Ray St. Louis
2/23/07
BETWEEN THE LINES
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 fellow citizens.
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 the activists trying to mobilize antiwar sentiment, I believe this is a failing.
Look, I’m not the active politico 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 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 provocations
directed toward Iran.
I want to express my opposition to this war along with thousands of my compatriots.
It’s not like it should be hard for the antiwar leadership (whoever they are), to find me. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool
liberal. I write a left-leaning column for a weekly newspaper. 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 their target demographics, who does? Why isn’t anyone contacting me? Getting out the
throngs who are against the war should be like getting out the vote in an election. Assembling their names
and phone numbers on calling lists should be like organizing voter registration drives.
Getting back to Vietnam for a moment, 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. Tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands,
showed up at the marches, the moratoriums, the 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 the leaders of whatever exists today as an antiwar
movement have to do, to get me and thousands, perhaps millions, like me to show up at the next big
demonstration, is to let us know.
But 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.
Note: I posted a message very much like this one on the Daily Kos national liberal blog site last week. Many
of the responses I got asked where was I on January 27? A major peace demonstration occurred that day
in Washington D.C. which, of course, I never heard about either beforehand or as reported by the media.