> I maintain the march is a fine thing for those attending. It's a
> morale-booster. Nobody cares about ANSWER or the speakers. From what I
> could see of the program, the speakers were a sorry bunch. I didn't listen
> to any speeches.
>
> It's unfortunate that all of the neophytes attending could not be exposed to
> better political substance. Why can't all the lefts with minds beautiful
> enough to look down upon ANSWER ever mount their own effort? It's also
> pitiful that the big DP-oriented constituency groups -- the AFL, N.O.W.,
> NAACP, etc. -- couldn't pull something like this together themselves.
Large national protest mobilizations often have ancillary positive effects--new activists educated, outreach to the public, and so on--but the chief purpose of these mobilizations is not to inspire newbie activists. The purpose should be to change government policy or mobilzie the public. The protest today is another failure in a long line of failures that the mainstream peace movement has inflicted on us.
If you want to expose neophytes to substantial political substance, there are better ways to accomplish that. But these mass national mobilizations are the chief strategy of the main liberal/left antiwar coalitions. Even if you grant ANSWER/UFPJ credit for 100,000 attendees (which I firmly don't see), the protest today is an utter failure.
Today's protest in Washington is a failure because it fails to demonstrate that the anti-war movement has grown since the NYC protests last year or ANSWER protests of several years ago. Given that most of the American public right now is against Bush AND the war, if the peace and anti-war movements were resonating with the public, the attendance should be closer to a million, not 100,000 or the more likely 50-75,000.
Let's face the ugly truth--these protests consist of the usual suspects, the people who attend every rally in Washington, plus a few new people. These national mobilizations are lazy activism and they are demonstrate that the mainstream liberal/left peace movement has no strategy for ending this war. If anything, their strategy can be pared down to: do the same thing over and over again and make sure that our leaders are on the stage and at the front of the march.
I think Max is totally wrong about these protests being a morale-booster. They may be a friendly reunion of the usual suspects who get excited about being together, but healthy movements that are growing would have produced bigger numbers, or, at least evidence of more anti-war activism around the country. What we should be concerned about is the growing number of our friends who are turned off by these mobilizations. They are withdrawing from more than attending these protests, they are tuning out local activism. I run into more and more of these people all of the time. They tell me that they don't care about national protests and say that can't relate to them.
If you want to boost morale, you give people victories. Today was not "Seattle". I'll bet that most of us will forget about today's protests by the end of next week. A year from now, nobody will be fondly talking about "September 24, 2005".
But I've been saying this for four years...
Chuck0