Wednesday, July 30, 2003

The irregular meeting of an ad hoc editorial board broke out just before 11 Monday morning at the corner of 10th and Liberty.

Their attention was focused on the northwest sidewalk, where maybe 75 doggedly peaceful protesters carried signs gently suggesting their displeasure with the policies of George W. Bush ("Impeach George W. Hitler"), who was safely inside the adjacent David L. Lawrence Convention Center failing to convince delegates to the National Urban League's assembly that he cared about issues urgently important to African Americans.

He'd just come back from Africa, where he'd come out strongly against slavery, but somehow that wasn't going to cut it. Maybe because it was literally and figuratively and rhetorically the least he could do. The very least.

This ad hoc board, a couple of self-professed young Republicans, ridiculed the actions of the protesters and questioned the motives of a news photographer crouching in the middle of 10th Street to shoot the protesters. It was good the young Republicans were not armed or the meaning of "shoot the protesters" might have been problematic.

"They're not Americans," one said.

"Fact is," the photographer said, "they are."

"But they don't want to be. Why are you taking their picture? They're only here so you'll take their picture. They're a bunch of goofs, unemployed, collecting welfare checks."

"I'm covering the news," the photog said.

"Yeah, but this news will be on page 1, and the real news will be on page 7."

"I'll bet you $1,000 right now this won't be on Page 1," another photographer said.

And so it went. 'Round and 'round until the young Bush supporters got tired of hooting at the protesters and bickering with the media in the middle. Another ad hoc editorial board meeting abruptly adjourned due largely to cluelessness.

Maybe there just weren't enough operatives protesting the protesters to make for any volatility, but the demonstrators ultimately proved to be quiet and largely ineffectual.

Perhaps an hour Downtown holding a sign was better than staying home beating your head against the floor.

Kristie Weiland fooled me severely. From across the street, she looked to be about 14, and, holding a sign that lamented the way the Bush tax cuts avoided the working poor, she looked every bit the innocent child of a family barely fighting off hunger. That's true in a sense, except that Kristie isn't hungry and isn't a child.

"I'm with Just Harvest," she said, citing the name of a noted advocacy group, the Center for Action Against Hunger. "I'm the director of outreach. Since January."

Kristie grew up in Butler, graduated from St. Francis in Loretto and took a graduate degree in social work from the University of Michigan. She's 24. I asked her if, in light of Bush's mammoth advantage in financing for the 2004 campaign, she could see any possibility that he'd be defeated next November.

"I think it's a possibility," she said. "No weapons of mass destruction have been found. The Iraq War is more and more unpopular. The economy continues to be stagnant."

Were her convictions dulled any as a result of being called un-American from across the street?

"We are Americans," she said without any spark of anger. "We have a right to protest. It's part of the democracy."

Yeah, I thought so.

Still, this deployment of protesters succeeded at little. Its "No Justice, No Peace!" chant was probably among the most peaceful on record, and nothing it said or did compelled onlookers' attention more than Channel 4's Kelly Frey striding into the story in insensible shoes.

"I thought it went pretty well," protested protester Karen Waggoner of Oakland. "There were a lot more than 100 of us, I'd say."

Karen was carrying her "Regime Change Begins at Home" sign, and her friend Gen Davidson of Regent Square held one decorated with a flag that said, "These Colors Don't Run The World." They, too, were vets at the protest game, as they've been demonstrating against the war every Saturday since January in Regent Square.

I asked them, since the protesters were representing a spectrum of agendas -- from abortion rights to international diplomacy -- if there was a particular issue that especially riled them.

"I run hot and cold on things," Karen said. "Sometimes it's this yee-haw foreign policy Bush has, sometimes it's the schools policy, sometimes it's the environment."

"For me," said Gen, "it's just the total sense that with this administration, these guys are out of control."

Uh-huh. And they seem to be the only ones.

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