Posted on 03/19/2005 5:03:49 PM PST by Constitution Day
Today we met in Fayetteville, NC to Freep a motley rabble of socialists, anarchists, Code Pink-os, and other throwbacks to the 60's! As usual, we were well outnumbered by their hordes of college students, aging hippies and other bused-in protestors, but we held our own as always.
Please post any reports and observations on this thread only.
I hope all is well with your nephew. Please tell him there are a lot of people who appreciate what he is doing and we are praying for all our brave troops.
I Thank you.
I take some blame for the poor goober. At least he held signs for us while he was there.
He seemed to me to be a runaway...pretty grubby and definitely hungry.
It was great FReeping with you guys Saturday BTW.
The Richmond Sunday paper mentioned Fayetteville's anti-war protest but not us. They picked it up from the AP.
When I got to work yesterday morning, several of my coworkers who were in the breakroom said, "Wasn't that you we just saw on tv?" Yes, that was me. Then I saw the paper and that one article was all about the Freepers. That is something, considering the left-leaning paper here. Usually, we get nothing more than a mere mention. They did a good job for reporting on us, I think.
Girl, you are FUN to FREEP with!
Please give your dear Momma my regards.
(I've been cravin' collards since I left Fayetteville.)
My mother mentioned that to me...she lives in Richmond. That's odd, because I was interviewed by the AP reporter that was at the event. In the AP articles I read, the counter-protest was mentioned, and other FReepers and I were quoted. Either there was more than one AP article written from the material, or there was more than one reporter.
But I'm rather disappointed that the Times-Dispatch would report only on the anti-war protest. They're known as a relatively conservative newspaper.
The only thing conservative about the RTD is the editorial page. Trust me.
Your speech was terrific and I agree with another poster that you should send it out to newspapers far and wide as a letter to the editor.
I wonder if anyone got a photo of the pretty reporter (blonde)from Ft. Bragg. I know she interviewed a lot of FReepers.
She is Army and is going to Iraq soon.
She was wearing a sweatshirt with the insignia of an Israeli division (airborne?) on it.
Yes, she was a member of one of three synagogues in Montana! I'll check my disk tonight to see if I caught her in any pix.
Cool!!!
I can tell you from personal experience-I was taught by the father of the cretinous, virulently antisemitic snot who founded ISM-that the Shapiro family is filled with people who loathe both their country and their heritage.
As for Medea Benjamin, there's not much that can be done to ameliorate her situation.
She's one of those unreconstructed Marxists whose neurosis has so infected and permeated her deranged mind that there really isn't anything that can persuade her to reject that soul-enervating path.
Anyway, great job guys!
Hopefully, our next counter-demonstration in Manhattan will attract a crowd as large and determined as yours.
-good times, G.J.P. (Jr.)
I wonder if any of you have read this piece yet (excerpts below)...
Fog of War
By Dick J. Reavis, AlterNet.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21550/
"...The Fayetteville demonstration, more like an Americana July 4th picnic than any Days of Rage, was as placid and serene as the weather that day, temperatures in the low 60s, dry, cloudy skies. No one keened or got red in the face, nobody clashed with the fascists, and policemen's boots didn't lose their spit-shines. The protestors were clad in loose-fitting, informal garb, jeans, cotton windbreakers and sweatshirts, athletics shoes and baseball caps. More than 90 percent of them were white – "middle-class hippies" of all ages, one participant quipped....
...Americans, complain as they may, are never, ever, alone. Commerce accompanies us from conception to the far side of the Golden Gates. By the time that the marchers arrived, politically correct vendors had laid merchandise atop 40 tables on the east side of the speaker's kiosk. Merchants at this Green-Beret-city bazaar brought with them pins and buttons of 900 designs, and probably more books than escaped the looting and fires at libraries in Iraq.
Most of the merchants represented pastel peace groups and mild-mannered petition societies, but Trotsky's disciples – of a half-dozen stripes – brought tables too, laden with literature that scientifically proves that pacifists, peace Democrats and former comrades from the adjoining Trotsky table have all taken part in the Revolution Betrayed...
...But not even a Jefferson, a Frederick Douglas or Karl Marx can convey a life-changing message, nor present any significant analysis, in a 90-second span...
...Michael Hardt, an English professor at Duke University, is co-author with Italian Antonio Negri of two recent tomes on globalization and the perspectives of protest. Though he did not attend the Fayetteville action – he was on a plane in return from France – Hardt claims to know why the demonstrations were not bigger and better, everywhere.
"When movements grow is when they propose the agenda for change," he declares. "One of the effects of the war on terror is that all we are doing is reacting. The anti-war movement has become a failure because it has conceded the terrain of issues to the pro-war people."
Hardt's general argument is that oppositionists should struggle to implement their unredacted dreams, for a full vision of the lives they want to live, not for a list reforms, bargain items underlined in red."
Of course, it carried the hefty price tag of fifty cents.
FIFTY CENTS!
Keep in mind, there are professionally published dailies, with staff that actually bear journalism degrees, who do not charge that much for a copy of their newspaper.
(Prolonged eye roll.)
-good times, G.J.P. (Jr.)
ping to post 193
Yes, we do. :-).
The space was a little close. Maybe next time we could have the park (and the playground) and the leftists could have the highway median :-).
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