PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

My thoughts on April 3rd
by DJ Sylvis Friday, Apr. 04, 2003 at 5:58 AM
deejbard@telerama.com (email address validated)

Not exactly journalism, more like nonfiction prose. But my thoughts and observations on the silent march yesterday.

At five o’clock Thursday afternoon, I sat on a street corner, trying to stay in the shade. Black was an appropriate color to wear for the march that would begin in a half-hour, but it certainly didn’t make the day any cooler.

While the sweat trickled down my back, I watched three police officers across the street. They were unloading from their trunk an extensive array of gear, strapping it about themselves while they furtively watched the marchers gather. I couldn’t help but wonder, are those handcuffs for me? Is that club to wield against my peaceful protestations? Who is more paranoid; we who don’t trust the government as our savior, or those who see our presence as a threat?

As more people gathered, I shook some hands and learned some names (which I immediately forgot), and the rumors started to spread. The police had asked all the merchants along our route to close early. The police had warned people that a violent protest was planned. Some of the people close by had been arrested in previous actions the past Sunday, or the week before, and were wary of this news. “Man, I really can’t chance going to jail again.” But they stayed, even as the police presence started to build.

We began to crowd in at our corner, free-haired hippies and mothers with children and Raging Grannies. We talked, friends found each other, people distributed underground newspapers and letters of protest, all the while sneaking glances at the stone-faced officers across the intersection. And they stared back at us.

A half-sheet of paper was passed around, defining our march. Unlike the usual protests we had been taking to the streets, this was to be a silent march, an expression of mourning for all the dead of this war. “We march to emphasize our common respect for war victims,” the paper read. “We march with deep grief over the violence in our world, yet clinging to hope for a better and brighter world.”

As copies continued to circulate, a respectful hush started to fall amongst the crowd. Many people were obviously thinking, not talking, and those who held conversations kept their voices down. Two groups of four young people lifted cardboard coffins to their shoulders and moved to the front, the crowd parting around them. We fell in line, four or five abreast, behind them on the sidewalk. From somewhere came the beat of one muffled drum, and we began to walk at a funereal pace. By this time, the streets were lined with police officers and vehicles; but even that seemed somehow less threatening, as if they were providing an escort to our bereavement.

Marching slowly is more difficult than marching quickly, at least in the short term. Within the first block, my feet, ankles and shins ached from shuffling along. I continued to sweat in the late afternoon sun. I moved, but the air seemed to hold place around me. The silence was only broken by the traffic in the street beside us.

With no voices chanting, no colorful signs, we seemed to become more anonymous. We could have been the destitute on the road fleeing Baghdad, or the homeless seeking refuge in Afghanistan, or the line of ash-dusted New Yorkers I remember from a photograph on September 11th.

We felt like victims. And as I continued to walk, falling into step with the muted drumbeats, my thoughts wandered back and forth from the marchers around me to the casualties I had been reading about in the news of the war. They were so easily interchangeable. The woman in front of me, of the same age as my mother, could have been one killed in a truck near Najaf simply for panicking and failing to stop as she fled with her family. I turned my head as I heard laughter in the line behind me – little girls playing at hiding from their mother. They left me in tears at their resemblance to the children cut in pieces by a U.S. cluster bomb only days ago. Row by row we became corpses, killed in hospitals and markets, shot as we fled with our families or bombed as we crouched trembling in our homes.

And I thought back to the young, clean-shaven man who had spoken about going to jail before we set out on the march. He became a soldier, rifle fallen from his hand, his blood spilled across a poorly-paved road outside of a city. He became that man, pressed to this fight by a power-mad leader, afraid of what might happen if he should refuse, a United States soldier afraid of killing almost as much as dying. Another human being who was called to the front lines of a war steeped in atrocity.

I barely noticed my surroundings for the rest of the march. The police might not have been there altogether. All of my thoughts were with the people surrounding me, and by extension through them with the lives – every one ended too soon – which we were mourning. Even after we dispersed, with evening taking over the sky, it was hard to pick up the pace, to let my mind move on.

We marched that afternoon, and should be marching always, for all victims of this war. For the Iraquis, civilian and soldier, adult and child. For the troops of our country, whatever their feelings about what they have been ordered to do, who have served and lost their lives.

And we marched for ourselves, for our hope and our faith, for our trust that the truth will win out. For, as long as our leaders pay blood to buy oil, while they save lives by cutting them short, while they wage a war founded on lies ... every one of us is a victim.

We marched for the victims of war.

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