A friend asked me last night, "How did the World Can't Wait strike against the war" go yesterday? To get reports from the horsie's mouth, go to their web-page, where you can read reports and see pictures. There are some nice ones of Union Square in NYC. Truthout has a piece too.
But I wasn't there, sadly. I went to work, and all my anti-war colleagues and anti-war students were there. I think the WCW group has more of a broad base on the West Coast, judging from these photos from San Francisco, which appeared on the indymedia website for the Bay area.
According to NY1, hundreds of highschool students in NYC came out. Folks in Ohio also left school, and so did people in Missouri, despite threats of being slapped with "truancy."
In Michigan, where attendance was sparse, due to poor planning, a student named Laura Parish read this poem by Eve Ensler, "Fire His Ass":
Since GEORGE BUSH really got in power by corporate take over and not election Since he has behaved like a CEO of a huge corporation called U.S.A. supporting profit in all cases over human interests, we should treat him the way they would treat him in any corporation and
FIRE HIS ASS
When you start with a major surplus and end up with a huge huge deficit they
FIRE YOUR ASS
When you fail to move a company forward, they
FIRE YOUR ASS
When you are lazy and take vacations at a time of peril, they
FIRE YOU LAZY ASS
When you don't prepare for terrible outcomes and then lose thousands of lives and insane amounts of money they
FIRE YOUR ASS
When you lie to your stockholders and board and then spend nearly 1.3 trillion dollars and kill hundreds of thousands of people for no reason that makes sense to anyone, they
FIRE YOUR ASS
Sometimes they even put you in prison.
When you openly practice racist policies whether they want to or not, they
FIRE YOUR ASS
When you openly break the law, order torture and get caught they
FIRE YOUR ASS
When you hire people who are ignorant and incompetent, they
FIRE YOUR ASS
When you destroy the brand of a company
and alienate potential buyers all over the world, they
FIRE YOUR ASS
We are the shareholders of the U.S.A.
Bush has bankrupted our company, our pocketbooks,
But mainly our soul.
We need to remove this president and his staff
and we need to do it now..
FIRE HIS ASS.
Generally, I think the WCW group is hampered by its ties to the RCP, which always produces great posters and slogans, and is very good at picking up on the popular sentiment and drawing people in for actions, but lacks grassroots organizing. That's my main beef with the RCP: no real organizing. This may be related to the top-down nature of the organization. I had friends who joined Refuse and Resist back in the 90s over doing direct action abortion clinic defense, which was crucial, but when they kept going to R&R meetings, they got frustrated with the leadership and eventually left the group. Seems like the RCP in general concentrates a lot on bringing in young kids from highschools and community colleges, maybe thinking of some kind of youth vanguard...or a highly pliable mass base?
Despite all that, I wouldn't refuse to go to an action they sponsored just because of their political beliefs or even their wacked inner-group methods. I think bringing out numbers to any anti-war, anti-Bush action is important. ....THE WCW, like every other RCP group, brings together a diverse group of people. Plenty of non-Leninists are on their roster of support: Gore Vidal, Robin DG Kelley, Howard Zinn, Eve Ensler, etc etc. and Boots, from the Coup, did their promos on the radio. Plenty of young kids, brown, Black, Asian, white, working class and middle-class are drawn to their call. They seem to me to have more potential to build a "troops out now" movement than either UFPJ or ANSWER - and that is, to me, more important than anything else and all to the good. However, I wasn't there, so I don't know what it felt like at the demos. If you participated in the NOv. 2 actions, please, please post about them here.
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