Markos wrote:
Media savvy will carry a movement much further than any march, regardless if it had 100,000 or 500,000 or a million people. Cindy Sheehan had the right idea with the Crawford protest — there was a story line and drama which the media could use to create a narrative, hence a long-running story.
Cindy had the right “idea”? That’s hilarious. You’ve never lost a child or you wouldn’t say that.
Cindy Sheehan had PAIN. From her PAIN she, on her own, decided to go to Crawford, and camp out to confront Bush. To try to stop him from killing another mother’s son.
Cindy Sheehan had no clue that bunches of people would come join her, to spend time asking the same question, or that it would become a media moment. After all, she’d done scores of other actions, other speeches, that didn’t provoke all that.
She didn’t know how long she’d be there, if Bush would come out the first or second day. She didn’t care if she was arrested, run over, made fun of by Bush or by national news. Enough pain puts you past caring about details. She just knew she had to stand up and do what she, as one person, could do to try to stop the war.
Why? So years later, when people asked her, “What did you do to try to stop it?” — she wouldn’t have to say, “Nothing, I sat home in my living room and watched TV.”
There comes a time in a person’s life when they have to stand up and do SOMETHING to “speak truth to power”. To go to the seat of power, and stand up against it.
And that is EXACTLY what everyone at the march in Washington DC, or Seattle, or Sagebrush, Nebraska was doing. Standing up for what’s right. Voting with their feet, their spines, demanding that their government listen to them and get out of this despicable war.
You think it didn’t make any difference that millions of people marched against the Iraq war before it happened? Think again. It was an unprecedented event, a pivotal event in world history.
Maybe you think marching doesn’t take guts, but maybe that’s because you haven’t tried it. It took guts for Cindy to go alone to Texas. It took guts for every single person to go to DC. To every single local march. If you’ve never tried to get yourself off your rear to a march, you don’t know that.
To imply — to even imply! — that one second of the time and effort that anyone spent getting to an anti-war march should have been spent doing something else is to entirely misunderstand the nature of social and political change.
It isn’t an “either / or” decision. It’s an “and / and” situation. Every single time that someone stands up for what’s right, for what’s true, for better treatment for humanity, it matters.
We can’t intellectually “discover” one perfect approach and then get people behind it! Life isn’t like that, perfection doesn’t exist. Life is too complex for any one person to dictate a “right strategy” to everyone else. (Yoo hoo, that’s what’s wrong with a “dictatorship”.)
We’re weaving a better world. A military planner once said, “If I come at you from many sides, it’s because the frontal attack is obsolete.” We need to celebrate each and every person who does something to make things better — no matter what it is – AND celebrate the person next to them who made a different choice.
And / and.
Thank you for marching, all of you, and thank YOU for writing a book! And thank you for taking in a homeless kid, and thank YOU for Freeway Blogging, and thank YOU for helping the senior on your block, and thank YOU for running a solar panel business and thank YOU for working to establish paper trails for all votes in your state.
This positive action and that positive action, all adding up into streams and rivers of change. Eventually changing our world. And / and.
TOGETHER we’ll get there.