Minkgirl Muses

Yesterday, several thousand people marched on the streets of San Francisco to acknowledge and protest the 5^th anniversary of the war in Iraq. As the Chronicle noted, this was a drop in the bucket compared with the numbers that protested during the first few days of the war in 2003. A fact that one could find discouraging. While I did join the protestors in 2003, I’m pretty sure that if I had been in San Francisco yesterday, I would not have been among the people on the street. More likely I would have been one of the people stuck in cars trying to cross Market Street, craning my neck out the window to get a glimpse of what was stopping traffic.

If I’d been there, I would have seen some interesting things. I might have witnessed a group of 50 or so people staging a “die-in” outside Senator Diane Feinstein’s office at Market and Third streets (what a clever idea!) Apparently, because they were blocking traffic, most of them were arrested. But they also made an arresting image, one that is being picked up by media outlets across the country. Or, I might have witnessed a small group of young people chain themselves to the front doors of the Federal Reserve Bank, or a group of men in orange jumpsuits and black hoods kneel in a phalanx across Market Street.

These images are potent, as or even more compelling than the more standard protest image of a sea of people marching together. The committed and intrepid citizens who participated in yesterday’s civil action were exercising not only their blessed right of free speech, but also their creativity and ingenuity to get positive attention from the media and to articulate more nuanced and universal truths about the war. In talking about how organized, prepared and communicative the protest organizers have been with the media, Chronicle journalist C.W. Nevius commented, “Back in 2003 the protesters were angry. Now they're trying something new. They're getting smart.”

Now that is encouraging. While I never have been the kind of girl who stands on top of a newspaper box shouting slogans, I might be the kind of girl who dresses from head to toe in black and joins a long line of other women marching silently to express our solidarity with mothers everywhere who are losing their children to poverty and violence. Images like the ones from yesterday’s protest move me one step closer to manifesting the stirrings of my own conscience in more tangible and visible ways.

One of the photos from yesterday’s protest that caught my attention depicts a young woman shouting. I thought to myself, “who is she talking to?” Me. She’s talking to me. And anyone/everyone who, even though we agree with her, isn’t standing next to her with our own mouths stretched open wide. "This is America," said State Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco. "We are not proud. So we say to the world, to the people who are watching, we are Americans, we are against it, and we are sorry."

Thank you San Francisco.

Be well.

Read more about the protest on SF Gate.

Labels: Community Muses