Protests Were Good Wake-up Call

When I told two young legal secretaries in our office, one in her 20s and the other perhaps in her early 30s, that they should avoid the 10th and Market area going home on 3/5/03 as there was a protest taking place there, they both asked me: "What are they protesting?" I laughed bitterly and told them, "the pending war in Iraq." My doubts about school walk-outs ended right then as these protests forced these 2 people, and hopefully others, to wake up to reality!

Others in the office, including attorneys, could not understand why there were traffic problems in the morning in downtown San Francisco as they had no idea of this protest. They, too, finally got their wake up call.

If the people of the world wonder why we do not have more protests, these examples are typical of what all political people like myself face. Right here in San Francisco, with posters on the poles in the vicinity of our offices and in many residential areas, with 200,000 marching for peace on January 18 and February 16, 2003, with very active peace organizations in all the 9 counties of the Bay Area, we still have supposedly educated people asking what is going on?

They know all about the football games and the Hollywood movies, but events that directly impact our lives and our tax dollars are completely ignored. This is difficult to fathom but is the reality we all face when we build our peace movement.

Our school system is falling apart, we have no national healthcare system, we have martial law at the airport due to the government's Reichstag Fire of 9/11/01, we have the destruction of the Bill of Rights, we have 15,000 homeless right here in San Francisco, and much more, and yet the average American still needs these protests to wake them up!

As to the schools that took a negative view, they should be told that these protests should be treated as social studies field trips connecting the loss of school funding to the increase in military funding. Apparently, it is protests like these that we have to do just to tell the average American that making war is worthy of our attention, particularly when it is our tax dollars at waste!

For all of my fellow political junkies who live, breathe, devour and act on political ideas, books, websites, demonstrations and the like, you can rest assured that we have just begun to organize!