As I mentioned earlier, I joined the peace rally in Lexington Sunday, since Arthur’s leg wound looked like it would benefit from some more time off.
I’d been planning to take the digital camera, but I forgot. I really regretted that when I looked across the crowd and saw my father standing with his cane, in a camo jacket, holding a poster that said “Peace”.
Local newspaper coverage estimated the crowd at 200. That seems reasonable. I would have guessed a little higher, but I’ve always been a lousy judge of crowd numbers.
(When I was an Episcopal acolyte, one of my tasks was to count the congregation during the sermon and tell the minister, so he could judge how much bread and wine to consecrate.
I usually just made up numbers.)
What was more interesting, and encouraging, than the numbers was the diversity of the crowd, and the speakers.
A former governor had been invited to speak, and declined with the excuse that he was a “mainstream Democrat”.
The politicians still don’t get it. The mainstream doesn’t want this war. The speakers included high-ranking members of “mainstream” churches, including the Catholic Diocese of Lexington.
The crowd ranged from aging hippies like myself to sorority girls. One of the speakers, a UK Pol. Sci. prof, said he had never considered himself an anti-war activist.
But he said he’d never seen a war that was opposed by much of the current military top brass, the CIA, and a whole host of former national security advisers.
How much more “mainstream” do you want, Gov. Breathitt?
PT Barnum said that “nobody ever went broke understimating the intelligence of the American people”, and for years, politicians have operated, usually successfully, under the same principle.
I think it’s finally backfiring on them.
They’ve always believed that they could always count on the American people to be gung-ho for war, regardless of how ridiculous and unjust the cause, as long as it was fought in somebody else’s back yard, and preferably against a powerless enemy that we could crush without getting our hands dirty. And they were usually right.
But this time they’ve gone too far.
Of course, several speakers mentioned that W and his Whitehouse Gang kept the Korean nuclear fiasco under wraps until after Congress voted to approve his war.
The public has good reason to be irate about that.
But I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the spineless Democrats in Congress who fell all over themselves to approve W’s war, and are now complaining that they were duped, as it finally sinks in that maybe they finally have underestimated the intelligence of the American public, and they scramble for cover.
Duped by W? Give me a break. If that really is true, you ought to be ashamed to admit it. Did his daughters beat you up and steal your lunch money too?