Hamilton students and faculty recently participated in an anti-war rally on the village green in Clinton, and a rally for peace in New York City. Hamilton's Peace and Justice Action Group (PJAG) organized a bus trip to the New York City rally with members of the Mohawk Valley Peace Coalition.
Speakers at the New York City rally included Reverend Desmond Tutu, Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon. An article in the Spectator quoted attendee Hilary King '05 as saying, "It was kind of crazy, but it was just amazing. I'd never been to a rally before. There were so many people just chanting, 'This is what democracy really looks like.' It was an incredible sight to see people passionate enough about something that they were willing to stand in the freezing weather for four hours," she said.
PJAG plans to host additional campus events including an open forum, speaker and candlelight vigil. Linwood Rumney '04, the president of PJAG, says in the Spectator article: "It's almost impossible to gauge how the campus feels about going to war with Iraq. We don't really talk about it too much, and when we do it's usually our friends who tend to be of like political mind anyway. That's why we thought an open forum might be a good idea, so that people with very different views express them."
Following is the text of an opinion piece written by Maurice Isserman, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History, and published in the Utica Observer-Dispatch on February 23. Isserman was among faculty members who attended the rally in New York.
"It was dark when the bus chartered by the Mohawk Valley Peace Coalition pulled out from the parking lot of Utica College early last Saturday morning, heading for the anti-war demonstration in New York City. There were forty-eight of us, and we filled every seat on the bus as it rolled down the Thruway past the frozen landscape. Some slept, some listened to music, but mostly we talked -- about the threat of war, about what awaited us in New York, and about ourselves.
"I knew a few people already, but most of us were strangers to each other when we got on the bus. As the hours passed, we got to know each other better. A few of us were older, veterans of earlier marches and earlier wars. Most were young students from Hamilton College and Utica College. They were a pleasure to travel with, having that mixture of seriousness and exuberance that I remember from civil rights and antiwar marches in the 1960s. The youngest rider of all was a 12 year old boy from Sauquoit, travelling to his first protest with his mother, and carrying a hand-lettered sign reading 'What would Jesus bomb?'
"The rider who most impressed me was a friendly, sandy-haired man about my own age, who also carried his own sign -- 'Another Vietnam Veteran for Peace.' He had a combat infantryman's badge and a Bronze Star pinned to his fatigue jacket. '1st Infantry Division,' he told me when I asked. He got the medal while serving in Vietnam in 1967-68. Why had he come? 'If Americans had turned out for a demonstration like this one forty years ago, I wouldn't have had to go to Vietnam.'
"We got to the Shea Stadium parking lot about 11. That's where the buses from out-of-town were letting off their passengers. Dozen of buses were already parked there, and more rolling in by the minute. On one side of us a bus from Buffalo let out its passengers, on the other a bus from Lynn, Massachusetts, did the same. Everyone looked glad to get off the bus after a long ride, and eager to get to the rally on the East Side of Manhattan.
"But that wasn't easy to do. Thousands of us stood in a long line stretched through the parking lot waiting to get on the subway. There were enough people already gathered at Shea Stadium to make a powerful statement against the war. What would it be like when we got to Manhattan?
"It took an hour, and a cramped subway ride to find out. Finally, just after noon, we were on the East Side of Manhattan, making our way from Grand Central Terminal with tens of thousands of others headed towards First Avenue. When we reached First Avenue, we found ourselves near the end of a vast river of protest, stretching from 42nd Street all the way up to 68th street, and beyond. The crowd estimates I heard ranged upwards of 400,000. Half the people on our bus never even made it to First Avenue, because the police started to block access to the march shortly after we arrived.
"I heard many chants that afternoon. My favorite was 'This is what democracy looks like!' Believe me, it sounds really good when several hundred thousand people join voices and call it out. My new friend on the bus was right. If there had been that many people speaking out against a war in Vietnam forty years ago, he wouldn't have had to fight. Think of the lives that would have been saved, the misery and division we would have been spared. Knowing what we know now, who would want to see the United States fight the Vietnam War again? Maybe this time we'll succeed in heading off war. This is what democracy looks like."
Maurice Isserman is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (1999).
