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The Pro-America Rally: My Rebuttal to a Reaction to a Response about Anti-WarIn a free openly liberal Orlando newspaper, the Orlando Weekly, an article appears this week concerning a rally that took place last Saturday at Lake Eola. Written by Jeffrey C. Billman, the article, “Praise the Lord and Drop the Bombs: Inside a Pro-America Rally,” paints a picture of a huge crowd of angry white Republican old men who hate dissent, trust their government, believe in God, and want to kill Iraqi children, all waving their flags and drunk with a mindless obsession to support President Bush, make war, and silence protesters around the world.I don’t consider myself a strict Republican (I refer to myself, when asked, as a registered Republican or a conservative Libertarian), although I do have several right-wing conservative leanings, and I am not an old man. I do not inherently trust my government, nor do I attend church or practice a religion. I definitely have no desire to kill Iraqi children, and yet, I was there, without any friends or family with me, waving my little American flag (which has “MADE IN CHINA” scrawled on the side of it) and was nearly brought to tears by the words of Michael Curran, an ex-army intelligence officer who fought in the Gulf War. Curran talked about the things he saw when he visited the Northern Kurdish villages of Iraq and how enthusiastic these starving and oppressed masses were to see help in the form of Apache helicopters and American flags. He discussed the horrors he witnessed at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and the importance he placed on risking his own life and limb (indeed, he was wounded in combat) to help the underprivileged around the world. He talked about the difference between the life of an American child, living in freedom, and the life of children growing up in oppression and tyranny. Because of this, and a vast amount of other rhetoric, it is impossible to say that this rally had nothing to do with the proposed war on Iraq. In fact, when I sat down about an hour before the rally, I heard two guys behind me swapping Saddam jokes, including one that compared him to a malignant tumor that a French doctor wanted to inspect for a few months instead of removing. There were other messages at the rally as well, one of which being that racial make-up has no bearing on reality, that the seeds of divisiveness are planted by those who label any group based upon superficial observations of skin color or ethnic background. As Curran put it, “Race was what we did on the playground and it was all-inclusive. Color was how we picked our bicycles, not our friends ... The hyphen was a form of punctuation, not identification.” Billman, in his reactionary article, obviously doesn’t believe that message. “Of the 2,000-plus here,” he writes, “I count 20 blacks, including a singer, a speaker on stage and two janitorial staffers.” Billman, in true liberal fashion, wants to turn this into a racial issue. For the record, the people sitting in front of me at the rally were of obvious Hispanic decent, a man of Middle-Eastern or Indian appearance was a few seats to my right, and, directly in my line of sight to the left, a small family of blacks chanted and shouted, “Amen,” louder than almost anybody aside from the drunk white guy behind me screaming “freedom” over and over as if trying out for a stage version of Braveheart. While I acknowledge that noticing these things goes against a belief that race makes no difference, you have to make sacrifices in order to prepare yourself for the inevitable leftist racial argument. Billman also points out that there were a large number of veterans in the audience, and he does it as if that were a bad thing. Not once in his article does he acknowledge that, if it weren’t for the sacrifices of men who died in combat oversees or the men who stood before him last Saturday with old war wounds and battle scars, the Orlando Weekly would not exist and Billman’s opinions on a wide range of issues would remain unvoiced. Instead of thanking these men for his liberty, Billman berated them with political rhetoric and then mocked them in a public newspaper. This is the only thing in Billman’s article that actually infuriates me. He discusses a scene in which he approached a man and asked him what he thought of killing Iraqi children. I wish Billman would have asked within earshot of me, since, while we’re on the subject, I would have answered, “Regardless of who you blame for it--the U.N., for laying down economic sanctions in an effort to avoid war with Iraq in ‘91, or Saddam Hussein, for doing nothing to prevent the sanctions and then squandering his country’s wealth in opulent palaces and biological weapons programs--you cannot deny that Iraqi children have been dying at a horrific rate in Iraq for at least twelve years now; it’s well-documented. If the U.S. and her allies go in and remove the Baath party from power, the sanctions will be lifted, humanitarian aid will pour in, and the child mortality rate will drop significantly. I do not want to kill innocent Iraqi children, but, if killing ten saves ten-thousand, then I don’t know what we’re waiting for.” Billman makes his argument on Iraq by stating that he wonders why we don’t simply arrest Saddam Hussein and try him for crimes against humanity. I would like to ask him how exactly we would do that. Could we simply walk passed the Iraqi Republican Guard, put Saddam in handcuffs, and march him out of Iraq like a drug dealer at a nightclub without risking any sort of retaliation from the thousands of loyal soldiers armed with Russian and American heavy armament? Reading Billman’s article, I also feel the need to react to his assertion that the people at the rally (to whom he refers as “these people”) “share a very cohesive worldview rooted in religious principles and black-and-white notions of right and wrong, good and evil.” He tries to argue that this is the definition of the Republican party. As an agnostic and deeply philosophical registered Republican, I cannot agree with him. He goes on to say that he and his fellow liberals are deeply divided on gray-area issues like bombing Iraq and, while I agree with that, I am forced to wonder why they weren’t as divided on the morality of bombing Iraq in 1998, when Clinton failed to ask permission of either Congress or the U.N. to drop more bombs than were dropped in Iraq during the entirety of 1991. To claim that a political party stands for something cohesive and that all members of that party agree with it is to lump a group of people together based upon a prejudice. It’s not exactly racist, but it’s something comparable. The only thing you can say about the rally beyond a reasonable doubt is that most of the people at it (including Billman) came out because they were called to come to a “Pro-America” rally. It was organized by Shannon Burke, from conservative talk radio (540 WFLA--“the Rush Limbaugh station”--5:30 to 9:00 a.m.), but he was not the only one telling people about the rally. I even saw a van on my way to work a few days before the event with information painted on the back windshield. Within less than a week, over 2,000 people got the call, and it was not a call for old white Republicans and suburbanites who wanted to wage war; it was a call for people who wanted to stand up and support America. Burke even said, so often that it was becoming tiresome, that it was not a pro-war rally. He discouraged (albeit unsuccessfully) political rhetoric, and he claimed that all he wanted to do was show that the 2.5 million anti-war protesters from the week before weren’t the only people willing to raise their voices in the name of what they believe. He wanted to praise America. Is it his fault that the majority of people patriotic enough to assemble and wave American flags while chanting “U-S-A” over and over again just happen to be Republican? Is it his fault that cynicism over the country is a trait typically reserved for the Democrats? I chanted, I sang, I saluted war heroes, and I said the pledge of allegiance (for the record, even though I don’t support organized or State-sponsored religion, I did say “under God”; I got over any squeamishness I may have had about that as a Boy Scout), but I was not some mindless automaton programmed by the Republican party. Most people who know me know that I am only a registered Republican because I’m waiting for the Libertarian party to grow some more political weight and get better leaders, at which time I’ll be more than happy to change parties. I am a recent college graduate with a liberal arts degree. I am twenty-four years old. I am an agnostic and a student of psychology and philosophy. I am a writer stuck in a low-paying job, scraping by, paycheck-to-paycheck. I believe in freedom of speech and respect the anti-war movement for letting its voice be heard. I even respect Jeffrey C. Billman and the Orlando Weekly, regardless of how much I disagree with them, and I don’t believe that it is unpatriotic to question one’s government. I believe in the power of honest dissent and public debate. I am not loyal to the Republican party. But I support America. And it has nothing to do with my race. When asked my ethnicity, I answer, very simply, “I am an American.”
-e. magill, 02/27/2003 | |
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