David Ledesma had
been telling us for weeks "the Democrats are coming to town, and we
need to let them know the anti war movement is out there." Having
avoided the Democrats like they were the plague for my entire life I
had no idea what to expect. Being not a delegate or anything like that,
I was fully qualified to hang out on the sidewalk outside the meeting.
That was okay, there was a lot going on there.
The first
demonstration of the day (except for us) was this one. Somebody
explained to me that it was the Clintonistas. Apparently they had the
Florida and Michigan votes sewn up, so counting those votes would help
Hillary.
After posing for a
while they marched around in circles chanting "count every vote" and
stuff like that. Then they went back inside, leaving their signs taped
to the concrete wall.
The Obama fans were a
lot more casual.
They had a merchandise table, and it seemed like there were always a
few of them around. There was a guy selling Hillary stuff to, but he
was less visible. According to TDM, Obama was a lot more popular than
Hillary with the delegates inside the hall.
This pair were there
to remind everybody they could about the suffering of Tibet and China's
ongoing patterns of human rights abuses.
One by one my fellow
peace activists were crawling out of the woodwork. This woman brought
her own sign.
This demonstration was almost funny in
its brevity. They marched all the way down to the street and back,
chanting about how great Carol Migden is. Just enough that the guy
filming got the ten seconds he needed for the cut in the commercial or
whatever. According to my friend inside the hall, Carol Migden and Mark
Leno are having a knock-down drag-out fight for the Democratic
Nomination to represent San Francisco in the State Assembly. (Joe
Nation, the Marin County resident who is also running is considered the
"third party" in the race.) Neither one of them got any of the big
endorsements during the event. It seemed to my friend they were acting
almost childish.
The only Candidate for Congress that
came out to lobby for the peace activist vote was Mary Pallant. I think
she is a candidate in the Santa Barbara area. She gave me a sticker
that says "OUT OF IRAQ" in red and "PALLANT FOR CONGRESS" in blue. I'd
say help her out! She needs votes if she's
willing to have her picture taken by the likes of us.
These people were actually good
singers. They were singing about how the mortgage mess is as big a
debacle as the war in Iraq.
Other people came and went, but we were
there for many hours. David is the guy with the "4007 TOO MANY"
sign. The guy in the picture with the mauve border is his brother that
died in Vietnam. Those big, easy to read signs are also his work. He is
always working to make more people aware of the costs of war. He works
with a friendly dignity that brings people to the cause in a steady
trickle.
I remember when Kevin McKeowan was a
Green. Now he is 140 pounds lighter and a Democrat working on clean
money. I told him my idea of "clean money" is change. He reached into
his pocket, pulled out some coins and looked at them. I said "yeah,
that kind of change."
I had lunch at Iguanas with Randy and Mirrium. Randy was working the
crowd in a Bush mask with a sign that read only "WAR CRIMINAL" and
handcuffs. At every opportunity he would thank Nancy Pelosi for sitting
on impeachment so he could "get away with it". He said Democrats were
loving having their pictures taken with him.
I don't remember this womans name, but she is very knowledgeable about
the practical aspects of not using fossil fuels in a rural setting. She
gets her heat by burning wood which she collects herself near her
home. She told me about a book a guy wrote about
living among the Amish. I think it was titled "Switch Off". She said
"the Amish evaluate technologys based on 'does it help build
community?'"
I came away from the time I
spent inside the building with is a strong feeling that one thing the
Democrats have that the Greens don't have is a large group of fans
walking around saying "I think what you are doing is great" to anybody
that seems to be doing something.
All around the hall were these
signs. They seemed a bit pretentious to me, but after my friend
edited this one it was much more spot on. Under both the B and the F is
an M.
Around dusk we started a candle light
vigil which lasted until most of the delegates had left, well after
dark.
