The third anniversary of
America’s invasion of Iraq was March 19, so I joined a small group
of people who met in Riverside Park in Salida, Colo., to state our
disagreement with the war.
It was a cold and cloudy day,
appropriate for the occasion. There were the usual homemade signs.
I wore my Army field jacket, with the colorful Americal Division
patch on my right shoulder, and my rack of ribbons from fighting
the war in Vietnam for 12 months, because they are my personal
protest sign. The mood was relaxed and friendly, and people greeted
each other warmly. One man led a dog wearing a sign: “Doggone war.”
After some milling around, the protesters distributed
themselves along the sidewalk and then walked off, chanting “Out of
Iraq Now.” I sat on a stump instead because it seemed futile to
walk in circles and chant. There was no one in the park to witness
the event other than fellow demonstrators.
Riverside Park
is small, so the marchers soon came back past me and then did
another lap before stopping at the band shell to make statements.
Some speakers were impassioned, including a disabled vet, but most
were calm and soft-spoken. They carefully differentiated between
bad policy and the military people who were required to carry out
bad policy, and several spoke of supporting our troops. I left when
they started reading poetry.
I attended my first anti-war
rally in 1966, back East. I wonder if there were any such rallies
in Salida, 40 years ago, and whether a peace rally then would have
caused so little public comment? I thought then that I was doing
something useful in protesting the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson may
have actually listened to the protesters, but times change, as does
the willingness of an administration to admit or even consider the
chance that its policy might be unwise. Bush refuses to listen, and
Cheney doesn’t seem to care about the people who protest the war
— or fight in it.
So why attend this quixotic
rally? I was there for my children, for the 20-somethings under
fire, for the friends who had died in Vietnam, and not because it
would make a difference to anyone but me. Doing the right thing is
worth doing, whether or not anyone notices the act. I can’t do much
for the kids being shot at in Iraq, or to honor my old comrades in
arms, other than spend an hour standing in the wind on a cold
Sunday.
On my way home, I realized that I was probably
not alone in this view — that making a statement is worth the
effort even if no one in power is listening. Marching and chanting
without any witnesses, many of the demonstrators seemed to be part
of a stylized exercise, like a Japanese Noh play. Instead of
traditional masks, we had standard signs and chants, performed in a
ritual way by longtime veterans of many anti-war demonstrations.
The signs we carried seemed solidly constructed, bolted to thick
strips of well-painted wood, suitable for frequent use. The signs
may have even been stored in garages for years.
Now we
are again sending brave young people to be killed and wounded and
maimed — never mind the civilian casualties, or the violence
done to the Constitution. Unlike the first Iraq War, this war was
started for reasons that have changed frequently but always seem
wrongheaded. We are fighting it almost alone, and we are fully
bogged down.
But the more things change, the more they
remain the same. Congress dithers, just as it did during the
Vietnam War, while its constitutional powers dribble away like
water through a hole in a bucket. Just like President Nixon, this
president mouths platitudes, when he is not speaking what seems
like a foreign language, or when his press secretary speaks English
but has strange new meanings for familiar words. Young men and
women come home in body bags while some ?patriots? accuse those who
exercise the right to free speech of giving aid and comfort to the
enemy. We may have learned not to blame the troops we send to fight
a bad war, and in Salida we may have learned to tolerate war
protests, but what else have we learned?
Here?s one thing
I learned: Make an anti-war sign strong enough to withstand
repeated use.
F. R. Pamp is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a lawyer in
Salida, Colorado.
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