> Well, Chuck, I detect a big-city snobbishness toward a flyover state --
> the hometown booster in me takes umbrage at your suggestion that folks
> in Ohio don't know what we are talking about. :-> Ohio is a political
> bellwether state, the key test-marketing arena of the nation, be it
> test-marketing Fat Free Pringles, War (remember Bush's Cincy address on
> October 7, 2002 to sell the invasion of Iraq,
> <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html>), or
> Peace (you recall the blow that we dealt the Clinton Administration live
> on CNN in 1998, <http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9802/18/town.meeting/>). The
> dominant activist sentiment in Ohio is best represented by the following
> posting by Andy Reed, Central Ohioans for Peace, a group based in
> Worthington, a Columbus suburb:
Yoshie: I come from Kansas, which is not just a flyover state, but also the pre-eminent "drive through really fast" state. Yes, I see Ohio as a similar state, if only because as a Washington resident I've grown to hate the Ohio Turnpike more than driving across Iowa.
As an activist in Washington, DC, I have plenty of experience watching these national organizations, leaders and orders in action. As I've explained numerous times this year, I've seen how ANSWER sabotages the work of other activist groups to suit its agenda. It seems to me that activists outside of DC should understand by now how DC-based activists think about ANSWER, but now we here about a stupid call for one group that is doing good work to "unify" with a group that has a history of doing shitty things to activists. This is why I flippantly insult the Ohio activist who initiated this ignorant call.
> As you may see in my notes on the UFPJ conference in Chicago, I think
> that both UFPJ and ANSWER have their respective weaknesses, but they
> also have their respective strengths as well, which are complementary.
> Brought together, I hope, UFPJ and ANSWER will be able to grow together
> while maintaining productive political differences between them.
You mean like ANSWER efective activist bus service? Other than that, ANSWER has nothing of value to add to the peace movements and actually does more harm than good.
Like why is everybody waiting until October to do a big anti-war protest? Why not early August? The Bush adminsitration is really vulnerable right now, but these damn groups are waiting for several months. This is what the International Action Center did during the Balkans War, a strategic blunder so big that I vowed from that time forward to be an incessant critic of anything the shitheads associated with the WWP and IAC ever tried to organize. When you put too much power in the hand of a few groups like the UFPJ and ANSWER, your entire movement is at the mercy of their poor strategic thinking.
Chuck0