Youths swell ranks of budding movement
By Matthew L. Schwartz
Washington, D.C.
According to march organizers, an estimated half of the
200,000 demonstrators who showed up for the historic Oct. 26
anti-war march here were students from high school and college
campuses.
Hundreds of parents attended with their children. Young
children sat on their parents' shoulders; some parents pushed
strollers in one hand and held picket signs in the other.
Teenagers marched next to the elderly in what was mass
solidarity among all nationalities, ethnicities, genders,
sexual expressions and ages.
Margot Davis, an 18-year-old student from Brandeis
University, told Workers World: "I came because I knew it was
the right thing to do. I had to physically be there to show
President Bush that there really are people from all over who
oppose his war." She added that this war was "obviously unjust"
and that "President Bush is simply in this to make a profit for
his oil companies. He has no respect for the human lives that
will be lost."
Beverly Hiestand, an organizer for the Buffalo/Western New
York ANSWER coalition--Act Now to Stop War & End
Racism--said: "Those of us who were active during the Vietnam
anti-war protests really noticed how different it was this
time. It was not just the youth who were coming in to buy bus
tickets, it was the parents and the youth together."
An editorial in the Oct. 29 San Francisco Chronicle about
the huge simultaneous Oct. 26 march and rally in the Bay Area,
entitled "Seeds of a Movement," noted another difference
between this anti-war movement and the anti-Vietnam War
struggle: "In the 1960s, young people were in part motivated by
the prospect that they might be drafted. By contrast, large
numbers of young people showed up in San Francisco--and to an
even bigger demonstration in Washington, D.C.--without facing
such a threat."
It is clear that the youth movement is just beginning. And
as President Bush and his warlords push forward, more and more
youth will come out and join the movement.
Reprinted from the Nov. 7, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
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