Global Dispatches (Page 11)

From the United States

"If you won't stop traffic, you won't stop the war," shouted a man in Times Square, urging protesters to defy the many stone-faced cops who were herding them onto the sidewalk. Despite a cold, bone-drenching rain, and a maze of police barricades some 5,000 gathered in New York City to protest the war on Iraq on its first official day. Twenty-one were arrested.

Similar protests took place all over the United States. (Students at more than 150 high schools, colleges and universities are walked out of classes to join protests Thursday and Friday.) Like the demonstration in Times Square, many reflected the conviction of activists that the reality of war called for more confrontational tactics, especially nonviolent civil disobedience. Peace activists in Washington, DC, and San Francisco blocked bridges and traffic; protesters paralyzed San Francisco's downtown as police arrested more than 1,000 demonstrators. Over the next few days, activists in more than thirty cities will be breaking the law in peaceful protest, staging actions at the offices of US senators, federal buildings, military recruiting centers and even army bases. "People have used their words," says Gordon Clark of Iraq Pledge of Resistance. "Now they're putting their bodies on the line."

But traditional peace movement tactics remain widespead, too. Hundreds of rallies and candlelight vigils were held Thursday in Los Angeles and the Twin Cities, as well as small towns and cities in Utah, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Hawaii, Nebraska, Georgia, New Hampshire and elsewhere. "The beginning of the war increases the urgency of our work," says Bill Fletcher, co-chair of United for Peace and Justice, which issued a call for emergency protests as soon as the US invasion began. "People are dying now."

While editorial pages abandoned misgivings about the war to focus concern, in the words of the New York Times, on "the welfare of those...who will be flinging themselves into the Iraqi desert," many Americans appeared to be as determined as ever to stop the Bush Administration. An Internet petition circulated by MoveOn.org received 300,000 signatures in a single day, a sign that antiwar sentiment remains firm. That shows the "maturity" of the movement, MoveOn.org organizer Eli Pariser says. "People understand that you don't win right away."

Liza Featherstone is a journalist based in New York City.

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