Boycott Antiwar Businesses

Fear, anger, and a balmy Indian Summer Saturday afternoon jump started San Francisco's facile peace movement this week. A goodly number turned out for its ballyhooed Dolores Park peace rally.
With near uniformity, they cheered speaker after speaker who attributed racism to homefront attack response, warning of impending indiscriminate mass slaughter of innocent Afghanistan bystanders by the U.S. military.
Never mind American response seems carefully crafted around precision commando missions to avoid mass carnage, the peace movement articulated its decades old message well: America pushes its weight around, plays favorites, and deserves to suffer for it.
Well, maybe so. Old Glory is stained with a lot of blood, much of it unheroic, and bled from its own citizens as well as others.
But, rather than a concrete entity, America more accurately always has been a teeming mass of humans trying to make the very best of existence. Yes, they've done the unspeakable, as humans are possessed of such, here and in other countries.
They've also, by continuous reach for the best, managed to slap together a mechanism -- a society -- that strains for, and often delivers, nurtured diversity.
And bin Laden's fundamentalist Islam probably can be said to be free of racism -- anyone's welcome as long as they conform their lives abjectly.
In the almost three weeks since more than 6,500 Americans were pulverized, I've constantly been struck that those opposing war mobilization express shock, horror, and even anger over American dead...in a perfunctory tone, preceding their litany of America's backward ways.
As this is written, some 92% of USA folks think protection of America's balky, backward path toward bettering things is worth war when threatened.
Many of Saturday's mostly white, mostly well scrubbed crowd return Monday to relative daily contentment.
Peace movement leaders will return to protected platforms to use the American tragedy of September 11 to once again dust off their international agenda, contemptibly but freely.
Yes, we are a country of protected dissent, and the peace movement should have such vigorously returned.
Businesses sporting those signs insinuating war mobilization is murderously racist should be peacefully, freely held out for contempt...and boycotted.