If Monday, January 21, was not the coldest day of the winter, it was right down there fighting for the title. You had to be brave just to be outside, exposed to frost-biting temperatures combined with bitter winds. Only people with a compelling reason would dare to stay exposed to these elements for more than a few minutes.
And yet, on arriving outside of our city hall, I found some 450 of my fellow citizens walking round and round, many of them holding anti-war signs and calling out their opposition to the proposed military campaign against Iraq.
This Monday was, of course, a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King whom the demonstrators would later invoke as a champion of peace. That part of the event would happen in the warm confines of a nearby church, where members of the community were to read aloud some thoughts of the slain leader.
Not a few of this day’s demonstrators, I noticed almost immediately, were people comparable to me in age. I had come hoping talk with them about their reasons for taking a public position against the war, even before it starts. I confess to seeking support for my own serious misgivings about the course our federal government is seemingly about to take in our name.
The first person I approached was a woman from East Cambridge named Grove Harris who, against the cold, was eating a sweet potato as we talked. “We need peace desperately,” she said. “We can’t afford this war, morally or financially. We can’t be the policeman of the world. We need to invest in a sustainable economy.”
A couple from Concord, Catherine and Richard Parmalee, both in their 60s, walked by me. “I’m opposed to the unilateral action by the U.S. against the United Nations,” Richard told me. He recalled growing up seeing on the wall of his room the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and drawing lasting inspiration from it.
A kindergarten teacher, Sally Baker, 55, said “I don’t think war solves anything; It just kills people. What’s the point?” She thinks it important for us to “teach children at an early age that violence and war aren’t appropriate.” She tells how war has touched her family: “My brother went to Vietnam and got blown up. He’s alive but he’s suffering terribly from post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
Mimi Grosser, asked about the possibility of influencing the decision makers, replies: “Well, you know, I have very strong memories of Vietnam; I started on a small scale like this. I think you have to start somewhere.”
A friend, Lester Lee, a Northeastern lecturer, had spoken out that morning in his church, focusing on Dr. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War. “I think the anti-war sentiment is very strong in the black community,” he told me. “I hear people talking about it, it’s there – – I just don’t know how it’s going to be connected out.”
“I wasn’t happy about going out in the cold; I hate the cold,” 87-year-old Boone Schirmer told me later, in the comfort of his house. “I’ve broken the same hip twice and I’m deaf as a post, but I’m glad I went.”
His wife, Peggy Schirmer, is a year older; she walks with difficulty and suffers the early stages of dementia. But she took part in the demonstration, using a wheelchair to get around. “When you get old, you are more limited,” she says, “but you live within your limits. We went up and down the line twice.”
Peggy regrets recent events. Needing some help with her words, she tells me: “I think our country has not been as I’d like it to be lately. To see what’s happening to our country is discouraging.”
Sure, I know most of the people I talked to live in Cambridge. And I am aware how the politics of my fellow citizens there are often the object of ridicule.
But I am convinced that negative feelings about the planned assault on Iraq fill the hearts of a huge number of citizens all across our country. You don’t have to be living on the East or West Coast to be disturbed about the militarization of our nation.
Older people, especially, have lived through enough history to have learned how often we have been lied to and manipulated by our national government. (Currently I am reading a new book by Daniel Ellsberg who tells of his part in doing this when he worked in the Pentagon in the middle 1960s.)
Some of us veterans of history doubt the morality of the proposed enterprise. The bishops of my spiritual tradition have, in fact, said it does not satisfy the requirements of a just war. Granted., the prestige of these Catholic bishops has been badly damaged over the past year; still they can recognize a harmful and unjustified military effort when they see it.
Richard Griffin