Peace core: North Texans head to rally - from '60s pacifists to teens...DC bound and determined

Bob Dennis was there among the demonstrators 40 years ago with Martin Luther King Jr., trying to push America and its government along the road toward freedom and opportunity.

The veteran human rights worker from Dallas had wanted to be there again this weekend with demonstrators, trying to slow America and its government on the road toward war with Iraq.

Mr. Dennis won't be there, but 54 people are enduring an around-the-clock bus ride to get from North Texas to Washington, D.C., for a national anti-war rally on Saturday. They could hope only that the protest would approach the watershed represented by Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech on the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1963.

"I just feel like this is going to be a similar experience for a lot of people," Mr. Dennis said, comparing one of the most electrifying moments of the civil-rights era with Saturday's rally and march near the Capitol, which could attract 100,000 or more participants.

Health considerations and the passage of time kept the 70-year-old lawyer and former head of the Dallas Peace Center from completing a 40-year circle but didn't stop him from showing up Friday in the after-sunrise chill for the peace bus send-off.

Riders and their supporters milled around a Farmers Branch parking lot, holding signs, taking photos and flashing peace signs for news cameras.

A distinct gray tinge testified to the 1960s vintage of many in the group while the mammoth charter bus idled nearby in looming contrast to the peace-protest transportation of bygone days.

"This is how we protest in 2003," chuckled Hadi Jawad, a Peace Center board member.

The bus trip attracted activists, students, professionals and some parents hoping to give their children a real-life lesson in democracy.

"War is not the answer," said the largest sign. "Drop Bush, not bombs," another urged in spray paint.

"Speaking out against this war is very important," said Mr. Dennis, who attended an anti-war demonstration that drew at least 100,000 marchers to Washington in late October, described as the largest such protest since the Vietnam War.

"It reminded me so much of the '60s," Mr. Dennis said, recalling rallies when he lived in New York City after growing up in Lancaster.

The Saturday demonstration and a series of events, planned to coincide with the King holiday weekend and draw on the civil-rights leader's opposition to the Vietnam War, was organized through a coalition called International ANSWER, for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.

"What this will do for people, who are feeling so lonely and bereft about what they consider an absolutely misguided foreign policy, is give them a sense that they're not alone," Mr. Dennis said.

Participants say their effort must move beyond its Vietnam-era roots and what some have called " '60s retreads."

"This movement can't be limited to that, and I think it's not," said Tim Brace, 51, who left the Austin area about 4 a.m. with his 17-year-old daughter, Erin, so they could catch the bus. "It has to be reinvented each time by the next generation."

Organizers acknowledged the weekend's importance as the peace movement tries to gain momentum and become more mainstream before United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq file their first report late this month.

"It feels to me like the train left the station and people are standing around wondering what happened," Dallas organizer Bill Maxwell said of the Bush administration's demand that Iraq disarm voluntarily or face war.

Mr. Maxwell, 60, a former Peace Center officer, said that he didn't consider war "a done deal" and that he hoped the administration would "back off all this saber rattling."

"We don't want to become a bully country," he said. "I believe people have lost their voice. If they see enough people stand up and take back their power, others will be inspired to do the same."

Demonstrators headed for Washington "tend to be optimists," Mr. Maxwell said. "They believe they can make a difference"

Only a busload from the Houston area would travel farther - another 70 miles or so - to get to D.C., organizers said.

The Texas busloads from "the heart of a conservative state" may seem meager to some, Mr. Maxwell said.

"If this is the best you can do, big deal," he imagined Bush supporters saying. "I think people understand that each person is carrying the banner for a number of people."

Erin Brace decided she should carry the banner herself. The high school junior persuaded her father, Tim, who took part in Vietnam protests, to make the trip.

Dad considered flying to Washington, but daughter wanted the experience of the shared journey - and volunteered to pay her own $190 bus fare.

"Sometimes that's the wonderful thing about children. They make you stand up for things you believe in," said Mr. Brace, a school board member near Austin.

While the September 2001 attacks motivated America to act against potential threats, Mr. Brace fears that military strikes against Iraq would inspire terrorist attacks against Americans around the world.

"For so long after Sept. 11th, you were considered a traitor for saying anything against the war on terrorism," he said. "We need a public debate on this.

"It's important that dissent be freely spoken and respected because that's what makes America as great as it is."

His daughter said the war rumblings are mostly about oil, and "that's not a reason to kill people."

"My parents always let me think for myself," Ms. Brace said. "Bush was saying, 'You're either with us or against us.' That's really not true. Being patriotic doesn't mean just going along with what the president says."

The youngest travelers were Sophia and Briana Hernandez, twins who'll turn 9 this month.

Their mother, Susan Motley, decided the Irving third-graders could learn civic responsibility on the trip.

"I hope they see that if you feel strongly about something, do something about it," she said as they waited to board the bus. "I think it'll be a cool experience they'll never forget and a good bonding experience for us."

The girls have little concept of war, their mother said. One recently asked, "Is President Bush going to be fighting Saddam Hussein?" Ms. Motley, a labor lawyer, said she pointed out that leaders send others to do the fighting.

"People are going to be less open to dissent once our troops are committed. It's easier to prevent something from happening rather than try to undo something once it's done."

The driver took down a red-white-and-blue "No Iraq War" sign that someone put on his windshield. As the bus moved forward, a van with chipped paint pulled alongside, honking.

Its big door opened and closed again before Dallas' contribution to an anti-war weekend disappeared down the highway.

ANSWER = Act Now to Subjugate Women and Encourage Rape.

What is this necromantic obsession the Left has?

The Wellstone funerally, now the King holiday. They are, in effect, attempting to raise spirits of the dead. The 60's are dead, yet they still attempt to conjure that "spirit." Necromancy, idolatry,... Consider the following (in a more secular sense) related to this topic from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.
[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.
[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.
[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.
[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness
[1] Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6. 12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12. 26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid., 9. 34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air";[Ephesians, 2. 2] and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world":[John, 16. 11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come. (bold added for emphasis)

The Left is obsessed with spirits of the dead and of death, phantasms, idolatry of vain philosophy, symbolism over substance. There are those who probably tire of my pointing this out, but it is the core of the Leftist methodology and should be exposed...

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