Voices from the Front in DC

Frank Medina in a reddish baseball cap, and on his shoulders, his young daughter in a pink shirt and bright yellow dress. As I ask for his name, she leans over and shouts out with delight: "Claire Elizabeth Medina!" He's a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "

I was at the demonstration before the war," he tells me. "And now, this is just an appalling circumstance. That's why I'm back. It's an appalling war and it needs to end immediately. There needs to be a coherent plan to turn the country back over to the Iraqis, with definite dates for the return of American troops. What can't be done is to continue to justify the war there by the sacrifices that have already been made. It's like saying that, when you've lost everything at the casino, you're going to double-down. At some point, you need to cut your losses.
"However, it's an administration that can't admit its mistakes, that can't admit the truth, and consequently that can't change. So there is no hope."

Why bother to come then, I ask.

"It's important," he says firmly, "to express your views, to protest."

Photo by Tam Turse

The above is an excerpt from TomDispatch. It clearly makes liars out of the right-wing knee-jerk bloggers who claim everyone at the weekend demo was a "Commie." But we should not be surprised by the "Swift-boating" of the anti-war movement as it grows in size and influence. Well anyway, here's a further excerpt from Tom's Dispatch (for the complete article:

"No Iraqis Left Me on a Roof to Die"
Katrina and Cindy Blow into Town
By Tom Engelhardt
Photos by Tam Turse

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 demonstration." 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.