New Paltz Nation - West Point

The good news is that there were over a thousand people on the march. The bad news, I guess, is that the average age of the participants was around 50. I wish more young people cared about ending the war, but I can’t complain. I was traveling in a carfull of 20 somethings all of whom are against the war but whose primary purpose at the event was to collect signatures on a pledge to support clean elections, money in politics being the root of all evil and a major cause of the war. Matt Edge, the creator of the project, for which he has collected around 1, 500 signatures explains it this way “After all, the 29 Democrats who voted in favor of giving Bush authorization for the invasion of Iraq received an average of seven times more money in campaign contributions from the oil and pipeline industry than the 21 who voted against it. We know that’s not a coincidence. Bechtel gave 1.3 million in campaign contributions in the 2000 election cycle, in return they got 700 million dollars in reconstruction contracts in Iraq—a good deal for them, but it sucks for us. And consider, these contracts were given before the invasion.”

There was a slight traffic jam on the way in but we had no trouble finding parking. West Point The crowd, if elderly, was colorful. There were lots of anti-bush buttons There was a contingent of ladies with cone shaped fairy princess hats and bright orange parasols inside a pink dragon which had a sign on it that said “pretty, but we breathe fire.” There was a woman with a balding Cheney wig and a Bush puppet. There were a slew of great signs, the best one carried by an impish man with a white beard. There was a cartoon of George bush Sr. reading a big book to W with the names of all the countries the US has invaded. The caption across the top reads “Poppie how did you and the CIA defeat the evil democracies?” I would have talked to him but I wanted to at least get a few signatures on the pledge.

We were milling around in Veterans Park, around 500 of us. I found Andi Barzak, a professor at SUNY New Paltz and asked her why she was here. “I’m here to hopefully cause George Bush and his friends some discomfort.”

When I asked her how, she responded "I want him to see that not everyone supports him and maybe a little reality will enter his fantasy world.”

“Do you think he will notice it?”, I persisted.

“Probably not, but you never know, I believe in the ripple effect, you throw a pebble and it ripples out and you never know where it will end up. You can’t be a summer soldier and a sunshine patriot. You have to keep working up hill… there was a Rabbi who once said ‘you’re not expected to succeed, but you are obligated to try.”

Fair enough.

There was a small group with white plastic pith helmets with bright pink fishnet stretched over them. One had a t-shirt that said “My boyfriend violates the homosexual conduct policy," the others had on black shirts with pink camouflage bandanas tied around their necks. I had to ask. Josh Gee responded “We’re here to deliver a graduation address to the Gay and Lesbian cadets at Westpoint. We feel that otherwise they are denied a voice by the 'don’t ask don’t tell' policy which is just homophobia made institutional”

“How are you going to get this address to them?” I couldn’t help asking

West Point “Well it’s more of a metaphorical address rather than a hand to hand delivery of the address” he giggled. “But we feel that by spreading the message to as many people as possible eventually it will meet certain critical mass. It’s come to our attention that there really are gay an lesbian cadets at West Point who really are suffering from 'don’t ask don’t tell.' And I think that by us being here today we are offering them some kind of solidarity and support that otherwise might be missing from an event like this.” I asked them if they’d read Major Conflict by Jeffrey McGowan and they admitted that the name was familiar but that they hadn’t read the book. When I explained how he had written the book after leaving the “don’t ask don’t tell” military and had been married to his boyfriend in New Paltz after leaving the service, I got what I think is an affirmative response: “New Paltz has always been punk rock like that.”

“Don’t ask don’t tell is hypocritical,” he went on. “People see it in common parlance as an invitation for gays to be in the military but really what it did was turn a 200 year old military tradition into a federal law that wasn’t on the lawbooks until 1993 so it’s really homophobia turned legal and institutionalized and it affects people on a daily basis. There are approximately two service members per day who are discharged for being Gay in the US because of ‘don’t ask don’t tell.’ And this is in a period when recruiters from coast to coast are falling way short on their quotas.”

“One Two Three Four. No more war.” While there were at least three megaphones, this was not a crowd that joins in and shouts. for the most part, the blasts from the megaphones died in the breeze.

I stopped Jonathan Tasini, who is running for senate against pro-war Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and I asked him how he felt about third parties also running against Clinton for the same reason “I changed from the Working families party to run against Clinton in the Democratic primary so I’m very supportive and sympathetic to third party efforts. I think that you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can try to take back the Democratic party that should belong to us and you can also try to build other efforts especially at the state, city, and community levels to take back politics for the people.”

Sigh—if only more Democrats were like Tasini and could walk and chew gum at the same time

We marched to the gate, and while a few wanted to storm it and many wanted just to hang out there and make noise, the MC of the event, lawyer Michael Sussman, managed to get the crowd to march back and listen to the speeches. I’ll admit I didn’t stay for all the speeches, OK I only stayed for the first two, then my ride was leaving I went too. The first speech was very moving, given by Penny Goldman whose husband committed suicide after serving in Vietnam. Her book Flashback is coming out on Monday. “He lived with his memories, his flashbacks, for years and when he couldn’t bear them any longer, he killed himself. What Daniel suffered was an injury, an injury caused directly by the horror and the terror of war that injury was finally as lethal as any bullet or bomb. Nobody knows how many Vietnam veterans committed suicide after coming home from Vietnam because the government has refused to count or track them. Many scientists, psychiatrists and historians and doctors believe that there are more soldiers who committed suicide after returning home than there are names on the wall.”

She went on to talk about the war in Iraq is already worse because soldiers in Vietnam only had to serve one year, but in Iraq they keep getting sent back. The war is now costing 3.5million dollars a week but veterans often have to wait a year to see a doctor and often take their own lives before they can be treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The second was by Rebecca Rotzler, our own deputy mayor, who gave an impassioned plea to not vote for war supporters Clinton and Schumer if you don’t support war yourself. It makes sense, right?

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