It’s not necessarily obvious how to go about protesting war on Memorial Day. When there are a bunch of elderly men gathering in the town square wearing their old uniforms and kids having fun of various sorts, it isn’t always easy to make a constructive stand against the militarism that is the cause of their sacrifice, their nostalgia, and the day off work. When then-presidential hopeful Jonathan Edwards encouraged people to protest the Iraq War on Memorial Day in 2007, it spurred a huge amount of anger.
Nor does a news search today for Memorial Day actions turn up much of anything—though that nothing was reported doesn’t mean that nothing happened. (Veterans for Peace had a few actions, for instance.) The closest thing I ran into in the news was Medea Benjamin and Adam Kokesh’s rather odd Jefferson Memorial dancing flash mob on Saturday, in response to a recent court decision that upheld the ban on demonstrations, including “expressive dancing,” at the memorial. Both Benjamin and Kokesh are well-known war protesters, but neither made an anti-war point on this occasion. Hawks denounced them as if they had, though.
When we asked our Facebook subscribers last week what they planned to do for the holiday, here’s what some of them said:
What did you do? What is our Google News search missing? What will you do next year?
I joined others from Austin, Dallas, Ft. Worth and Killeen, TX for a barbeque fundraiser at Under The Hood Cafe, a GI coffee house near Ft. Hood, the largest US Army base in the country (and world). IVAW members are there organizing Operation Recovery, an effort to stop deployments of soldiers who have PTSD, TBI and other injuries. It was a very meaningful day. Learn more at http://www.ivaw.org/operation-recovery and http://www.underthehoodcafe.org
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