The Great Hollywood Peace Parade
Antiwar Angelenos mark the fifth year of war by throwing a party
By Ron Garmon
Mayday
Peace, it seems, is back. Five years of even a media-sanitized and conscription-free war were still quite enough to build a wave of revulsion in the young, who have as yet no place in a society that has long since numbed itself to the horror. Protest, long ridiculed in mainstream culture as being hopelessly ’60s and passe, is now retro and hip. This was inevitable, as there are only so many ways one can market greed and apathy, even to consumers offered little else.
As this impulse organizes itself, more traditional elements of the left begin to flex dormant muscles. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union voted a “No Work, No Peace” holiday, stopping all work on the West Coast for eight hours this May 1 to urge “an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East.” Given the public’s surly mood, the idea of a mass-walkout of workers and the timeclock-bound could well gain traction as the hours tick off ’til May Day. After a half-decade of uneasy acquiesce to this latest, luckless imperial adventure, popular consent for war is being withdrawn and the peace movement has nowhere to go but up. The American people must, as usual, engineer their own rescue.
Published: 03/19/2008
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