[Mb-civic] voices from D.C,. on 9/24

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

This is a bit long but you don't have to read all of
it to get the flavor-- worthwhile...and sad that
corporate media consumers don't get to taste it!

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/09/katrina_and_cindy.html

Katrina and Cindy Blow into Town
Voices from this weekend's antiwar demonstration in
Washington D.C.

Tom Engelhardt
September 25 , 2005

[Note: As you read many of the interviews with
protesters below, you can
go to
<http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/09/katrina_and_cindy.h
tml> their striking portraits by photojournalist Tam
Turse, who walked the demonstration with me, camera in
hand.]

George was out of town, of course, in the "battle cab"
at the U.S. Northern Command's headquarters in
Colorado Springs, checking out the latest in
homeland-security technology and picking up photo ops;
while
White House aides, as the Washington Post wrote that
morning, were attempting "to reestablish Bush's
swagger." The Democrats had largely fled town as well,
leaving hardly a trace behind. Another hurricane was
blasting into Texas and the media was preoccupied, but
nothing, it seemed, mattered. Americans turned out in
poll-like numbers for the Saturday antiwar
demonstration in Washington and I was among them. So
many of us were there, in fact, that my wife (with
friends at the back of the march) spent over two hours
as it officially "began," moving next to nowhere at
all

This was, you might say, the "connection
emonstration." In the previous month, two hurricanes,
one of them human, had blown through American life;
and between them, they had, for many people, linked
the previously
unconnected -- Bush administration policies and the
war in Iraq to their own lives. So, in a sense, this
might be thought of as the demonstration created by
Hurricanes Cindy Sheehan and Katrina. It was, finally,
a protest that, not just in its staggering turnout but
in its make-up, reflected the changing opinion-polling
figures in this country. This was a
majority demonstration and the commonest statement I
heard in the six hours I spent talking to as many
protesters as I could was: "This is my first
demonstration."

In addition, there were sizeable contingents of
military veterans and of the families of soldiers in
Iraq, or of those who were killed in Iraq. No
less important, scattered through the crowd were many,
as I would discover, whose lives had been affected
deeply by George Bush's wars.

This was an America on very determined parade. Even
though the march, while loud and energetic, had an air
of relaxed calmness to it, the words that seemed to
come most quickly to people's lips were: infuriated,
enraged, outraged, had it, had enough, fed up. In
every sense, in fact, this was a demonstration of
words.

I have never seen such a sea of words -- of signs,
almost invariably
handmade along with individually printed posters,
T-shirts, labels,
stickers. It often seemed that, other than myself,
there wasn't an
individual in the crowd without a sign and that no two
of them were quite
the same.

The White House, which the massed protesters marched
past, was in every
sense the traffic accident of this event. The crowds
gridlocked there; the
noise rose to a roar; the signs waved, a veritable sea
of them, and they
all, essentially said, "No more, not me!"

Here's just a modest sample of those that caught my
eye, reflecting as
they did humor, determination, and more than anything
else, outrage:
"Yeeha is not a foreign policy"; "Making a killing";
"Ex-Republican. Ask
me why"; "Blind Faith in Bad Leadership is not
Patriotism"; "Bush is a
disaster!" (with the President's face in the eye of a
hurricane); "He's a
sick nut my Grandma says" (with a photo of an old
woman in blue with
halo-like rays emanating from her); "Osama bin
Forgotten"; "Cindy speaks
for me"; "Make levees not war"; "W's the Devil, One
Degree of Separation";
"Dick Cheney Eats Kittens" (with a photo of five
kittens); "Bush busy
creating business for morticians worldwide"; "Liar,
born liar, born-again
liar"; "Dude -- There's a War Criminal in My White
House!!!"; "Motivated
moderates against Bush"; "Bored with Empire"; "Pro
Whose Life?"; "War is
Terrorism with a Bigger Budget."

Because just about everybody had the urge to express
him or herself, I
largely followed the signs to my interviewees. People
were unfailingly
willing to talk (and no less unfailingly polite as I
desperately tried to
scribble down their words). The meetings were brief
and, for me,
remarkably moving, not least because Americans
regularly turn out to be so
articulate, even eloquent, and because so many people
are thinking so hard
about the complex political fix we find ourselves in
today. I've done my
level best to catch (sometimes in slightly telescoped
form and hopefully
without too many errors) just what people had to say
and how open they
were -- the first-timers and the veterans of former
demonstrations alike.

A day of walking and intensive talking still gave me
only the smallest
sampling of such a demonstration. To my amazement, on
my way to the Metro
heading back to New York at about 5:30 (almost seven
hours after I first
set out for the Mall), I was still passing people
marching. So I can't
claim that what follows are the voices of the
Washington demonstration,
just that they're the voices of my demonstration, some
of the thirty-odd
people to whom I managed to talk in the course of
those hours. They are
but a drop in the ocean of people who turned out in
Washington, while the
President was in absentia and the Democrats nowhere to
be seen, to express
in the most personal and yet collective way possible
their upset over the
path America has taken in the world. As far as I'm
concerned, we seldom
hear the voices of Americans in our media society very
clearly. So I turn
the rest of this dispatch over to those voices. Dip in
wherever you want
-- as if you were at the march too.

Angry Graphic Designer: On the corner by the Metro, we
meet Bill Cutter
and a friend. Cutter is carrying a sign with a Bush
image and enough words
to drown a city. We stop to copy it down. It has a
headline that asks,
"What did you do on your summer vacation?" Inside a
bubble is the
President's reply: "Well, I rode my bike, killed some
troops, killed even
more Iraqis, raised lots of money for my friends,
ignored a grieving mom
and, for extra credit, I destroyed an American city!"
Cutter, a forty-five
year old Washingtonian with a tiny goatee, says simply
enough, "I'm just
an angry graphic designer with a printer." The
previous day he made his
sign and his friend's (an image of Bush over the
question, "Intelligent
design?"-- and, on the back, Dick Cheney with
quiz-like, check-off boxes
that say, "Evil, Crazy, or Just Plain Mean, Pick any
three!" We're all
looking for the demonstration's initial gathering
place, and so we fall in
step and begin to chat. A sign-maker will prove an
omen for this day --the march will be a Katrina, a
cacophony, of handmade signs, waves and
waves of them, expressing every bit of upset and
pent-up frustration that the polls tell us a majority
of Americans feel.

Cutter explains his presence this way: "I figure that
if we live here and don't do something, it's
ridiculous. Cindy Sheehan's sacrifice is so much
huger than anything anyone has done, so how could we
not?"

more at: http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/09/katrina_and_cindy.html


		
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