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Peace by Pieces
Tia Steele, whose stepson was killed in Iraq, at the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit in Baltimore. "We can do something and we are doing something," she says.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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Then nights at Busboys and Poets, where members of the new not-so-silent majority are ushered to the restaurant's theater for "Fear Up," a play about the new American style of interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, or a screening of "Operation: Dreamland," a grunt's-eye documentary about the occupation of Fallujah.
"I think the depression and malaise that followed not being able to stop the war and not being able to do anything after the election has shifted," Steele says, "and people who felt deflated and defeated are now coming together in recognition that we can do something and we are doing something."
"I've opened many restaurants," says Andy Shallal, an Iraqi American who owns Busboys and Poets. "This is the most bull's-eye I've ever shot. This one people came in and got it right away. I think it's about timing."
The Roots of Protest
They converge, then disperse to "organize."
Whether Something really is Happening is difficult to measure. The polls offer clues, but also caveats.
Americans were much quicker to decide that Iraq was a mistake than Vietnam, says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. It took three years in the case of Vietnam, just 15 months for Iraq.
However, Newport says, the peace movement's claims to rising momentum are more tenuous. Since a majority first called Iraq a mistake more than a year ago, the number has fluctuated rather than increased steadily. Polls in the last week have suggested an uptick.
Hurricane Katrina and now Rita may be sucking publicity from peace. On the other hand, the movement has struck a chord with some people by using Katrina to further question Bush's competence and priorities.
If this weekend's demonstrations do draw 100,000, they will rival a prewar peace march in Washington that police suggested involved more than 100,000 and was considered the largest antiwar rally since Vietnam. Organizers claimed 500,000 attended that march.
So if you want to learn about the movement, you need to track the characters back up the solitary trails of tears that brought them here. The journeys involve the main questions facing the peace movement:
If the troops come home now, won't there be even more chaos and deaths of innocents in Iraq?
How can you support the troops and not the war?
