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Oakland, Cal.-"Barbara Lee we are proud of you," said many
hand-painted
signs at a rally on Oct. 21. Well over a thousand people, many of them
Black, wanted to show support and appreciation for Congresswoman Lee's
courageous lone vote in the House of Representatives opposing the
use-of-force resolution, which gave Bush extraordinary powers.
In her Sept. 14 speech she said, "There must be some of us who say,
let's
step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions
today-let us more fully understand their consequencesŠ. As we act, let us
not become the evil that we deplore."
In the Bay Area, where every weekend since Sept. 11 has seen an anti-war
demonstration of several thousand with teach-ins and meetings in between,
this one felt different. It was a genuine celebration of a difference we
might be able to make. Nobody at this demonstration ignored the horrific
act of Sept. 11 or tried to rationalize it. Yet it was clear that war is
not the answer to this terror.
Two women I met wore hand-made sandwich boards announcing that all of their
sales of bumper stickers, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world
blind,"
would go to support the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan.
They are not part of any organization, but felt they needed to do something
beyond coming to demonstrations. At a table at the edge of the crowd, two
other women were distributing a poster they created calling for peace.
They, too, were not affiliated with anyone else.
Langston Hughes' poems read by Danny Glover and the speech by Alice Walker
were among the expressions that linked Black opposition in America to the
dream of freedom. The militarization of our thinking is an impediment to
freedom here and around the world.
-Marxist-Humanist participants
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