I don't know. This is the first time I suspect I'll be slammed on a post where everyone is as liberal as I am, but as an old protester from way back, I am beginning to think the civil disobedience is bad timing. I've been doing some marching and attending rallies and candlelight vigils, but they were all peaceful. I know this is a new tactic, because they feel the old ones didn't work, or that it will draw special attention to Bush now, if you close down businesses to make a point.

But I post on a coupla boards where there's people from the other side, both right-wing and moderate and I'm holding up the Left (I get called "traitor" and other nasty names at least three times a day), and I can judge from reactions all around me that this is a HUGE turnoff to all the rally-round-the-troops folks right now -- that's all they can talk about, and it's blowing it, not helping. I have posted all kinds of quotations about dissent myself (including Robert Taft's speech to the Senate on the eve of WWII, about dissent being the highest expression of democracy).

That's to tell you where I am coming from. I read an article today in the L.A. Times by Todd Gitlin, that old 60's activist ("Days of Peace and Rage"): "Can the Peace Movement Reinvent Itself." I tried to make a link here, but it doesn't work. Put put in Todd Gitlin, March 23, and L.A.Times on Google, and it will bring it up.

At any rate, it says, in part, about violent protesting and traffic blocking, etc. "Expressive politics of this sort reflect understandable anger and desperation, but they are unlikely to affect the course of events -- except possibly to help turn a majority of the population against the antiwar movement, as happened during the later phases of the Vietnam war. A rise in militancy at a time when the majority of Americans are rallying around the president (as majorities generally do when war starts), would amount to a politics of futility -- a cathartic performance piece with precious little chance of winning new supporters and a vastly greater chance of annoying, even enraging, the majority."

And that's what I see, every day, folks.

Gitlin goes on to say that the movement has come to a fork in the road and needs to think, not of tactics, but of what it will protest, and -- importantly -- what it will affirm. "Some will think it sufficient to march behind the slogan "U.S. Out of Iraq," but now that war is launched -- however wrongheadedly or infuriatingly -- a simple 'no' is not enough."

This is just a brief rundown, but he goes on to argue the case of asking that protestors might look toward ensuring that something "decent" or at least "less indecent" follows from this war. And ends with saying that perhaps the next step should be to reprise another Vietnam-era institution: teach-ins, genuine exchanges of informed ideas where people learn from each other...and says "But if teach-ins turn into pacifist rallies that however, sincere, shirk the awful dilemmas, they will be next to useless."

Anyway, I am just digesting that myself. Viscerally, I know what I feel...but the intellectual arguments, those are far more complex.