An Anti-War Protest in The Borough

Its taken me a few days to sit down and get my thoughts around the status of protesting in The Borough. It's kind of a sad state of affairs - in all fairness, I should tell you about the whole event so you can understand the dilemma more completely.

Generally being on an organizations email list means you get lots of stuff, sometimes it calls for an action, like a petition or letters to representatives - click through and it's pretty simple. It allows you to accomplish something without even typing anything in, and I think is the best alternative if you want your voice to be heard (or read).

Then there are the in-person requests. Move On (Moveon.org) and UFPJ (United for Peace and Justice) do an excellent job of creating events - but we may be at a point of saturation.

The September vigil was an event that was happening nationwide on Tuesday evening, as a protest against the war in Iraq. The Borough did not have such a great turnout - about 40 or 50 die-hard protesters were there on the steps of Borough Hall - and the crowd being so raucous, there were 2 cops hanging out int he back.

So there was an opening speech, then some words by a woman from Brooklyn Parents for Peace (which is now just Brooklyn for Peace), then they broke out into groups and they read the war calendar. Now for those of us who are not up on our lingo jingo - this is an accounting, rather matter of factly of the date (going day by day), the number of US soldiers killed and where they were from. (with an intermittent chorus of "and how many Iraqi civilians").

As powerful and emotional the whole process was (an hour of Feb 3, 3 US soldiers were killed, they were from Plano, Texas, Culver City, Clifornia and Miami, Florida...and how many Iraqi civilians...feb 4 130 us soldiers were injured..etc. etc.).

The point is that as profound as the listening of the list was, I already know how horrible the war is, umm we're against it thats why we were there. preaching to the converted.

Maybe we are just too saturated with trying to stop the war, maybe it has gone on so long that people are apathetic and preoccupied by their sky rocketing sub-prime mortgages - but we didn't even try to engage the public or make a statement to someone maybe who would change their mind...so what was the point? shameless self promotion is what it felt like.