Strange
Day

In tried. I really tried to write something up that explained what I thought of the Protesters and the Counter-protesters. I really tried to sound fair.
But for fuck’s sake, there’s some blind, ignorant, obnoxious people out there.
We protest.
The simplest fact is, we can. We are allowed to. The very foundation of the country is the right to hold contrary beliefs, and express them as you see fit. And so long as we’re not doing physical harm to anyone or thing, you can damn well live with it.
We are not protesting against the soldiers. We are not even protesting against the military. More often than not, Protesters will independently share their concern for our troops. We are protesting against the Shrub, and everything he represents in this war.
This is a man with no experience in international relations, but an entire lifetimes experience in corporate affairs. This entire argument with Iraq has been based upon a pissing contest between our respective leaders. And Saddam Hussein has come out as the more mature.
How fucked up do you have to be to come across as a lesser man than Hussein? He is a blatant dictator who has a history of open aggression and nightmarish mistreatment. And he’s still behaving more civilized.
We have not yet turned up a single weapon of mass destruction. We have not turned up any evidence, more substantial than seven missiles which go thirty too far, that Iraq has not lived up to it’s requirements. At the same time, Iraq has accepted every increasingly ridiculous demand made by the US and the UN, right up until we simply told Hussein to go away.
We feel we have good reason to protest military actions being taken at this point. I already said this has nothing to do with not supporting troops. The very freedom those troops claim to be fighting for is what allows us, even now, to voice our concerns. You expect people violently opposed to an action to simply go away because that action has finally commenced? If that is what you would do, you are truly sad.
The neo-nazis can protest here. The religious fruitcakes can protest here. People can drive through the District with 6-foot tall pictures of aborted fetuses on the sides of their vehicles. Anti-nuke protesters have had a permanent station outside the White House for over ten years.
We are the people from the supermarket. We’re every age, every color, and every faith. And we can damn well gather here to say we don’t like the President.
A couple years ago, I lived with a girl from Tanjikistan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. She really wasn’t too happy with any part of the world. Americans were loud and garish and too proud of their “freedoms”. And for the sake of supposed freedom, people in her own country were having a hard time even getting food to eat. She said people had freedom to say what they wanted in Tanjikistan before the collapse of the USSR; they simply said it in their own homes.
It’s seductive — the idea that people should simply keep their concerns amongst their close associates.
But, we’re Americans. We’re loud and garish, and proud of our freedoms. We’re going to stand on the corner and yell and scream just because we’re pissed off.

Someone in Iraq died tonight. If they even saw it coming, they had but a second’s notice.
Someone’s child is dead. Someone’s friend is dead. Someone’s coworker is dead.
They didn’t threaten violence. They didn’t attempt to injure anyone. They just went to work.
There is nothing patriotic about this. And there is nothing good about this. One person is dead, and multiple people are grieving for someone they can never get back.
It has, as always, begun on the crumpled body of one dead person.