Op-Ed

Voices from the Frontlines of Protest,

Katrina and Cindy Blow into Town
By Tom Engelhardt
Photos by Tam Turse

George was out of town, of course, in the "battle cab" at the U.S. Northern Command's headquarters in Colorado Springs, checking out the latest in homeland-security technology and picking up photo ops; while White House aides, as the Washington Post wrote that morning, were attempting "to reestablish Bush's swagger." The Democrats had largely fled town as well, leaving hardly a trace behind. Another hurricane was blasting into Texas and the media was preoccupied, but nothing, it seemed, mattered. Americans turned out in poll-like numbers for the Saturday antiwar demonstration in Washington and I was among them. So many of us were there, in fact, that my wife (with friends at the back of the march) spent over two hours as it officially "began," moving next to nowhere at all

This was, you might say, the "connection demonstration." In the previous month, two hurricanes, one of them human, had blown through American life; and between them, they had, for many people, linked the previously unconnected -- Bush administration policies and the war in Iraq to their own lives. So, in a sense, this might be thought of as the demonstration created by Hurricanes Cindy Sheehan and Katrina. It was, finally, a protest that, not just in its staggering turnout but in its make-up, reflected the changing opinion-polling figures in this country. This was a majority demonstration and the commonest statement I heard in the six hours I spent talking to as many protesters as I could was: "This is my first demonstration."

In addition, there were sizeable contingents of military veterans and of the families of soldiers in Iraq, or of those who were killed in Iraq. No less important, scattered through the crowd were many, as I would discover, whose lives had been affected deeply by George Bush's wars.

This was an America on very determined parade. Even though the march, while loud and energetic, had an air of relaxed calmness to it, the words that seemed to come most quickly to people's lips were: infuriated, enraged, outraged, had it, had enough, fed up. In every sense, in fact, this was a demonstration of words. I have never seen such a sea of words -- of signs, almost invariably handmade along with individually printed posters, T-shirts, labels, stickers. It often seemed that, other than myself, there wasn't an individual in the crowd without a sign and that no two of them were quite the same.

The White House, which the massed protesters marched past, was in every sense the traffic accident of this event. The crowds gridlocked there; the noise rose to a roar; the signs waved, a veritable sea of them, and they all, essentially said, "No more, not me!" {mosgoogle right}

Here's just a modest sample of those that caught my eye, reflecting as they did humor, determination, and more than anything else, outrage: "Yeeha is not a foreign policy"; "Making a killing"; "Ex-Republican. Ask me why"; "Blind Faith in Bad Leadership is not Patriotism"; "Bush is a disaster!" (with the President's face in the eye of a hurricane); "He's a sick nut my Grandma says" (with a photo of an old woman in blue with halo-like rays emanating from her); "Osama bin Forgotten"; "Cindy speaks for me"; "Make levees not war"; "W's the Devil, One Degree of Separation"; "Dick Cheney Eats Kittens" (with a photo of five kittens); "Bush busy creating business for morticians worldwide"; "Liar, born liar, born-again liar"; "Dude -- There's a War Criminal in My White House!!!"; "Motivated moderates against Bush"; "Bored with Empire"; "Pro Whose Life?"; "War is Terrorism with a Bigger Budget."

Because just about everybody had the urge to express him or herself, I largely followed the signs to my interviewees. People were unfailingly willing to talk (and no less unfailingly polite as I desperately tried to scribble down their words). The meetings were brief and, for me, remarkably moving, not least because Americans regularly turn out to be so articulate, even eloquent, and because so many people are thinking so hard about the complex political fix we find ourselves in today. I've done my level best to catch (sometimes in slightly telescoped form and hopefully without too many errors) just what people had to say and how open they were -- the first-timers and the veterans of former demonstrations alike.

A day of walking and intensive talking still gave me only the smallest sampling of such a demonstration. To my amazement, on my way to the Metro heading back to New York at about 5:30 (almost seven hours after I first set out for the Mall), I was still passing people marching. So I can't claim that what follows are the voices of the Washington demonstration, just that they're the voices of my demonstration, some of the thirty-odd people to whom I managed to talk in the course of those hours. They are but a drop in the ocean of people who turned out in Washington, while the President was in absentia and the Democrats nowhere to be seen, to express in the most personal and yet collective way possible their upset over the path America has taken in the world. As far as I'm concerned, we seldom hear the voices of Americans in our media society very clearly. So I turn the rest of this dispatch over to those voices. Dip in wherever you want -- as if you were at the march too.

Angry Graphic Designer: On the corner by the Metro, we meet Bill Cutter and a friend. Cutter is carrying a sign with a Bush image and enough words to drown a city. We stop to copy it down. It has a headline that asks, "What did you do on your summer vacation?" Inside a bubble is the President's reply: "Well, I rode my bike, killed some troops, killed even more Iraqis, raised lots of money for my friends, ignored a grieving mom and, for extra credit, I destroyed an American city!" Cutter, a forty-five year old Washingtonian with a tiny goatee, says simply enough, "I'm just an angry graphic designer with a printer." The previous day he made his sign and his friend's (an image of Bush over the question, "Intelligent design?"-- and, on the back, Dick Cheney with quiz-like, check-off boxes that say, "Evil, Crazy, or Just Plain Mean, Pick any three!" We're all looking for the demonstration's initial gathering place, and so we fall in step and begin to chat. A sign-maker will prove an omen for this day -- the march will be a Katrina, a cacophony, of handmade signs, waves and waves of them, expressing every bit of upset and pent-up frustration that the polls tell us a majority of Americans feel.

Cutter explains his presence this way: "I figure that if we live here and don't do something, it's ridiculous. Cindy Sheehan's sacrifice is so much huger than anything anyone has done, so how could we not?"

On what is to be done in Iraq itself, he first says, "It's a tough one" -- a comment I will hear again and again, even from those intent on seeing American troops withdraw immediately. On this day, you would be hard pressed not to come away with a sense of Americans in protest over Bush's war and the mess he's brought to our very doorstep, and yet deeply puzzled by what is now to be done and how exactly to do it. "We've gotten ourselves down a rat hole," he continues. "I don't know what to do. Ultimately, I think it's going to end up as a civil war there and we'll have caused it. I only wish the Democratic Party had the balls and would seize the moment. It's like they're practicing the politics of safety. Do what's safe, not what's right." He pauses. "It's the politics of expediency," he adds with disgust just as we arrive at a plaza filled with a sea of pink balloons -- a sign that the antiwar women's group Code Pink is gathering here. We part at this point with him saying brightly, "I'm not sure ‘enjoy yourself' is quite the right thing to say... but enjoy yourself!"

Disabled (Peacetime) Vet: On the plaza we run into 48 year-old Steve Hausheer ("How-ser," he says, "but if you look at the spelling, you'll never pronounce it right.") -- or rather he rolls past us at quite a clip in his wheelchair. He's dressed severely in black, but has a kindly, open face. When I stop him, he swivels around, removes his black-leather wheeling globes ("my hands are a mess...") and shakes firmly. "I'm disabled," he says, "but I was in the peacetime military. I'm a peacetime vet. Seventy-six, seventy-seven. I just missed the Vietnam War." He's unsure about giving an interview. "I get really excited. I'm impassioned about this cause, but then everything just flies out of my head!" He's from New York, he tells me, and adds, excitement in his voice, "I've looked forward to doing something more than just talk to my friends and donate. I'm just so tired of seeing this country head in the wrong direction. It's time to get proactive!

"We need to support the troops," he insists with feeling and then, after a pause, "by bringing them home. We're stuck now. We've torn Iraq apart and there are going to be no easy answers. George Bush has taken us so far down the wrong road that it's going to be very difficult to find our way back. My wish is that the people speak up until Congress and the other forty percent of America that still thinks he's doing a good job change their mind.

"The men we're trying to bring home are true heroes and we need to treat them as such. It isn't bad enough that he put them in harm's way through a lie, now he's working to treat them as anything but heroes. Can you believe it? He wants to cut their disability payments!"

I thank him, we shake hands, he begins to don his gloves and then, at the last second, he calls me back. "One more thing," he says and begins to give me this final comment in a slow, measured way as you might dictate to a stenographer: "I want to put this country back into the hands of men and women who are dedicated to serving the American people instead of themselves and their cronies." He stops, satisfied, and then adds, "This would be my quote, if you have to pick one."

Ms. Statue of Liberty: Just down the plaza near a Montana Women For Peace sign, a group of women of all ages are scurrying to get their Styrofoam green Statue-of-Liberty crowns and green robes in place. A welcoming, white-haired Norma Buchanan is among them. "I am fifty-six years old. I have never been in a peace march in my life. I just snapped and I had to be here. Enough is enough. This war, the leadership, is against the law. What I hope is that, at a grassroots level, we're going to wake up the forty percent of Americans who are still asleep at the wheel. I hope we're going to stop worrying about what kind of dog Paris Hilton is carrying around or who's divorcing whom, and pay some attention to what matters!"

Suddenly a cry goes up, "The march is starting!" It's true. Hundreds of pink balloons, all attached to Code Pink women, are slowing beginning to bob out of the plaza heading for the gathering area near the Washington Monument where Cindy Sheehan is to speak and the official march is to begin. So Norma Buchanan excuses herself, picks up her placard, and a bevy of Montana-style Lady Liberties, hoisting aloft a cumulative painting of a Western mountain scene, head off to join what will soon be an ocean of protesting humanity, much of it, like Buchanan, at such an event for the first time.