want to feel again like the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness. Been there; done that (almost four decades ago).
I don’t want to waste my time doing something that eases my conscience and makes me feel good. I want to be part of a movement. I want to make a difference.
I want to march, with tens of thousands.
Can someone make this happen?