Jules and Jonah March on Washington

I'm hoping to run into two new friends of mine at Saturday's anti-war march in D.C. They won't be there, though, if the sniper is still at large in the Capitol area because their mothers won't allow them to go. Jules Bartkowski and Jonah Rabinbach are the vocalist and drummer of a rock band called The Mad Dodgers. They are 14 years old.

The duo began their careers as peace activists only recently, on Sunday, Oct. 6, when they and I and their mothers -- friends of my old college roommate -- joined an estimated 25,000 people at a rally in the East Meadow of Central Park. As we drove in, the moms discussed Israel and potential routes to peace in the Middle East being proposed by various colleagues of theirs on the lecture circuit while the boys sat with me in the back discussing their rock influences (the Stones, and the girl band, Sleater-Kinney), favorite TV show (Britain's "Ali G," which they download from the Internet), and favorite book ("Stupid White Men" by Michael Moore).

Jonah was wearing the T-shirt he had recently designed himself with the words, "Middle School: Enjoy the Fruits of Conformity and Hypocrisy." He planned to wear it again that Monday at detention, where he had been sent for talking out of turn in class. "Teach me the words for 'We Shall Overcome,'" he asked his mother, and she, a veteran of dozens of Vietnam-era anti-war rallies and Civil Rights marches with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., did so, and all four updated the song with references to current events. Jonah put on the headband he'd bought for this occasion.

It was a clear, fall day but the slight chill in the air made it just cool enough for the boys to wear, during cloudy moments, their denim jackets, which gave them more cloth space to fill with the No War in Iraq buttons someone was selling inside the park. I thought they looked photo-worthy, decked out in their rally gear, but there was no one there to take their picture. The duo seemed more impressed with the slogans on people's homemade signs and placards: Our Grief is not a Cry for War; George Bush: You are an Army of One; War with Iraq is Bush's weapon of Mass Distraction; and No Blood for Oil. The mothers were drawn to one that said I Won't Let an Old Son of a Bush Send my Sons to War.

The rally was organized by Not in Our Name, which was founded in the spring of 2002 to send the message that "people in the U.S. will not be silent as this government wages wars around the world, detains immigrants, and strips civil liberties away."

When the speeches began, the boys listened intently to a mother of three whose husband had spent six months in a notorious detention cell nicknamed "the shoe" and was secretly deported by the INS back to Jordan for a minimum of 10 years even though they had no evidence that he had any connection to organized terror. "My children have lost their father," she said.

They were moved by the Afghan-American woman who lost 17 family members last fall in our air strikes there, and by the Iraqi-American man whose sisters died because of lack of medicine as a result of the UN embargo with Iraq. "Please," the man begged, sobbing, "Do not let them kill us," and I watched the boys blink to keep from crying.

Many of the boys' friends have parents who worked in the World Trade Center, including their band's 14-year-old sound man and manager, Teddy Handler, whose father Harry, a vice-president of Morgan Stanley, was featured on ABC last Thanksgiving for helping an asthmatic woman down the stairs of the South Tower only 20 minutes before it collapsed. (For the record, Teddy and his parents were for the war against Afghanistan but are very much against the war in Iraq which they see as, among other things, an Oedipal drama writ large.)

One speaker read the statement of Meg Bartlett, who spoke for a group of 9/11 Ground Zero rescue workers who feel they "have a responsibility to those [they] could not save" to do everything in their power "to make sure that no one, ever again, experiences such horror, here or abroad." A spokesperson from September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows named Colleen Kelly reminded listeners that her brother and the 3,000 who died that day in New York were killed by "nineteen people and their weapons of mass destruction -- box cutters." The boys liked that line and thought they could use it in a protest song.