The United for Peace and Justice march on Saturday, Jan. 27 showed Congress that an estimated half-million Americans are opposed to the escalation of troops in Iraq passionately enough that they were willing to travel to Washington, D.C., and spend a day protesting it. It is absolutely vital that this be the case. The American people have a responsibility to pay attention to what their government is doing and to make noise when their administration is perpetrating war for profit in foreign lands. Going to pre-planned marches is part of fulfilling this responsibility. It's important to make headlines and come together to communicate and collaborate. But as I walked through the slow-moving crowd that Saturday - the parents pushing strollers and the kids with hand-painted signs, the performers on stilts, the drummers, the people chanting, everyone following the pre-determined route that snaked circuitously around the Capitol building - I felt like there was something missing.
There has been some debate recently among young leftists about the efficacy of marches in promoting the kind of radical change that the political situation in our country so clearly mandates. I believe these marches are absolutely necessary - if for no other reason than that they are evidence of a spirit of dissent that must exist in any truly democratic society. Protests send a message to the public that the government's actions can and should be questioned. They encourage people to think critically about the government's policies and they let the people in power know that we are not complacent. I remember reading an essay by Arundhati Roy in which she thanked the American people who marched in opposition to the Iraq war and showed the world that not all of us are complicit in the actions of our government. It is important for us to call the government out, to unify and to prove that we have a pulse and a brain. I don't think I could live in a society where such marches didn't take place.
But something about the Jan. 27 march felt insufficient, and I think it was the lack of rage that we should all rightfully be feeling about our government's actions. More than 3,000 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq. The occupation has killed 655,000 Iraqis, according to a Johns Hopkins report. Guantanamo Bay is still open, despite the flagrant torture taking place there. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are terrified, traumatized and ill-equipped, and it's looking more and more likely that the same spirit of corporate greed that has destroyed Iraq will bring us into Iran.
It's easy to forget these things when so many people are standing around holding signs with puns that insult the president's intelligence or portray him cartoonishly with devil horns or a Pinocchio nose. Perhaps humor is a way for people opposed to the war to deal with the terror and anger they feel towards the current administration, but humor is also an extremely effective way to ignore the true depth of the problem. Joking about George Bush is unproductive - he is already a laughing-stock, and laughing at him more is not going to end the war.
Not that I think a protest should necessarily be all business. I found the overall tone of the march to be joyful - it was a nice day, and people were happy to see so many others out in support of the cause. Someone was handing out stickers with smiley faces on them. Does it detract from the cause to wear a smiley-face sticker and rejoice in the fact that we are united against the war? I don't know. I wore one. I'm still not sure.
We need to find a balance between being happy to see each other and sending a clear message about the fact that we won't tolerate U.S. occupation in the Middle East. Scripted marches, though important, have become something the government and the public expect - it is no longer a novelty if half a million people turn out to an antiwar protest. Though I was not part of the small group of young people who attempted to storm the Capitol building and I'm not sure I see that as the most pragmatic approach, I at least have to commend them for expressing the sort of unbridled rage that we don't see enough of in our so-called democracy. Actions outside of the normal repertoire of protest express a profound sense of disapproval for the government's actions. Things like occupying a senator's office or attempting to enter a government building demonstrate to the public and the administration that people care profoundly enough about stopping the war that they are willing to risk arrest to make a statement about it. There is an urgency in such forms of protest that reflects the direness of the current situation more powerfully than a pre-planned march.
Even if the people in front of the Capitol appeared crazy to those who chose to stay at home and watch the march on TV, their energy and willingness to act demonstrate a passionate dedication to stopping the war that is difficult for the government and the public to ignore. I certainly don't endorse violence as a form of protesting violence, but there is something deeply troubling to me about the fact that we were all so well-behaved.
We shouldn't be behaving ourselves. We should be yelling louder. There should have been a million people out there, or 2 million. The amount of dissent surrounding U.S. occupation in the Middle East is disproportionate to the amount of suffering it has caused. We need to find new ways to say: "We won't take it anymore."
Amy Littlefield '09 is a member of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Brown's student antiwar group.
