Stop the Next War Now (12 page)

CODEPINK marches at the Republican National Convention in New York City,August 2004.

A NEW COALITION

REBECCA SOLNIT

Rebecca Solnit is a writer whose work focuses on issues of environment, landscape, and place. Her books include
As Eve Said to the Serpent
, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the recent
River of Shadows
, about Eadweard Muybridge and the impact of technology on the Wild West.

So many people felt, after 9/11, not only grief and fear but a huge upwelling of openness, of a readiness to question and to learn, and to understand our connections to each other.That desire is still out there. It’s the force behind a huge new movement we don’t have a name for yet, a movement that’s not a left opposed to a right, but perhaps a below against an above, little against big, local and decentralized against consolidated—it’s a vast aquifer of passion now stored up to feed the river of change.

In the spring of 2003, several hundred peace activists gathered at dawn at the port of Oakland, California, to picket the gates of a company shipping arms to Iraq.The police arrived in riot gear and, unprovoked and unthreatened, shot wooden bullets and beanbags at the activists.Three members of the media, nine longshoremen, and fifty activists were injured. I saw bloody welts as big as half grapefruits on the backs of some young men and a swelling the size of an egg on the jaw of a delicate yoga instructor. But the violence inspired the union dockworkers to form closer alliances with antiwar activists and underscored the connections between local and global issues.We picketed again a month later, with no violence.This time, the longshoremen acted in solidarity with the picketers, and—for the first time in anyone’s memory—the shipping companies canceled the work shift rather than face the protesters. After the picket was broken up, one immigrant truck driver pulled over to ask for a peace sign for his rig. I pierced holes in it so he could bungee-cord it to the chrome grille. He was turned back at the gates—the ships wouldn’t accept deliveries from antiwar truckers.When I saw him next, he was sitting on a curb behind police lines, looking cheerful and fearless.Who knows what will ultimately come of the spontaneous courage of this man with a job on the line?

“There is no time left for anything but to make

peace work a dimension of our every waking activity.”

—Elise Boulding

THE ART

OF MISBEHAVIN’

DIANE WILSON

Diane Wilson is a mother of five and a fourth-generation shrimper from the Texas Gulf Coast.Through hunger strikes and other direct action, she has been putting pressure on chemical companies to stop poisoning the bay. A longtime environmentalist and peace activist,Wilson is one of the founding members of CODEPINK.

I went to Iraq with a group of codepink women just before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Before I left, I had heard a lot about how the Iraqis hated Americans and envied our lifestyle and freedom. With that in mind, I was totally surprised with what I experienced in Baghdad—instead of hatred and suspicion and grudges galore, I met people who were open and curious and generous. When I asked them if they were angry about the Americans on the verge of bombing their country, they all said, “We know it isn’t the American people at fault, but the administration.” Unlike so many people in the United States who think all Arabs are terrorists, Iraqis understood the difference between the American people and U.S. government policies.

Despite their unfailing graciousness, the Iraqis were quite afraid of the U.S. invasion. The waiters in our Baghdad hotel begged us not to leave. The children who met us every morning after our coffee—and who charmed us with their sales of pastries and scarves and shoe shines—hung on to our arms on our last day there and cried tears of desperation. They acted as if somehow, if we remained, the bombs wouldn’t fall.

The Iraqi people had no idea what to do to protect themselves and, in a futile gesture, taped up their windows. It reminded me a lot of what happens in my own hometown when a hurricane threatens the Gulf Coast: it’s almost surreal. A monumental thing is fixing to happen and there’s not much you can do to prepare for it, but you know it’s going to change your life.

Even before I’d arrived in Baghdad, I had been opposed to the war. I was raised in a small coastal fishing town in a state where concealed handguns are legal and hunting is equated with ritual. But I had developed a total aversion to killing. During my time as an army medic in the Vietnam War, I saw firsthand (in a boot camp in Georgia and in a medical ward in Fort Sam Houston) what happens to eighteen-year-old boys conscripted into wartime service: their descent from innocent enthusiasm into a hell of drugs and violence and numbing withdrawal. In the wards where I worked, patients constantly swiped needles to shoot up. A pot haze hung in the air like smoke from a lingering fire. This was a lost generation of boys.

Twenty-third Street, New York City, March 20, 2004: Banner drop of the infamous CODEPINK “pink slip.”

© Fred Askew

This wasn’t something I wanted to see again. So before the war began, I went with Medea Benjamin to Washington, D.C., and we disrupted a House Armed Services Committee hearing where Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, was stating his case for war with Iraq. It was a spontaneous moment spurred by our wish to do something to stop the war, and it made national news because we did it while the TV cameras in the room were rolling.

One month later, a group of women from across the nation staged a hunger strike and vigil at Lafayette Park in front of the White House. We remained in the park, in the dead of winter, protesting the war and promoting peace for several months. During one protest, I scaled the fence in front of the White House with an antiwar banner and stayed up there for about five minutes until I was shoved to the ground by the Secret Service. For that action, I was arrested, jailed, and banned from Washington for an entire year. The Secret Service felt so threatened by our nonviolent antiwar protests that they even followed me to my hometown in Seadrift!

Still, I felt compelled to do more than just sit in Seadrift and grieve. So on the day before half a million Americans took to the streets of New York and people around the globe protested the invasion, a delegation of codepink women assembled before the UN gate to protest. I climbed the fence and chained myself to it. I was then arrested and sent to trial. Later, back in Texas, two other protesters and I stood in the state capitol and shouted down a resolution supporting the war. For that I got four days in a women’s correctional facility outside Austin.

But still, I didn’t do enough. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted any failure as much. A war rages, children die, families are blown apart—and we are all too well behaved.

I’m a fourth-generation commercial fisherwoman, born and raised in Texas and baptized in a river by a Pentecostal preacher. I’ve also been an environmental activist fighting the destruction on the Texas bays for years. My environmental activism flowed into the peace movement, and that flowed into codepink. Just like the ecosystem where I shrimp, it’s all connected. The corporations like Formosa and Dupont and Dow are destroying the Texas bays and killing small communities like my town, and the federal government is bombing a whole country to control its oil. It’s the same destructive mentality at work.

When we say we don’t want war, those can’t just be words. Stopping a war takes a real commitment, and that means putting ourselves at risk. We have to pursue peace as aggressively as others want to make war. In our own American history, people have laid their lives on the line for their beliefs. To paraphrase one of them, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: If you don’t have something in your life that you’d die for, then you don’t have much to live for.

So we need to be bold and imaginative and brave. We’ve got to be heroes.

“No single person can liberate a country.

You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.”

—Nelson Mandela

NURTURE NEW ACTIVISTS

MARTI HIKEN

Marti Hiken is the cochair of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

When I first started college at the University of California Riverside during the Vietnam War, I merrily went to classes. I was young, I was away from home for the first time, and I was pro-war. Every day at noon, I walked across the courtyard to go to one of my classes, and one day there was a woman there from UC Berkeley—you know, a wild hippie—who was antiwar. She was arguing with a group of people about Vietnam. She went around in a circle and talked to everyone there.At one point she singled me out because I was so pro-war.We argued and argued.The next day I was walking through the courtyard and saw her again. I stopped and listened and argued.This went on for weeks. Every day she would take me on—going over the same points, trying to convince me.

Then one day I was walking through the courtyard and she wasn’t there. I felt this loneliness, but then I suddenly realized that I didn’t need her anymore, that she had fulfilled her purpose for being there: I was now against the war. I never learned her name, but I learned that a real exchange of ideas can change people’s lives—it certainly changed mine.

NOT RONALD REAGAN’S

ANTIWAR MOVEMENT

BECKY BOND

Becky Bond is a creative producer for Working Assets.

The work of stopping the next war started with broad-based opposition to the preemptive invasion of Iraq. When a large swath of the American public is moved to take a stand, only to discover that their thoughtful protest is ignored by those who purport to represent them, they return to fight with renewed strength. If we want to win, we must continue to be an inclusive movement and push for success where we settled for narrow defeat in the past. And we must fight as though we are entitled to victory.

Even though we did not stop the preemptive attack on Iraq, the millions of Americans who opposed the war laid the groundwork for preventing the next war. Citizens did their job by lobbying the president and Congress with e-mails, calls, and letters protesting the rush to preemptive war. But in a cynical move, progressive leaders in both houses joined the pro-war forces in hopes of burnishing their credentials for a far-off presidential race.

We were defeated. But when the peace groups sat down to plan the protests in the streets, the unexpected occurred. It wasn’t just the regular suspects who showed up. Everybody marched, a group as diverse as it was broad.

March after march, from coast to coast, protesters came on their own terms, with their own slogans. When asked his opinion of antiwar activists of another era, president Ronald Reagan famously quipped that they acted like Tarzan, looked like Jane, and smelled like Cheetah. But today’s antiwar demonstration was not Ronald Reagan’s protest. Something very different was going on. Suburbanites took advantage of an online protest RSVP form from Working Assets, which printed and assembled ready-made placards with a range of slogans that allowed even busy people to express themselves with a customized message. The messages ranged from the earnest “Go solar, not ballistic,” “How many lives per gallon,” and “Register to vote for peace” to the edgier “Draft SUV drivers first” and “Draft the Bush twins!”

In collaboration with the environmental community, Working Assets also organized an “Environmentalists against the War” rally featuring the first ever antiwar hybrid, electric, and biofuel car convoy. More than a hundred vehicles took part, from Priuses to battery-powered Volkswagen Beetles and a Berkeley biofueled garbage truck. Many people were moved to attend the protest (some from hundreds of miles away), in large part because this was the first time they were asked to demonstrate in their green cars. These peaceful environmentalists now had the opportunity to connect their conservationist beliefs to a principled opposition to an unjust war.

What we learned in the process was that the movement had the potential to be much broader—you just had to reach out and ask people to come. And you needed to let them march under their own banners, not just a few themes decided by a committee of conveners. In this way, the people who oppose all wars were joined by the folks who just oppose unilateral preemptive war, and the people who believe in the absolute sovereignty of even totalitarian regimes enjoyed the company of marchers who simply felt diplomacy needed more time. Clergy walked with their congregations in tow. Francophiles marched with baguettes held aloft. Student activists were, for once, outnumbered by parents pushing strollers.

After we marched, we gave money to fund relief efforts in Iraq, to cover the cost of the next protest, and to put up billboards that demanded, “Bring the troops home now.” And then we went to work making sure that more people than ever before participated in the 2004 election.

Citizens whose protests against the war were largely ignored in 2003 came out in full force the following year to volunteer and vote. The growing antiwar movement had a profound effect on the presidential debates, with people from both parties beginning to question the rationale for the increasingly costly venture.

Although we failed to stop the war, with steadfast opposition we may well stop subsequent invasions. It would pay to keep a few things in mind along the way:

• Recognize that if you don’t speak out, volunteer, or give money to worthy groups, you cannot effect change, no matter how admirable your views. Getting active not only helps the movement, but will also make you feel better.

• Elect and support leaders who will fight, and hold them accountable, both at the ballot box on election day and with e-mails, calls, and letters throughout their terms.

• Finding common cause means making room for people in the movement who don’t agree with you on every issue. Welcome new allies and let them fight for peace on their own terms. You can still be picky about whom you let into your own affinity group.