Tonight I sat down and watched the second half of the Northern Iowa-Kansas upset. Thrilling stuff. Reminded me again why I watch the tournament each year. What else could reduce a grown man to screaming and convulsing over two college teams that aren’t even Big East? Nothing like it.
Seven years ago I was watching the tournament when I heard the news. After all the strutting and swaggering at the joke that is the UN; after the Colin Powells and Dominique de Villepins had exited stage left; after our impotent howls in the press and in the streets, and after all the lies, the sewer-stream of filthy goddamned lies from the throne, the endless droning repetition of lies by CNN and The New York Times, after more bullshit than I’ve ever seen in my life–there was the President, live from the Oval Office, telling me that he’d just bombed Baghdad. I don’t remember what game I was watching. I know that I turned it off and walked outside, smoked a cigarette or two, and thought: we failed.
There aren’t too many things worse than failing so abysmally at something so important.
But I do know that giving up is worse. And when it comes to the wars, that’s precisely what we’ve done.
That March, way back ’03, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Boston.
We did it again in March 2004.
In March 2005.
In March 2006.
In March 2007.
In March 2008.
In March 2009.
And we did it again today:
Except that there weren’t tens of thousands out there today. There weren’t thousands. There weren’t hundreds. There were tens. There were hundreds of people on the Common today, so many that the antiwar demonstration was wholly lost amid the tourists, the vendors, the girls in their summer dresses. A small handful turned out to commemorate the start of an action that has cost 100,000 Iraqi lives and those of 4,000 Americans. And 714 billion dollars.
And to shake their puny collective fist at a state that continues to perpetuate the carnage across Iraq, and across Afghanistan, and in Pakistan, and god only knows where else, because neither you nor I do.
And I wondered: would there have been larger, angrier crowds were McCain our President? It’s tempting to think so, tempting to assume that it’s shame on the part of the many who voted for and support Obama that keeps them home now, those who can no longer say “not in my name,” because with each of their votes, each put their names on the war. It must be hard to demonstrate against the same wars your candidate had made it crystal clear he would continue to prosecute if elected.
But there’s more to it than that, because I’ve watched the numbers dwindling year by year, and I see I was just as dispirited back in March 2008, already too deeply aware of the state of the so-called “antiwar movement.” Which is I suppose alive and well at conferences and seminars and in the pages of journals eagerly snapped up by the choir, but I think we’re all aware of just how far our earnest PowerPoint presentations and strategizing sessions and theorizing gets us. And I suppose others will turn to me and say, well, yeah, and just how much did your freaking marches accomplish?
I don’t know. Not much, I guess. Though I’m thinkin’ about Country Joe MacDonald and what he said from a stage on August 16, 1969…
“Listen, people, I don’t know how you expect to ever stop the war if you can’t sing any louder than that. There’s 300,00 of you fuckers out there, and I want you to start singing.”
… and I’m guessin’ that there ARE 300,000 of you right here in the region who oppose the war, and my guess is that if 300,000 turned out, took to the streets, started singin’, as it were… … well, a man can dream.
Or maybe it is all just some attempt at catharsis. I’m sometimes not even sure why I go to these things. I was actually touch-and-go about heading into Boston after a two-hour Saturday morning meeting, feeling maybe like I had done my service to the revolution for the day. But someone else on our telecon had to leave early to make a rally way out in the western part of the state, and that meant something; and when Ann encouraged me to drive in to town, I told her I would because I should. Like going to church. Or, perhaps, more aptly: a funeral. There are occasions so somber, so literally awe-some, that they need to be to be marked, to be com-memorated: remembered together.
So that’s reason enough, on a personal level, but we have all have out ways of sacralizing a beautiful as what we got yesterday. Still, I couldn’t help but wish more people had turned out. 300,000. When there is a demo like this, and so few show up, the message sent to politicians is clear: the citizenry does not give a fuck; proceed as planned. Hell, in Thailand, they’re soaking their t-shirts in their own blood; and here in Boston, the Teabaggers were out–they rallied a few blocks away in front of Fanueil Hall, unhappy about that Real Big Vote on Healthcare Reform today. Hmmm. A lotta people I know, they’re unhappy too. They want single-payer. They want everyone in the United States to have healthcare, seem to feel that the state of your health shouldn’t depend on the state of your bank account. But looking round at the carnage wrought by war, and looking at the American people’s determination to ignore it, I wonder, in my more cynical moods, whether the American people even freaking deserve it.
But thanks to United for Justice with Peace, the Stop the Wars Coalition, and the Committee for Human Rights for holding the event. Have a look at their web sites. Maybe join up with them. Maybe see you next year–because as I wrote upon returning from the March ’08 commemoration, “…despair banished in the stiff Boston breezes, I guess I’ll wind up doing pretty much the same thing next March. And, likely enough, the March after that.”
Damn.
Healthcare isn’t going to reform itself.
The environment isn’t going to save itself.
And the wars are not going to end themselves.
I started with Country Joe.
I’ll end with Patti Smith.
Life is filled with holes, Johnny’s laying there…
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy,
Can’t you show me nothing but surrender ?”