So where have all the protesters gone?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Sigh. I have a sudden longing for tie-dye and the warm, fuzzy goofiness of hash brownies. Of course, I was only seven when hordes of hippies overran Yasgur's farm over there in upstate New York and my personal experience with hash brownies occurred in the back of Ms. Raymond's English Lit class in 1977. But those are just details. My heart and soul were there with those kids on the streets of Chicago in '68. In fact, my activist nature really was much more suited to the sixties than the Studio 54 Me decade of the seventies. Lucky me to have been born into the wrong decade.

Anyway, I'm going to make up for all that now. I - yes, me - the woman who struggles to find the energy to clean her house - am going to protest. And much like the sixties, I am going to be protesting a senseless war perpetrated by the American government against a foreign power. It's sad how quickly this War against Terror has just disintegrated into War, plain and simple. And a guerrilla war at that. Instead of small men in black pyjamas attacking and then disappearing back into the Southeast Asian jungle, you have young men in arab headdress nabbing people off the street in Baghdad and throwing them into the back of beat up Ford pick-ups. The difference is that now the video of their beheading ends up on the internet within 24 hours.

But where are the protesters? I know that the lack of a draft makes this war less emotionally charged than Vietnam, but we still have young men and women dying every day over in Iraq - and for what? Where are the kids in the streets with the signs? Where are the musicians with those powerful lyrics that led kids out of their university classrooms and out onto the quad?

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio

Are we just more cynical now than we were forty years ago? Was this summer's Live 8 concert just a pale retread of Live Aid because the world is so different now? Young people today do not need to leave their homes to connect with the world - they can do that online. All those rites of passage can be had through the internet: itunes for the music, chat rooms to find a cute guy/girl, and porn sites for everything else.

What a sad statement - that our kids would prefer to live in a virtual world rather than get involved in making the real world a better one. I hope that it isn't true. But either way, I'm not giving up. I am going to protest. I'm not sure how, I'm not even sure how many people will be involved, but I'm going to do something.

Now where did I put that leather fringed vest?

There's something happening here,
what it is ain't exactly clear,
There's a man with a gun over there,
telling me that I've got to beware.

I think it's time we stopped, children, what's that sound,
everybody look what's going down.


"The 14 Marines killed in Iraq Wednesday and the six killed Monday all belonged to the same Ohio-based battalion. The Headquarters & Services Company, 25th Marine Regiment, 3rd battalion is headquartered in Brook Park, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.

The Wednesday attack, in which a roadside explosive detonated beneath the Marines' amphibious vehicle, is the single most deadly improvised explosive attack on U.S. forces since the war began." - NPR, August 3, 2005