The night after the rally I had a strange dream, a kind of counter-Utopia. This [the Stand for Children] was the future of all mass demonstrations, where people would experience the mystique of radicalism and never express opinions, where people would pretend to have freedom of speech and never risk using it.
Suddenly I am aware of an imposing presence approaching the microphone. The wild crowd grows silent in anticipation. The speaker s magnetic voice sends chills down our collective spine: "We have gathered here today from every part of the country we are white, we are Black; we are Muslim, we are Jewish, we are Christian and we have come as one united voice to demand ... absolutely nothing!"
The people cheer ...
HE AWOKE from the nightmare, this War Resisters League activist of the Left, after Standing for Children June 1 in Washington. Why had he gone? Why had we gone? What had we hoped to gain? Were we not clear after decades of being dissed--dismissed, disrespected, disregarded--of being missed--mistreated, misunderstood and misrepresented--of being characterized as un-patriotic, un-American?
Why did we go? What did we hope to gain? Why was the WRL--which rejects the use of violence for national defense or revolutionary change; which vehemently opposes the inequity caused by a government that funds the Pentagon and starves its children; which understands that peace and justice are inextricably linked and that the road to a democratic society free of racial, economic and sexual oppression is one inevitably full of civil disobedience and the often resultant imprisonment--in Washington that day? What was an organization like ours doing at a gathering of people described by organizer Marian Wright Edelman of the Children s Defense Fund as "Democratic and Republican, moderate, liberal, centrist and conservative," when we weren t even counted among those present?
Edelman and the Children s Defense Fund--which develops public policy for children and advocates on their behalf at the federal, state and local levels--had called for us to Stand for Children because the child poverty rate of the United States is one of the highest in the developed world, ranking 26th among developed nations in an international study by the Luxembourg Income Study; because America ranks 18th among industrialized countries in the gap between rich and poor children; because every day 15 children are killed by firearms, 8,493 children are repoted abused and neglected and 2,833 children drop out of school. More than 200,000 people from hundreds of organizations convened June 1 at the Lincoln Memorial to make a stand in the face of those numbers. WRL s YouthPeace Program, the New Jersey WRL local Root and Branch and other WRL members were among those groups because WRL was among the organizations that endorsed the event, despite the fact that the League has a decidedly different solution to the social problems all the endorsing organizations acknowledge and want to change. Social change comes in many forms, and we saw myriad approaches represented in the diverse grouping of labor, social service, religious, moderate, conservative, centrist and liberal groups, despite the very small representation of us on the Left.
How
We Stood
The WRL contingent displayed banners that captured the
attention and imagination of thousands of those people; we distributed literature
and buttons and shared a point of view, a message most of them were not familiar
with (and some did not agree with). Such novel ideas: That the violence in the
streets has a relationship to the violence in the media--and to the war toys children
play with; that the militarization of our youth starts with GI Joe, Ninja Turtles
and Smurf Bazookas and culminates in Army, Navy and Marine enlistment and service;
that the guns we have at home, the guns that are shot in the streets and the guns
the police empty into the backs of our young men and women are all part and parcel
of the same problem. We stood for Children June 1 and propounded our simple solution
to the enormous national issue of violence: Peace. The end of war, the end of
violent acts and violent media, the removal of firearms and other weapons from
homes and streets, the end of militarism, of training soldiers and teaching violence
through war toys and military recruitment.
The Children s Defense Fund stressed that this was a day of commitment to children, not a partisan political day. Edelman asked those of us who care about children to come as parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, big brothers and big sisters, students and educators, nurturers and providers, not as Republicans, Democrats or independents. No politicians or candidates were invited to speak, although they were welcome to come as parents. The conveners maintained that supporting children and making it easier rather than harder for families struggling to raise them is not a partisan issue, that every child should be given the chance to realize his or her potential, that no child should grow up hungry, sick, unsafe or uneducated. The event tried to build a new spirit of caring for children that transcends party labels or racial, regional or economic boundaries.
Attack from the Right
Yet even after that strenuous effort to remain non-partisan and non-offensive,
conservative forces came out in force to attack the event. According to The New
York Times June 2, conservatives saw the Stand as nothing more than an upraised
begging bowl from liberal welfare lobbyists and poverty bureaucrats. The article
quoted Kenneth Weinstein, director of the Government Refrm Project for the Heritage
Foundation, the conservative Washington research organization, as saying, "I really
think that this march should actually be called the march of the social service
administrators. "
These responses are to be expected. Never mind that the proposed FY1996 military budget of the current administration is $258 billion--an amount with which you could fund Aid to Families with Dependent Children at its current funding level for 16 years. Yet Edelman appeared to be shaken by the barrage of conservative attacks. Did she really feel that a coalition of eclectic forces would move the hearts and minds of those who feel that the answer to all of our problems is a more balanced budget, stronger defense, more jails, fewer schools--in short, less for "the least of these" and more for the wealthiest?
The Stand for Children and its aftermath show both that diverse mass gatherings are still possible, and that compromise and accommodation can diminish even the best-intentioned effort. If one lesson was learned from Stand For Children it was: stand firm, stand strong.
Which is why we were there. The War Resisters League came because we know that our commitment is not marginal nor accommodating, that we stand, feet planted firmly on the Left, buoyed by Gandhian philosophy, on the shoulders of generations of pacifists, giving voice to otherwise-muted ideas in a time of increasing conservatism.
We came to Stand for Children June 1 at the Lincoln Memorial because we stand strong against a Right that employs grassroots methods in its efforts to invade the schools, affect social policies, influence behavior and attitudes while shrinking the human capacity with narrow perspectives on almost everything. We came to inform. We came to share. We came to resist.
