Well, today I went to the anti-war rally in Central Park, and it was a pretty amazing thing. It's nice to know that there are so many people who feel the same way I do about the possible war with Iraq.
And when I say "many," I do mean many. I have no way of estimating how many people were there, certainly, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were in the tens of thousands. I went looking online but didn't find any mention of the rally in the Yahoo! page. Which sorta dove-tails with Noam Chomsky's contention that this sort of thing wouldn't get any attention, since the same powerful business interests who "own" and run the government also own most of the media sources.
I have to tell you, sometimes Noam Chomsky's "everything is controlled by the rich guys" routine seems a little too conspiracy-theory-esque to ring true to me. But then there are the times like today, when I see Tom Daschle promising broad support for a war on Iraq, when only a week or two ago he was all about being the opposition. No doubt the Democrats got some calls from their rich friends telling them how it needed to be.
I'm a little skeptical, I have to say, about the Pre$ident's contention that we should attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein could strike at any moment. It just seems to me a little too terribly convenient that Saddam is suddenly this mega-threat, when we bombed him into oblivion ten years ago. If he's been building up this capability and we have proof that he intends to use it, why the hell did we wait 'til right now to decide to do something about it?
It just doesn't add up.
And you know what boils my blood? When the pre$ident has the nerve to say in a speech, "we have no quarrel with the Iraqi people." We don't? Then why did we kill 100,000 of them in the last war? I think they have a quarrel with us.
Now for the Gemini in me:
This rally was great, but I was really taken aback by the large number of freakish fringe hangers-on who were bottom feeding at the edge of the crowd. The Worker's Revolution party. And the booths from the Green Party with signs insisting that both Democrats and Republicans are evil, so if we want to prevent war, we should only be voting Green. How 'bout that? I'm evil! I guess I better rally behind Pre$ident Bu$h and join his evil crusade to suppress the evil Muslims!
I'm not much of a bible guy, but I have to tell you I think I kinda know how Jesus felt when he came across the moneylenders in the temple. I really wanted to take a baseball bat to many of these booths.
And the idiocy wasn't limited to the fringe, I'm afraid. One after another, well known people took to the podium to express their opposition to the war, for very valid reasons. And then the organizers made the moronic mistake of letting some college girl get up there who went on to link stopping the war with Iraq with stopping eating meat and wearing clothes from the Gap 'cuz every time we do we're supporting slavery. Now, granted, I'm not exactly a big supporter of the Gap, but I refuse to see the cow I eat as a slave.
I wonder, really, how the opposition to the war expects to be taken seriously by anybody when they allow this girl to take the microphone and go on a rampage about how the older generations goals are not our own, and linking all the evil in the world to the people behind the push for war.
It's the same problem I had in the first days after 9/11; we're not gonna get anywhere if we demonize the people who don't think the way we do. I don't think George Bush is evil. I think he's a puppet of misdirected war-mongers in service to oil companies and industrialists who're gonna profit from whatever happens in Iraq. And so I feel it's my duty as a person of conscience and an American to oppose what they're trying to do.
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