Are marches pep-rallies

[joanna bujes]

At 01:49 PM 11/04/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Over the weekend I talked with twi people who basically have their
>hearts in the right place, but aren't normally the types who go to
>demonstrations. They both boarded buses for antiwar demos on Oct 26,
>one to DC, the other to SF. The one who went to DC belong to a
>liberal Protestant church in Baltimore - again, a place with its
>heart in the right place but normally not very mobilized politically.
>Yet the congregation is pretty energized by antiwar activity. Short
>of Nathan knocking on their doors, don't the demos do a lot to bring
>people like that out of the woodwork? They don't need their opinion
>changed so much as they need a way of latching on to something that's
>already in motion - e.g., big demos. And if the rally's large enough,
>they'll be spared the godawful speeches.

One of the best things for me about attending a rally (aside from breaching 
the asphyxiating political isolation one lives in most of the time) is 
finding out what kind of support, what constituents a particular issue can 
bring out. It was very heartening, for example, to go to the anti war rally 
on 10/26 in SF and observe the great diversity of people who attended: for 
the first time at an anti-war rally I saw a great many African Americans, 
for the first time I saw plain non-political folks plainly galvanzied and 
present. It was especially encouraging to here these people observe that 
the demos were NOT interested in getting us out of this situation..and that 
there had to be a third way.

All in all, the demo was much more than a pep rally. Also, the speeches 
weren't all that bad this time around.

Joanna