In the 1960s and ’70s, a good-sized group gathered every Saturday morning in front of Town Hall (the current Spruce store next to Restoration Hardware). Week in and week out, they protested the Vietnam War.
Estelle Margolis, on the bridge.
Since 2005, a much smaller vigil has taken place on the Ruth Steinkraus Cohen Post Road bridge. For over 300 Saturdays, several folks have held a “peace vigil” to draw attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Estelle Margolis was there 40 years ago. She’s still working hard for peace. This Saturday from 11-11:30 a.m., she says, “we will ‘celebrate’ the 7th anniversary of our peace vigil, if celebrating is an appropriate word for this serious mission.”
She adds:
We have failed to generate an influential peace movement in this country. I believe it would be different if we had a draft. We do get a lot of honks of approval on the bridge for our message: “End the Wars, Bring the Troops Home!, Get Out of Afghanistan, NOW!”
We will commemorate 7 long years on this Vigil. We are sick about the time we have been trapped in these two countries. President Bush created a living hell that is now 10 years old.
After 10 years we are still in Afghanistan at the insistence of President Karzai, who is known to be corrupt and untrustworthy. We support this fake “democracy” with our troops lives, financial aid and weapons while the Afghans make huge amounts of money exporting heroine. The latest figure estimates over 300,000 acres of poppies are planted every year….
The scene on the Ruth Steinkraus Cohen Bridge, several years ago.
How many horribly wounded young people could we have saved with a serious nationwide peace movement? How many lives? Over 6,000 dead and over 40,000 wounded. Over 400,000 who are in need of help from the Veterans Administration and a record high number of suicides among returning vets. How many more will there be? What have we done?
Come join us and lend your voice to the call for peace.
From Tampa I join you in thought
Obama could have ended the wars; he chose to not do so. Now, he is killing people willy nilly without due process, and without oversight. Eisenhower ended the killing in Truman’s war within one year of taking office; it can be done.
Then Eisenhower started another one,in Vietnam. Yeah, he was the one.
Not true, but you can have your fantasy.
It’s ENTIRELY true. Do some reading.
No Jake, American troops were in French Indo-China which became……follow the dots. Now, you do some reading. Your post is utterly irrelevant with respect to the point I made; Ike ended Truman’s war within one year, and Obama could have done the same with Bush’s war, but Obama chose to not do so. Moreover, if you were right, and you are not, then Obama has just started a war in Uganda. If the opposition to wars was principled, Obama’s wars would be just as objectionable as Bush’s.
I was getting ambushed, mortared, and shot at in Nam while peace niks were protesting to bring me home. You know what? I wanted them to shut the duck up and go home. The more protesters, the greater the resolve of our enemies / opponents to keep killing our soldiers to break our will to continue.
I try not to question the motives of the bridge people. I try not to believe its an ego trip. I know that some have served honorably. Still, it gives hope to our enemies and is counter productive to the objectives of the protesters. Write a letter, visit your congressman, but jump off the bridge 🙂
I lost a lot of respect for the bridge protesters when they ramped down their protests as soon as Obama was elected. It seems that a lot of them were more interested in bashing Bush.
DAVID BROOKS: Okay, so our act starts with us inflating a giant internet bubble. Then that collapses, taking the country’s economy with it, just as we massively cut taxes on millionaires because, we say, if we don’t the government will have too much money. Right after that we blow off warnings about terrorism and let 3,000 Americans get slaughtered. We use that as a chance to lie the U.S. into invading a country that had nothing to do with the attack, killing hundreds of thousands of people and turning millions into refugees. In the middle of all that we borrow torture techniques from the Inquisition and use them on people in secret sites around the planet. Then we make billions off another financial bubble, the biggest in human history, and do nothing as it collapses, plunging the world into the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. To fix that we open up the national bank vault and shovel out money as fast as possible to all the criminals who made it happen in the first place. Then—as the amazing finale—we refuse to prosecute anyone for that, for the war, or for torture, and we start killing U.S. citizens with flying death robots.
[LONG PAUSE]
AGENT: …That’s a hell of an act. What do you call it?
DAVID BROOKS: The Aristocrats!
—Jon Schwarz
Who is “us”? I don’t run the Fed.
No one cut taxes; tax rates were cut, but tax receipts went up.
I like the flying death robots image. Those chickens will come home to roost.
I have a suggestion: look at http://www.waifllc.org , to see an
effective anti-war action in the D.C. area.
Also a request: make Ms Margolis also aware of the above
URL. Through it she can send me E-mail, if she wishes to
learn more about our activities.
Best wishes,
Alan McConnell, in Silver Spring MD