Here's what my allies are saying in Columbus, Ohio.
<blockquote>Local activist Mark Stansbery of the Central Ohio Peace Network wasn't exactly happy with the two major choices facing Ohio voters last Tuesday. He said he didn't even decide which presidential candidate to vote for until he was in the booth and had finished the rest of the ballot-it wasn't a matter of holding his nose and voting as much as throwing up and voting.
"No matter who wins, we lose," Stansbery said of the peace movement. "Sort of like the Alien Vs. Predator slogan."
"If Kerry wins, he's not talking about ending the occupation [of Iraq] or bringing the troops home," Stansbery said last week, when the results were still up in the air. "This peace and justice movement will still be here whoever wins."
To prove it, the group organized a rally for November 3 at the federal building at 200 N. High St. to advocate an end to the war -- a demonstration they planned a full two months ago.
"We looked ahead and said let's do it the day after the election," said John Wallace, pastor of Christ United Methodist Church. "We don't know what we're going to be needing to say, but let's make sure we have that together for whoever gets elected to let people know that the movement for peace and justice continues. That's fundamental."
As Stansbery put it, the main way the election impacted their movement was that "We'll be the only ones out there if Kerry wins, and we'll have a lot of friends if Bush wins."
Looks like they'll have a lot of company. Last Wednesday several hundred people attended the rally, and Wallace was pleasantly surprised by the number of young people involved, spilling over from the various election-related activist movements of the past year.
"I think we know our job is as big as ever," Wallace said of four more years of the Bush administration. "I don't know who it will discourage, really. I think for most of us, it's a long journey, and we've always known that."
Still, even if a narrow majority of Americans decided not to boot the president in a nail-bitingly close election, Wallace said some encouraging signs have emerged from election-related polls, citing the three-to-one margin in one poll that showed most Americans think the war in Iraq has made us less safe.
As a reverend of the Methodist faith, Bush's own denomination of Christianity, Wallace finds some of the president's policies particularly upsetting, especially when the president tries to frame them in terms of religion.
"I think he's misused it," Wallace said. "He's been seen by people as strong when morality was the issue. Well, war and peace is a morality issue. Poverty is a morality issue, when we're mistreating the poor."
"It upsets me a lot that he's claiming Christian faith and I think he's doing things that are very contrary," Wallace continued. "If you look at the Bible, it says a whole lot about the poor, and Jesus talked a lot about how he was not into violence. To think that we use Jesus in these ways is, to me, appalling." (J. Caleb Mozzocco, "Columbus Peace Movement: Second Term, Same as the First," Columbus Alive, <http://www.columbusalive.com/2004/20041110/111004/11100412.html>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>