Orange County (CA) Register: 'Beginning of a true people's movement' [View All]

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Sunday, August 28, 2005

'Beginning of a true people's movement'

Another caravan traveled through California to Texas last week, stopping in Long Beach on its way to support Cindy Sheehan on Saturday.

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Jim Gibson of Laguna Woods got in a minivan in Long Beach last week and was in Crawford on Saturday, where he said it feels like the peace demonstrations he attended 35 years ago.

"It looks like the beginning of a true people's movement, a movement to end his (Bush's) war," he said. Gibson served during the Vietnam War as an Army medic; these days he wears a "Veterans for Peace" T-shirt and a "Wage Peace" button. He camped out in a ditch near Camp Casey with others from Southern California. So many people are fainting from heat exhaustion and dehydration that the sheriff put him to work again as a medic.

His time in Crawford has been very emotional, he said, especially when he heard Sheehan speak and listened to Joan Baez sing"Amazing Grace." When he comes home on Sept. 1, "I'll be satisfied I did the right thing," he said.

Rosalind Freeman returned to Huntington Beach from Crawford last week, before the Saturday rallies. Freeman opposed the war since before the invasion. In her view, the government emerging in Iraq is a "perverted idea of democracy" that essentially will shut out women. The U.S. presence there is "based on lies," she says. The Iraqis need to figure out their own future, she says. "We have created the terrorists there - I don't know how we think staying there will make it better."


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http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/08/28/sections/news/news/article_652585.php