How Many More Years Must We March?

Five years. Five long deadly years of a war that was advertised as a brief excursion to topple Saddam, to "liberate" the Iraqi people, a cakewalk that would be over in weeks at best, months if things took a little longer. Five years that threaten to stretch on ad infinitum, at least if the worst occurs and we end up with President McCain. Years that for peace activists are marked for by protest rallies and marches that seem to accomplish little, and seem to be ignored by the administration, by our elected representatives. I have been attending these marches and rallies for over thirty-five years now, beginning as a twenty-something high school language teacher during the Viet Nam War. While we lived in Delaware, I went in to attend the national marches in Washington D.C. both before the Iraq war began and during the first several years of its duration. Now that we are in Albuquerque, we have marched and rallied outside the local offices of our Congresspeople, and today on this despair-causing anniversary, my partner and I attended Stop The War Machine's fifth anniversary of the war rally/march that began and ended on the campus of the University of New Mexico. The University (where I am now teaching), apparently has its share of the military-industrial complex pie, in weapons research contracts and other things I'm not fully aware of. In fact, UNM ranks in the top fifteen universities in the country for war profiteering. So, we marched from facility to facility, chanting our slogans and singing our songs.

It was some serious déjà vu all over again: rainbow flags, tie-dye t-shirts, guys with long braids, peace symbols, drums, tambourines and bells. banners, posters and giant puppets. But I was no longer the earnest young woman wearing a black armband and dancing along with the drums and bells that I was thirty years ago. I found myself unable to sing along with We Shall Overcome, to chant "Torture is not American" to listen to the earnest speeches. I am a tired old broad, and deep in my heart I no longer do believe that we shall overcome someday, and torture has become an all-too-American pastime. Albuquerque has 2,500 nuclear weapons and warheads at the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage and Maintenance Complex, so many in fact that if the city were to secede from the Union it would become the planet's third-largest nuclear power. Can even a pretty good-sized band of tied-died purple-haired youth and gently-aging sixty-somethings with the best intentions in the world have any effect against such statistics?

Technorati Tags: Albuquerque, antiwar protest, Iraq war fifth anniversary, military industrial complex, Stop the War Machine,

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