Mark Rickling wrote:
>
> From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
> > The other day Liza wondered aloud why there are never mass demos for
> > things with potential for huge popular support, e.g. national health
> > insurance? That's a good question.
>
> Rumor has it that SEIU wants to hold a march of roughly 100,000 people
> across the Golden Gate Bridge for universal coverage next summer, when its
> convention will take place in SF.
>
Within weeks of 9/11 independent groups were forming all over the nation and small demos being held demanding No War. No central committee called them into action -- though if this war keeps up and the movement grows, at some point we will need some big centralized coalitions grounded in various local and regional groupings (something to be worked out as we go along). Small demonstrations, most of them ending disastrously, were being held all over the south from the late '40s on.
There may have been a mass movement sometime some place in history that was grounded in "we want the government to do such and such," but I don't know of any. All that I know of that went any place, including most especially those that at some point _did_ win "positive" demands, were organized around saying NO to something the state was doing.
I would love to see something like Doug speaks of here happen. I think he and Liza ought to give up their journalist careers and go out and organize it. I tried for years to get people to just get together to _talk_ about treatment of the elderly or medical care. They thought it was a good idea -- to chat about.
Carrol
P.S. The ERA might be considered an exception, but various people I've talked to or corresponded with around the country at various times have agreed with me that a main reason for its failure was that not enough just plain saying NO to something or other (in rude terms) was going on. That is, as soon as it became merely a respectable campaign for a positive result, all the oomph went out of it. Affirmative Action was not a "demand," there was no campaign for it, it was something the "establishment" came up with to try to quiet things down.
A really big anti-war movement could, almost as a side-line, develop some huge campaigns for very specific positives, like free health care for everyone.