Reply #7: I favor Direct Action!

[La_Fourmi_Rouge]

H20, I went to my first anti - war march when I was in high school. Back then, organizers and activists on either coast could get 250,000 people on the streets at the drop of a hat. Now I know that much of the impetus for direct action came as both an outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement and a response to the Draft, which conditions do not exist today.

I think the netroots has been really effective in the past few years at getting people to write and/or call their "representatives" in D.C., and I know of many people who regularly walk the halls of Congress to "buttonhole" Senators and Congresscritters. But look what it gets us - a pathetic, weak-kneed attmpt to have it both ways! Apparently, most of the D.C. crowd is playing for some sort of "plausible deniability" - putting up a lame, kabuki-theater show of resistance and then caving once they think they've massaged the message enough to squeak through another election cycle.

I would like to see the current level of disgust with the Washington, D.C. crowd expressed in the streets, en mass, the way we did it in the late '60s and early '70s. So I am wracking my brain trying to figure out how to raise the level of passion high enough that folks feel compelled to rise up against this monstrosity of a war and take to the streets.

Also - there were giants in those days - Martin and his cohort, Stokely, Jerry Rubin, Abby Hoffman, Angela Davis... man the list is loong! We had people who literally laid their lives down to drive the message home. There came a point where the civil rights issues and the war issues merged in a "perfect storm" of protest, with people of genuine character and courage at the point of the spear.

Where are they now?