A New Youth Peace Movement Takes Root

Sarah Williams couldn't stop grinning. Her white teeth glistened against her opal wire frames and windblown dark hair. She twisted her hands anxiously above her discarded rain jacket. The once rainy, gray Washington D.C. morning had turned into an afternoon of warm sunshine.

The 20-year-old NYU junior could vividly remember this time last year when she was struggling to find any resemblance to what she found today -- the beginning of a united American peace movement.

"You couldn't tell the media or anyone last year that there existed an anti-war movement in the U.S. But look around, you can't hide it anymore," she said dropping her "Regime Change Begins at Home" poster to motion toward the diverse grouping of people who were making their way across the muddy ground in front of the sound stage in D.C.'s Constitutional Plaza.

Williams wasn't alone in breathing a sigh of relief at the crowd gathered at the October 26th March on Washington against the War on Iraq. Most of us on the left were thinking the same -- it's about time. In a way we were tired of listening to underground news reports about the hundreds of thousands of people gathering across the world, from Brussels to Paris to London, to shout down Bush's war, while many of us were struggling just to get people interested at our campuses and in our neighborhoods. But it seemed that all changed overnight.

Planting a Seed for Peace

Drop a seed into the ground and watch it take root, my mother always says. The same can be said for social justice movements. The political landscape of youth activism is fertile ground for a new peace movement. Trained in the activism of the anticorporate globalization and anti-prison movements, young activists are already spending their time in politicized highs school and college climates -- ones made more charged with every move of the Bush administration. Sociologists are reporting that today's incoming college classes are the largest and most political in the United States since the 1960s.

But this new movement can hardly be said to look the same as those of the last few years. It's older. It's tremendously diverse. It's not just the radical white left or sectarians hawking papers for solidarity donations. It's your best friend's parents. It's veterans of the Vietnam War protests, Muslim Arabs and Black nationalists. It's high school students, the elderly, and all the ages in between. It's your run of the mill vegan neo-hippies from schools like Oberlin, anti-globalizers and Black Blocers from Eugene, standing beside families from the Deep South.

It's even a 78-year-old curly gray-haired woman my cohorts and I referred to as "Mama Revolution." She stood for hours at the corner of 17th and Constitution waving down cars. For us, still recovering from our 15-hour drive to D.C. in a cramped van from Chicago, "Mama" represented a snapshot of the perseverance of the day's protest -- the largest anti-war protest in America since the Vietnam War era. In cities across America like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and across the world in Belgium, Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo and Mexico City, hundreds of thousands marched into the streets to "stop the war [on Iraq] before it starts."

To many of us, this peace movement has been a long time coming. A youth movement that seemed so on point when it came to fighting sweatshops, fighting for living wages or organizing against the prison systems, was alienated when searching for a united response to the pro-war consensus in mainstream America.

But it seems that older sectarian activists, like the organizers behind Not in Our Name (NOIN) and International A.N.S.W.E.R (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), although criticized for their questionable allegiances, have been successful in providing somewhat rare infrastructure for large-scale anti-war protests in this post 9/11 void. In this they have given a voice to the anti-war left that many thought would not survive 9/11 in one piece.