{"id":1353,"date":"2007-09-25T11:55:15","date_gmt":"2007-09-25T16:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1353"},"modified":"2007-09-25T15:29:30","modified_gmt":"2007-09-25T20:29:30","slug":"sunday-at-the-mall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1353","title":{"rendered":"Sunday At The Mall"},"content":{"rendered":"

I biked over to the Capital Mall on Sunday to watch the union “peace” rally on the Capitol steps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I inadvertently got there very early – guess I don’t know my own strength! – so I went down to the World War II memorial, at the foot of the mall by the Veterans Services buildling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An older couple were there, wearing matching T-shirts commemorating their son, an Army major who’d been about a year and a half older than me when he was killed last year in Iraq.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, I can’t pretend to imagine what it’s like to lose a child; the safety of my own children is a constant nagging worry in the back of my own head.\u00a0 I’m no shrinking violet, and I’m certainly not the most sensitive guy, but I do know when to just shut up and let people talk.<\/p>\n

And the woman – the bereaved mother – did talk.\u00a0 She must have figured she was among friends, being on the grounds of a “peace” rally (and, indeed, she was; some things should <\/em>transcend politics; caring for our kids and loving them more than anything in the world is one of them), and she unloaded, as her husband stood quietly by, admiring the WWII memorial.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She was angry.\u00a0 Still demolished with grief.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She raged against the President.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wasn’t about to argue.\u00a0 I disagreed, naturally, but what could I say?\u00a0 What should <\/em>anyone say?\u00a0 She’d lost her son; for her, the sky might<\/em> be red and the sun might <\/em>rise in the west.\u00a0 I can’t say as I’d see differently in her shoes.<\/p>\n

And then she added “…it’s 2007.\u00a0 We should be able to settle things by talking…”.<\/p>\n

I wondered – to myself, of course – if, 65 years ago, Jewish advocates in Poland might have postulated the same ideal; that if they could only talk <\/em>with Hitler, they could find a way to settle things, before the rest of their families disappeared into the nacht und nebel<\/em>?\u00a0 If some Ukranian kulak <\/em>pondered the idea of just getting a letter through to Staliln to try to settle things as his children starved to death during Stalin’s famine, or if a Cambodian merchant or a Tutsi farmer yearned just to try to settle things like human beings <\/em>as doom engulfed them and their families?\u00a0 If some gay Afghan or pregnant Iranian teenager had a the urge to try to reason<\/em> with their killers before the evil snuffed them out?\u00a0 Did they believe that evil could be placated?\u00a0 That behind the implacable mask of the Nazi, the chekist<\/a><\/em>, the Khmer Rouge ideologue or Hutu zealot or Taliban or mullah, or muj <\/em>with a cell phone alongside some road in Iraq,\u00a0was someone who just needed to be reasoned with<\/em>?<\/p>\n

I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask.\u00a0 I nodded, and listened, and expressed my genuine mutual sorrow.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

As the couple walked away toward the capitol, I noticed a group of people – younger and middle-aged – in red polo shirts, gathering around the memorial’s reflecting pool.\u00a0 One of them came over and greeted me; I was among friends – in this case, “Families United<\/a>“, a group of people whose children, spouses or siblings are in Iraq – or, in a few cases, who died there also.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the people\u00a0in the distance on the Capitol steps\u00a0\u00a0slowly gathered and strummed guitars, the Families United group – two dozen people, altogether – gathered under the American flag and had a brief observance.\u00a0 The founder – Merilee Carlson, who lost a son in Iraq – read some letters from some of her group’s sympathizers who were also members of the participating trade unions, and were outraged that their <\/em>unions would spend their dues money on demonstrating to scupper the troops’ mission.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

And money, they spent – although apparently not on trying to help people get there on time.\u00a0 The permit was slated to kick off at 1PM; people were draggling in until two o’clock; between one and two, the crowd swelled from 200 to maybe 500.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Four fairly posh motor coaches lined up on Constitution Avenue, reminding us that this wasn’t the same crowd we’d had two weeks earlier (at least, some of it differed); the unions, the AFL-CIO and AFSCME, among others, had pulled out the stops to make the day as low-impact as possible on their members.<\/p>\n

And still, over half of the “crowd” was the usual suspects; the ACORN crowd, the poverty pimps from various “church” “social justice” groups – everyone but the anarchists, it’d seem.\u00a0 It didn’t look like the “A-team” of protesters; the signs looked wan and halfhearted; a guy wandered up and down the Mall walkway, banging a pot to no apparent purposes (and yes, if the other guys start that “banging on pots” thing at the convention next year, I am bringing the bagpipes.\u00a0 Oh, yes I am).\u00a0 They didn’t know much about sound; they brought a PA system fit to handle a sock hop in a junior high gym; the speakers all exhibited that tendency that inexperienced, underamplified speakers do, shrieking into the microphone like they were hollering to be heard above a nor’easter.<\/p>\n

The protesters shied away from talking in person; they’re smarter than most demonstrators (the ones that approached us two weeks earlier were generally woefully illiterate on current events, if not on talking points).<\/p>\n

I left after a bit; it was too nice a day.<\/p>\n

Janet Beihoffer<\/a> and Jamie Delton<\/a> were there, and covered things.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I biked over to the Capital Mall on Sunday to watch the union “peace” rally on the Capitol steps.\u00a0 I inadvertently got there very early – guess I don’t know my own strength! – so I went down to the World War II memorial, at the foot of the mall by the Veterans Services buildling.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,42,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-days-of-adolescent-rage","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}