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Sunday, August 06, 2006
Yesterday's rally at the art gallery was different. There was a tension floating in the air, an anger that I haven't felt in public since that one rainy night 3 years ago at an Iraq war protest when someone got hit by a car that smashed into the march. It was rainy and cold and dark that night. Yesterday was sunny, bright and hot.
The music was loud and intense, billowing out of loudspeakers. It too sounded angry, and the pictures of dead people looked angry and the voices coming out of microphones were angry and anger was everywhere in the crowd.
And the crowd seemed smaller. I know, a lot of things were happening yesterday - the Dyke March, and Powell St Festival and the fireworks. But the march seemed small. Marginal. Some of the co-organisers put the march at 1500 people. I really really think it was no more than 500.
A girl spoke. She was maybe 10, and she broke down in the middle of her speech. "Why?" she asked. "Why is the Israeli government killing people." It was really hard to watch. Really hard to listen to. I ran into a friend on the outside of the march after that. "I think I need to leave." he said. He looked really shaken up. "I don't know if I can handle this. Its too much. Its too intense". I've never seen him look so stunned before. So shaken. Usually he is laughing.
I have to admit, I am getting scared. People are polarising, the reaction is getting more and more angry and vicious. Rifts are being created, or exacerbated. The lines drawn between Muslim and Jew are NOT being healed, no matter how hard I push in our little collective for them to be. A man from Jews for Just Peace spoke at our rally. He was amazing, but at the end people had some criticisms. Fine. Valid. But then someone said "I guess what he said was good for a Jew." Sigh. I dunno. How do I feel about that? On the one hand, its good that someone's expectations of what a Jewish person can think and feel and believe about the world are upturned and upended. Its good that solidarity can be displayed from all sides.
But it freaks me out a little. The way in which these lines are hardening. Everyone is hardening. People are angry and everywhere there is bitterness and rage and bile and distrust. And sometimes, as was said at the march, in a climate of utter distrust and fear, someone like Hasan Nasrallah is whom you turn to.
And I know he is a resistance leader. And I know Hizbollah does things for people that our governments don't even do. But I fear that our movements will get marginalised and stereotyped if we don't do a better job of explaining ourselves as we shout solidarity with the resistance. Already reactionary mouthpieces in the paper - even the Georgia Straight - accuse us all of being "terrorists" and even followers of a "pro-war, fascist Jew-killer ". We are positioned as rabid dogs. Terry Glavin's piece (of shit article) accusing StopWar.ca of organising for the sole purpose of "opposing Israel" attacks us all - big names like George Galloway, activists in general and one of our coalitions co-organisers, and local business man Rafeh Hulays. Glavin takes Hulays' comments out of context, twists them, and re-contextualises them to make a fairly conservative businessman look like, well, a monster. The media can create such things. It can create monsters , but it will never EVER be able to uncreate them. Just like you can't unsay a thing you have already said
So see. I feel it. I really do. I feel that we are polarising. We are "with us or against us"-ing. We are falling apart here, on the left, in the anti-war movement, in the world in general. I don't know what to do.
I waver back and forth over whether we will actually manage to pull all of this together. Over whether we will ever be able to convince anyone. Over whether or not we can ever adequately solve to problems that confront us. Today I am feeling no. I am feeling very worried. I am stiffening for the soon to be prevalent increased racism and profiling and distrust and fear of "Arabs" in North America, and the continued hardening of views towards Jews all over.
A synagogue was attacked yesterday in Rio di Janiero, Brazil yesterday.
I am bracing for the worst here.
In the meantime, I suppose I just keep trying to do what I have been doing.
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