Giving the President a Pink Slip in New York City

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 01 May 2006 12:29:02 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Tom Engelhardt at LewRockwell.com - the author of TomDispatch.com gives a review of last Saturday's big anti-war march in New York City. I only found one story about it yesterday, which wasn't good enough to link to, but this one is good. He prints some of the sign messages, and talks to a number of participants. [lew]

As I often do, I spent as much time as I could prowling the crowd, talking to as many protesters as possible. A demonstration of this size is a complex beast, one I would hesitate to characterize. I've tried instead to offer below some of the voices I ran across -- or at least as much of each of them as my slow hand could madly scribble on a pad of paper. As modest as the cross-section I encountered was, I had the feeling that, while the march was calm, lively, and upbeat, many of the demonstrators had no illusions about what the future might hold. The ones I met were almost uniformly disappointed in, or disgusted with, the Democratic "opposition," fearful of a new war in Iran, realistic about how hard it will be to get the President's men (and so our troops) out of Iraq, and yet surprisingly determined that those troops should be brought home as soon as humanly possible.

Perhaps such demonstrations are now not for the Bush administration, nor really for the mainstream media either, but only for us. Perhaps they are a reminder to all those who attend and to those numbering in their hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on the political Internet that we are here, alive, and humming. That is reason enough to demonstrate.

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