Parrish: Speak to the Audience

Geov Parrish Seems to understand what direction a successful anti-war movement must now take:

"For those of us who do want to challenge it, there's much we can't control. Barriers to such changes in U.S. public perception are formidable. The military complex in this country has enormous money behind it, enough to employ millions of people earning (except for the soldiers) a comfortable living building pieces of a repugnantly deployed whole. Mass media is currently dominated by a range of political opinion that makes Genghis Khan a centrist, and that acknowledges dissent usually only in the course of ridiculing it. Both major political parties are corrupted by corporate money almost beyond redemption.

But what we can control is what we say (and hear), how we act, who we appeal to and work with, and to what ends. Much of the political rhetoric in this country -- with or without a war in progress -- is so over the top and intolerant as to be anathema to a secular democracy, and many Americans know that, too. What is lacking is a coherent, appealing alternative. Times of crisis and maximum dissent are precisely when those alternatives should be on display -- not when they should be abandoned for the protest equivalent of comfort food.

Many of us who have opposed this war feel frustrated and powerless; it is an emotionally charged time. Remember this sensation. Remember how unpleasant it is. Then resolve to do what you can to ensure that neither you nor future generations of people who care about their world will be put in this place again. And start working to do something about it."

It's obvious that the street protests are having virtually no impact on Bush's decisions regarding Iraq. Now is the time to stop looking at the immediate past and the present, and to start planning for the immediate future. Time to shake up the Democratic Party and filter out the policy-flapjack senators and representatives, replacing them with real Democrats who represent the voters rather than the largest campaign donors. It won't be easy, but what choice do we, the opponents of American Imperialism, have?