Noon hour, Veteran’s Memorial Park sheathed in ice. Alison and I stepped with great caution to the junction of Main and Elm. Her sign read NO TO WAR AND WASTE/ YES TO PEACE AND PROSPERITY. She stood in front of the statue of a Civil War (Union) soldier. My sign read IRAQIS ARE PEOPLE. I stood on frozen footsteps someone else had made while waiting to cross. We received several honks and raised arms with hands in the ‘V’ peace sign. One young guy leaned out of his window, waving his arms at "Iraqis are People," shouting, "Yes, yes." Quite a different reception this time. We’d been here before. A few drops of ice rain fell, not enough to ruin our signs.

On this day a master of assembling words into structures that shine every which way would take an oath and become a member of the Supreme Court. And at 9 o’clock in the evening our leader would give a report on the State of the Union. That’s why we were there, to show opposition to clever dodgers and the Chicken Hawks’ war. I wondered how many people in the passing cars and trucks felt like stopping to show heartfelt hostility and tell us how wrong we were. And how many silently wondered if it might be fun to join us.

Actually, it was fun. We enjoyed showing the flag, the opposition flag. If you know that firm resistance here at home is the only way out, then you know what is to be done and you don’t fret about it. It’s a sort of freedom feeling. Not so incidentally, some people passing by not only waved or honked, they smiled.

The atmosphere on that day was one of soft suspension, as if people were waiting. For what? I don’t know. Sometimes after getting into the rhythm of a demo or protest you move into a sort of dreamy state. On this day I was working with materials at hand, ice and quiet rain, slushy rush of traffic, pigeons soaring high above, and then I began recalling the start of Gulf War II when the park had been crowded with American Legion and VFW "Support Our Troops" vets, a boom box blasting God Bless America, a yellow ribbon on the tall pedestal on which the Civil War soldier stood. And Old Glory and Marine and Legion and VFW flags. A scene colorful and raucus. I had mingled, trying to start a bit of discussion, but I was a Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home vet. Someone yelled, "This is OUR park, didn’t you know that?" Our handful of anti-war people were forced from the park. We took the opposite corner, but even then one of the vets ran across and tried to block Alison’s sign with his. She talked to him. He gave in, responded with the standard brand: "War might not have been a great idea, but now we’re in we have to finish it."

We kept on protesting, every week, for a while. The Support the War vets didn’t show, our anti-war six or seven dwindled, got down to two: Alison and me. Three years later, two of us again, but no scowls this time, no angry shouts. Just the slush of traffic, pigeons, rain, ice and some smiles.

The previous night Coretta Scott King had died. Thirty seven years ago her husband was assassinated. King was an unusually outspoken pastor, he condemned the war in Vietnam where our armed forces dropped 19 million gallons of herbicides, 8 million bombs, wiped out 60 percent of Vietnam’s mangrove forests. Our troops took 50,000 KIAs. Among the 300,000 wounded were 70,000 amputees. (1) The Vietnamese people are still taking casualties from that holocaust. Most statistics are boring, these are not.

When our feet got cold we tippy-toed on ice, back to the car, joined the good old American traffic streams, went home. Next morning we heard that Cindy Sheehan had been arrested for displaying an anti-war sign at the State of the Union affair and taken away in handcuffs for god’s sake! And then along comes David Gergen, longtime advisor to presidents from both donkey and elephant stables. He is given air time to say that Cindy had a right to protest, but her going to Venezuela and "embracing Chavez," was too much."

Gergen! Stop! Think what you just said! You have tried to push to the far margins of society a Gold Star mother who visited another president, having been rudely and cowardly refused an audience with her own. Did she literally "embrace" Chavez? I didn’t even know she’d spoken to him. If she did embrace, good for her. What is "too much" about such acts? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Searching the Web, I discovered there are web sites full of totally mindless and vicious words being thrown Cindy’s way. I got mad. I’m still mad.

Let’s be clear about a few things. We live in a nation governed by stealth and secrecy that has launched us on a track that leads to Hell. It’s time to become refuseniks, people who stick up for one another, refusing to be sidetracked by prominent spokespersons and news manglers who make up sentences that don’t stand the test of logic or constitutionality or American underclass tradition.

Oh yes, nearly all of us are underclass. If you’re reading this I doubt very much that you are wearing a suit designed in Milan by whose-it or in Paris by what’s-it. The people in charge don’t really give a damn about us and the sooner we get used to that fact, the better. Because that might nudge open the rusty old gate, welcoming us to the real stuff of our country, the long hidden history, the thoughts and acts they didn’t teach us in high school.

We ought to be critical, learn the fine art of disagreement among ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we have to take the word of people in power or their lackeys, or the subservient congresspersons or the talking heads on TV or complacent newscasters on NPR. We don’t have to take seriously the vapid, totally empty pronouncements from Democans, like Hillary, or Republicrats, like Tom DeLay. We can’t afford to allow them to sidetrack us by innuendo about a refusenik’s personality or her/his stature or human failings or mistakes at certain places along the lifeline. None of us are angels. I’m saying nothing new here, but the arrest of Cindy gets me mightily riled up. I’m still riled up.

Joe Hill, an IWW, was executed by firing squad in Utah, for murder. We don’t know if he was guilty; we don’t know if he toned down his defense to defend the reputation of a certain woman in Salt Lake. We are told he said, or wrote, "Don’’t mourn, organize." That’s a damn good saying, and it’s high time we stop milling round like a bunch of sheep mourning our sorry situation. Time to stand up for Cindy, an organizer, a leader who walks the talk, and who has been taking lots of flack. It’s time to stand firm against the slandering of everyone who gets in the crosshairs of the utterly stupid, but well-placed, blathermouths on the airwaves. Oh sure, let’s enjoy passing around cartoons and jokes about the horrific times in which we live, the stupidities of higher-ups, the awesome depth of disdain for human life that infests the corporate world. Laughs are good. The more laughter the better.

But, hey, the Europeans had great jokes about Hitler too, remember?

Yesterday, Alison and I were taking long looks back, to all the demos and vigils against the wars. So many wars, so overwhelming the injustices. We carried petitions and joined protests against Truman’s Korean war, against Kennedy’s Vietnam war, Johnson’s Vietnam war, Nixon’s Vietnam war (50,000 KIAs); against Reagan’s aggression in Nicaragua and Panama; against Bush the First’s invasion of Iraq; against Bush the Second’s invasion of Iraq. Have I left out some of the wars? Probably. Our activism was simple enough, though at times a chore. It wasn’t anything we were ashamed of or wanted to opt out of. We were not heads of organizations, hardly ever spokespersons, never even went to jail. We simply showed up when it seemed the thing to do. We decided it had been an adventure in tragic times, an adventure inadvertent and unplanned, because history never stops. Surprises, always. Not always bad.

Our conversation moved on, to the peace action in the final half of my new novel, Breakout. In that fiction the author was having a great time, imagining a "what if." (2) It began with three women in South Dakota. Yes, a conservative place. So is the territory where Alison and I live now, but we’ve lived here a long time and know that "conservative" doesn’t even begin to describe the grand sweep of opinions, of doubts, of struggles, which means being alert, which means that rhetoric from on high is always being measured against on-the-ground reality.

Let’s listen to three (fictional) women in South Dakota, on-line, issuing a call to defend the nation, organizing a resistance...

Here is what can be done. On a certain Saturday, very soon, each one of us takes a nice big sign that you have made yourself and you take that sign to a place where one highway meets another and you stand there from seven in the morning till nine. Take a break. Go home or go somewhere to talk things over with whoever is with you. Talk about what happened, think carefully about every little thing, then go back for noon hour traffic. That’s all you have to do.

These standings will be happening all across our nation. We are the ones who make this nation. We are the ones. We will be showing each other where we stand. Words are not enough and you know this as well as we do. No excuses. Just put your body out there. This will be a grand showing, FOR US. Not for TV, not for the rulers, not for experts who are not out there with us, not for anybody who thinks they can boost their selfish egos by making fun of us.

You are thinking this showing will not stop war. You are right, it won’t. We will set another date, another weekend so you can’t say sorry, have to work, sorry, have to go to class. We will stand again, each little group of us will learn how to do it better in the next show. And the next and the next. We will find ways to do it. We will learn. We will not do it perfectly the first time.

Are you ready? Somebody has to set the date. We will let you know. WARNING: Do not waste time hoping a TV truck will visit you, or hoping that CNN will give us a decent showing. Hoping like that is a downer. This is OUR show. We will be telling each other about how it went and how we can do better. Don’t get down on your knees. Stand proud on your own two feet. If you are disabled, get out there anyway. Bully somebody to get you there. Show up!!!

Today we were in town again, doing errands. A young man stopped us. "You were the ones , Tuesday, with signs," he said. We admitted to that. He said he had tried to persuade a couple of his friends to take a stand, but now that he’d actually seen a couple of people doing just that, he felt encouraged. As we parted, he said, "Hey, I’’m going to make me a sign too. Next time I see you out there, I’ll join you." l. Kurt Stand. /King’’s Revolution In Values Revisited/. www. mrzine.org, January, 2006.