"THIS Sunday, Easter, April 20th, please join the Apostasy Peace Squad (Son of Earths boyz) for ... 'THE WAR MAY BE OVER BUT THE WAR IS NOT OVER' (30 minutes of noise for peace) One p.m. on the Amherst Common, bring your voice, drum, crumhorn, horn, banjo, thing, other thing or piece to make a hell of a racket, get out your angry feelings in 'song.' We know lots of folks are pissed off. We, for instance, are pissed off. At the war? Sure. At the nascent aftermath? You bet. At the administrationsystemocracy? Of course. What we want to do, instead of hitting each other or anyone, is to make a bunch of noise. Noise. No metre, no funky beat, just a 'song' to say how we feel. All at once, together, mayhem, disorder, ecstatic bell/yell."
In addition to saddening me, things like this are just ridiculous. They serve to confirm a suspicion I have had since I first heard about the extreme protests against this war. On March 25 a number of people staged a "vomit-in" in San Francisco, intentionally vomiting in front of the Federal Building. Then, in another feat of ingenuity (read, stupidity) on March 27, 150 people lay down on 5th Avenue in New York City during the morning rush hour. A week later, as I was headed to Northampton on the PVTA, a number of Hampshire students instilled with the same anti-war spirit (but not nearly as much creativity) replicated the feat on Route 9, prolonging my bus ride for an hour and a half.
My suspicion is that deep down, these protests are not so much about the war (which has turned out to be the least bloody conflict in American history and has resulted in the removal of one of the worst tyrants ever to walk the earth) but rather, frustration regarding the position of the left in society today. There is no longer a clear enemy-there are few, if any, hooded KKK members, hardly any remaining Jim Crow laws and already a lot of civil rights legislation in place. There is no obviously wrong war like Vietnam around (despite what any protester may say). The war in Iraq is not a stalemate and is not causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. These anti-war protests which have become increasingly extreme, intrustive and anarchic, are merely the dying gasps of a cause that is becoming largely irrelevant.
This is not to say that there are no legitimate reasons to oppose this war, but rather, that these recent protests barely attempt to explain them. One of their main arguments was that Bush wanted to control Iraq for oil, but any economist can tell you that it would be much cheaper for us to have simply purchased all that oil. Another major concern of the protestors is civilian casualties. However, even if you trust the reports of Iraqi TV (considering that NPR recently reported that many civilian deaths completely unrelated to the war were attributed to U.S. bombing) the maximum number of Iraqi civilian casualties is 2,325, according to the much-vaunted website iraqbodycount.net. While 2,000 plus lives lost is a terrible shame, it is a sacrifice our government and the Iraqis who celebrated in the streets, were willing to make to remove a regime from power that has killed hundreds of times as many people during its own reign of terror.
Now, the war is over and the anti-war movement has barely garnered the support of a fifth of Americans (almost 22 percent according to a recent CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll). Meanwhile, the movement is on the verge of being rendered completely irrelevant by its own lack of support and the quick victory of our troops, not to mention the celebrations of those whom we invaded. Against this overwhelming evidence in favor of the war, there is no reason why there should be an ad on the Daily Jolt calling for protests of the war. The protest itself, which the ad admits nearly as much, is an act of self-therapy. Its purpose is to make the protestors feel better about what has happened. And that, I fear, is what many of these protests have been: self-therapy for a generation that has no more Vietnams left to protest.