Today I met with about 40 like-minded souls in Palo Alto, California to deliver a petition to our representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA) (or at least her reps at the local office). We asked her to step up and enact legislation make it clear to President Bush that he does not have authority to go to war with Iran.
Our specific petition had 1700 signatures on it, most of them collected online, though a few were hastily added at the event itself. According to Moveon.org (who cosponsored this event) we were one of 343 different events, delivering a sum of over 160,000 signatures.
We met for around half an hour in Lytton Plaza in downtown Palo Alto, singing songs and listening to people talk.
The most entertaining part of this was the Raging Grannies, a group of vivacious older women who dressed up, distributed lyrics worded to object to war and the war crimes, and led us all through those songs to the tunes of a variety of Christmas Carols. There was even one of them with a Tuba!
Then maybe 20 or so of us took the walk down to Rep Eshoo's office (we lost a number of the, as they put it, less ambulatory grannies at this step). We walked in, signed our names on sheets they had for us, and spoke for a while with a fairly amiable young man about our concerns.
I had volunteered to speak if need be, so after the organizer of the protest had read some of the (very good, though not original) talking points from Moveon.org about why war with Iran is such a bad idea, I tried to open up a more conversational discussion.
Its strange, interacting with political office workers... I asked him what he thought of this situation, how he felt, and he wouldn't answer. I asked him what Rep Eshoo's stance was, and he would only say what she had done in the past about Iraq. He said that he would pass along our concerns, and he thought the Representative would respond to us, but he could not express his own opinions or make any statement about the Representative's.
I understand this to some extent... its CYA behavior. But it makes it very difficult to have a conversation. I'm not good at delivering monologues, as can be seen in my sometimes incoherent diaries, and do much better when I can have a two way discussion.
However, when that option was shut down, I had to speak anyway. Luckily, once I started, more and more of the people who came began speaking and building off of one another. I don't remember all of what is said, but one thing did stick:
Someone said that it seemed like our representatives were afraid, and he didn't understand why. I felt compelled to respond:
We're all afraid... standing up is hard. But we're here anyway. Our representatives have every right to be afraid, but if they don't act, who will?