The Protests: Commentary Worthy of Your Consideration [View All]

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

"First, the speakers were extremely disorganized, self-contradictory, far more radical than the crowd itself, and totally lacking in message discipline. They ranged from Jesse Jackson stirring the crowd in a speech about how the 2000 election was stolen, to an old militant who promised a violent overthrow of the government, to a woman who harangued the crowd for the racism of the anti-war movement (she was part of the program, not someone who broke onto stage), to another speaker who told us we were not really opposed to the were unless we actively helped the Iraqi insurgency. Can there be anything less motivating than holding an anti-war march where the speakers tell those in attendance that they are not really opposed to the war? Could there possibly be a better way to make sure that the march was not covered by the media than by having every speaker talk about everything except Iraq? Most of the speakers actually talked about Columbia, the Phillipines, Palestine, Afghanistan, Puerto Rico--discussion of Iraq was actually a minority topic. Can there be anything worse than a march where the speakers, for all the media to hear, tell the crowd they are racists? Could there be any worse way to build an anti-war coalition than by tacking every non-Iraq related issue possible, and packing the speakers with radicals who do not represent the even the majority of people who came out to march, much less the majority of those opposed to the war? Could there be any stereotype they did not seem eager to fit themselves into?"

You may not agree with all of it but you, me, all of us need to give serious consideration to the points raised. This ain't Nixon we are dealing with. They are far more adept, and thus, far more formidable. We must be at least as formidble, if not 100x moreso.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/3/21/17284/9278

Note: I have seen this sort of thing, described above, before. I am 52. There was this little thing called "Vietnam". You may have heard of it. The Movement had the same sort of problems then, too.