Protest on Grand River
Originally published at The Mouse's Tale. You can comment here or there.
It’s not often I get to randomly happen across a peace demonstration, but that’s exactly what happened to me today. After my 4pm class ended, I wandered up to Grand River to get something to eat for dinner while I waited for a team meeting in the library at 7. As I approached the restaurant, I noticed a bunch of people standing around with signs. Without a moment of thought, I grabbed my camera out of my bag and started taking a whole bunch of pictures. The theme of the rally, of course, was peace and the removal of American troops from Iraq.
There was an interesitng variety of different signage being used by the protesters. The most common sign is what I’ll refer to as the “odometer sign“, a double sided sign with one side emphasizing the 4,000 deaths and the other side illustrating a turnover from Iraq to Iran. The odometer sign’s most interesting feature, though, was a subscript which read, These numbers pale compared to the million Iraqi lives lost to the imperialist, racist policies perpetrated by U.S. institutions. Probably the most striking sign, at least in terms of its size and visual interest, was the big black sign that a few people were holding up beside the road.
One notable facet of the protest was the woman with the megaphone. Actually, to say there was only one is incorrect, as even in the time I was there, they handed it off a few times to various other women. I noticed as I first approached the protest that what was coming out of the thing was a list of names, which I initially assumed to be the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. But then I noticed a couple things: The names were all middle-eastern, and a number of them were accompanied by phrases like “nine years old.” I asked one of the ladies who had been reading the names who those people were, and she said that they were a combination of Americans and Iraqis killed in Iraq, and mentioned that although she didn’t know for sure, the group had been protesting the day before as well and that she thought they were then reading a list of all 4000 soldiers killed in the war.
Curious who had orchestrated the event, I asked one of the protesters what group it was that I was seeing standing on Grand River. He told me that the group I was looking at was The Greater Lansing Network Against War and Injustice (Glnawi). Indeed, their website confirms their presence today and also offers some description of the names that I had pondered over earlier: As a memorial to those who have died we will read the names of the Michigan soldiers who died in Iraq and the names of a sample of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths in this war.
There was one other facet of this protest which caught me as being a bit unexpected. Although there was certainly a contingent of student aged individuals out there, the overall demographic was well beyond the college age. I would put the average age somewhere in the late 50s, with a sizeable contingent seeming quite a bit older than that.
Certainly not what I expected to see when I went hunting dinner.