Friday, January 26, 2007

"It won't be just grayheads at Saturday's peace rally" (UPDATED)

UPDATE: More details here, from United for Peace.

Susan Paynter (Seatle P-I):
I got that old angry feeling last week reading about mom and school bus driver Pat McCune sending cookies to her son, 22-year-old Redmond High grad James Riekena, in Iraq. A roadside bomb killed him before the package arrived. She hopes the other guys in his National Guard unit enjoy them.

I got it again this week listening to the president's State of the Union speech and walked away humming, "All he is saying is give war a chance."

But I really felt it talking with 28-year-old Jesse Hagopian. Hearing him, I remembered my own red-eared fury as a rookie reporter still wet behind the ears with news ink as we took to the streets to say "no more" to senseless, endless death in Vietnam.

Some of those who are convinced that we can change our destructive direction again -- who believe it strongly enough to get up off their glutes to march -- are the same indefatigable souls who protested that other war, bless 'em.

But a greener crop of objectors is being watered by the blood spilled since March of '03. Along with the gray hairs, they are the organizers of Saturday's march rallied by the January 27th Coalition to Bring the Troops Home Now.

It starts at 1 p.m. at the Center for Social Justice, 2111 E. Union St., moving to the Military Recruitment Center at 2301 S. Jackson St., then to the Langston Hughes Center at 104 17th Ave. S. at 3, where speakers will include Lt. Ehren Watada. He'll face a court-martial Feb. 5 for his refusal to deploy to Iraq based on his claim that it is an illegal war.

Teen Peace and Youth Against War and Racism will be there along with Green Party members and Iraq Veterans Against the War. So will Hagopian, a middle school teacher recently graduated from the University of Washington. And, if his last name sounds familiar, he's the son of Amy Hagopian, the former school board member and activist who fiercely pushed against the presence of military recruiters in the halls of Seattle's high schools, including Garfield, where her son graduated in '97.

"My mom is my hero," Jesse Hagopian said -- something you don't hear every day.

True story: His mom was off to try to shut down the Trident submarine installation the day she found out she was pregnant with him. Just that once, she didn't go.

As a toddler, he rode her shoulders at marches against South African apartheid.

"She says the right thing even when it's uncomfortable," Hagopian said. "The counterrecruitment movement at Garfield was very polarizing. Some parents thanked her for standing up, others screamed at her."

He did not immediately march in his mother's footsteps. It was a three-year stint with the Teach for America program in a crumbling, leaking Washington, D.C., school just 10 blocks from the White House that peeled back his eyelids.

The kids would work for months on a project only to have it flooded by rain from the roof. There were few books and no playground as the war tab rose to billions a month.

"OK," Hagopian thought. "Now I know what my family was talking about."

He got busy. Last fall he was campaign manager for Green Party senatorial candidate Aaron Dixon because Dixon's "out of war and into our communities" message clicked.

At Saturday's march, Hagopian will moderate a panel and give some introductory remarks. He'll talk about opposing the troop surge as a "new way forward" in Iraq. And try to tell the Democrats who now control Congress that they will fail a real opportunity if they don't withhold funds for that escalation.

"All of them were elected because people were fed up with the war. Seventy percent of American oppose the surge so, if they are ever going to stand up, now is the time for more than a symbolic resolution."

Hagopian hopes momentum will build from Saturday's march followed by Watada's court-martial, then by the March anniversary of the war. He hopes masses of people will turn out on Saturday to lend the crowd confidence. And that, if they come, so will the media.

He knows people think that the young care more about iPods than about fighting for social change. But Hagopian believes that people are not apathetic, they just need to see that collective action works to persuade them that there is something they can actually do.

It wasn't one protest or image that turned the public against Vietnam, although body bags on the nightly news and that "Cronkite moment" helped fill streets and screens.

Now, Hagopian believes, people are angry enough for another surge of activism.

It's an old feeling, but it's marching on new feet.

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