Reply #5: Did posting that make you feel less guilty (about not coming)? [View All]

It's always interesting that, after one of these huge rallies,
where tens or hundreds of thousands of people make the effort
to actually get there and say SOMETHING, we always have
posts that decry what we said.

Yes, we probably could do without the "Free Mumia" and "Free
Leonard Peltier" people. But the taped message from Mumia
actually was precisely on point and much more germane than
I was expecting to hear. And the various Palestinian and other
Arab speakers who spoke merely identified for us the Elephant in
the Room, and elephant which many here deliberately choose to ignore:
That there will never be peace from the Middle East until
there is peace and justice IN the Middle East.

And, program speakers aside, the crowd's message wasn't in the
least bit confused. Here it is, boiled down for you:

• The Iraq war is wrong
  
  
• It is one of the many bad things the Bush "administration"
  has done.
  
  
• As long as the Bush administration is in power, bad things will
  continue, so
  
  
• End the occupation AND end the Bush administration (the
  root cause of the problem)
  
  

And if you don't like that message (or the ANSWER/UFPJ message),
then the answer's simple: organize your own demonstration. Get 100K
people to Washington and 30-40K to San Francisco. If you've got a
good message, I'll even help. But right now, ANSWER and UFPJ are
doing the job that you appaerntly think could be done better.

Maybe you should prove you can, or re-think your decision to stay away.

Atlant