A Peace of Their Minds
The “Convergence” weekend’s anti-war protest events draw thousands
By BRIAN LIBERATORE, JUSTIN HOPPER, MARTY LEVINE and BILL O'DRISCOLL

Article appeared Jan. 22, 2003 on front page

For this article, we won the Golden Quill, a statewide award, in the weekly newspaper category for spot news. The event was the largest protest in Pittsburgh leading up to the U.S. invasion in Iraq.

Abbey Casey, 79, of White Oak, surveys the “dead” -- about a hundred people lying on freezing, slush-covered Fifth Avenue near Craig Street in Oakland, protesting the possibility of a U.S. war with Iraq. “I’m disgusted by Bush. He should be impeached,” she says. This “die-in” -- the culmination of a weekend’s worth of local anti-war activities billed as the Regional Convergence Against War -- is Casey’s first protest rally. “My uncle was in the first World War -- he was gassed,” she says. “My two brothers were in World War II -- one didn’t come home. I’ve lived my life. I’d like to see them live theirs.”

In front of her, Eric Laurenson, a Peabody High School teacher, lies shrouded in a sheet, vowing to stay prone “as long as I can.” If arrested for refusing to move -- police are watching from the perimeters -- “then I guess I’m going off to jail,” he says. “Peacefully, of course.” Laura Maloney of Oakland struggles into a 30-gallon garbage bag in the middle of the pavement graves. “Cops can drag me away in my body bag,” she says.

In a constant snowfall -- sometimes a white-out blizzard -- 5,000 people (by police estimates) stretched nine blocks of Oakland on Jan. 26 in an anti-war march that ended with the die-in. Organizers say it was the largest Pittsburgh political protest since at least the Vietnam War. “We have broken silence,” Tim Vining told the crowd. “The American people does not support the war.” Vining, executive director of the Garfield social-justice organization The Thomas Merton Center, spoke when marchers had reached their destination: the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University on Fifth Avenue, long a target of protests for its defense department contracts. The Merton Center and the Pittsburgh Organizing Group of activists convened the event, which included teach-ins, prayer vigils, panel discussions, concerts, films, lectures and a parade through the South Side in addition to today’s Oakland march and “die-in.” In the middle of the dead, a 20-foot papier-mache figure in a business suit clutches a gasoline can and a missile. “No blood for oil,” reads one sign on the pedestal. “What Would Jesus Bomb?” reads the other.

Chad Skaggs steps into the middle of the tableau in his smiling George Bush mask and mock-taunts onlookers, hands on his hips. “It’s our duty to come out and take to the streets against things we don’t like or don’t approve of, just on principle,” says the 21-year-old Point Park film student and socialist later.

“We don’t have to go to D.C. to make change,” adds his girlfriend, Jill Bluhm, of Bradford, Pa, also 21. Skaggs agrees: “It’s good that [the protest] is here now.” Merton and POG had indeed hoped their voice would be amplified if it originated from “Middle America.” It was enough, Vining reported before the weekend, to attract a reporter from the BBC, for one.

“War is lame,” reads a sign in the crowd ringing the die-in, reduced to several hundred now. Nine city police officers in riot gear remain in line above the Software Engineering Institute steps, 18 officers mill on the steps of the CMU building next to it. Four unmarked vans of police, which had been idling in all four lanes of Fifth Avenue facing the crowd at the end of the march, move a bit closer. But they are mostly invisible to the crowd, apart from a few policemen in front of sawhorses. “I really respect the way they handled this,” says one protester, eyeing the officers.

“Yeah, so far, so good,” says another.

A call goes up -- “Link arms!” around the dead -- but few move in the cold. “They’re waiting us out,” someone mutters. It’s more than half an hour since the dead first lay down. In the near silence of indecision, a police radio is the loudest noise. A city officer is calling wagons to the scene -- to pick up the barricades. “We’re in no hurry” to move people, says an officer surveying the crowd.

Dan Lapp of Point Breeze is lying in the street next to his mother, his 4-year-old daughter Maya on top of him. He hopes this demonstration will do some good “but I’m skeptical,” he says. “Because I think the snowball’s already rolled. You have to do what you can.”

The die-in was only the final act of a weekend’s worth of politics, and political theater.

Saturday, Jan. 25, 11 a.m.
Maya Lapp spends the Convergence’s first hours with other young people gathered for a “peace witness” at the Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Homewood. Witnessing for peace means everything from a communion service and a teach-in on the “just war” theory to a pizza party and poster making. Zena Lapp, 10, a fifth-grader at Liberty Elementary School in Shadyside, helps her sister write the word “War” on yellow cardboard. Carmen Lapp, the girls’ mother, looks on with 7-year-old Sam. Brian Leyde, 15, and Chris Melville, 16, both Quakers from State College, Pa., arrive with five other high school students. Their sign: “Babies don’t like war either.” About 40 children and adults enjoy the church basement’s defunct heating system, three pizzas and the Zena Lapp’s conviction: “I don’t want to go to war,” she says. They bring their posters in to the teach-in, coloring through the presentation by Dr. Moni McIntyre, a part-time pastor and professor of social and public policy at Duquesne University.

Whatever a “just war” might be -- the crowd never reaches consensus -- the possible war in Iraq fell short.

Saturday, Jan. 25, 11 a.m.
The tone of the town meeting on “Working People Against the Wars” in the South Side Presbyterian Church could have been set by veteran activists, people with protest experience dating back to the early days of the anti-Vietnam War movement. But it also draws people like Charlie Coughlin, a retired union electrician who said he just stumbled on the gathering. “I’m definitely against this war,” says Coughlin, who worked as a civilian for the Army. “Wars are never fought for the reasons that they tell you they’re fought. … There’s gonna be a lot of blood spilled for oil, and I in no way condone [that].” The meeting, attended by 90, is moderated by Charles McCollester, an Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor and director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Labor Relations.

The war, McCollester says, exemplifies “a diversion of national wealth toward all sorts of foreign adventures and away from the real needs of the people of this country and the world.” Others echo his concerns, including high school and junior high students from Greensburg; students from Pitt and CCAC; members of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union Local 1199; a woman identifying herself simply as a housewife; a couple of graphic designers; a self-employed piano teacher; and Catholic, Presbyterian and Unitarian clergy.

“I have more in common with the working people of Iraq than I do with the U.S. government,” says Peter Oanes, a union machinist at Westinghouse Airbrake. Al Haber, an Ann Arbor, Mich., carpenter and cabinetmaker who in the 1960s helped found Students for a Democratic Society -- one of the signal groups of the New Left -- has been working with Homestead-based labor activist Mike Stout and others to hold a series of town meetings. In Ann Arbor and Toledo, Ohio, he has gathered working people around a broad range of issues, including education, health care and employment. Stout sees an Iraqi war as part of a global U.S. strategy of constant war (hence “Working People Against the Wars”), and the peace movement as part of the social-justice continuum.

“The government always hides behind the working class and the middle class,” he says. “They’re not doing this for the working class or the middle class. They’re doing it for themselves, for big business.”

On Jan. 11 in Chicago, more than 100 trade unionists from unions, central labor councils and other organizations met to form U.S. Labor Against the War. And Stout (a member of the United Steelworkers Union and the Pittsburgh Musician’s Union) is circulating a petition with 27 starter signatures by individuals from 10 different union locals, including SEIU 1199P President Tom DeBruin and District 6 United Electrical Workers President John Lambiase.

Stout and others note that while the working class didn’t oppose the war in Vietnam early, it was their opposition that turned the tide. Given that, he says, this anti-war movement is actually ahead of the game, especially when people are emboldened to speak out.

“We’ve got a movement out there that is so big and so pervasive and so widespread that all we have to do is get people out from behind that curtain of fear,” Stout says. “People in this country are against this crap and will stand up to it if they see other people, their neighbors and co-workers, standing up to it.”

Saturday, Jan. 25, 12-2 p.m.
“The cops have been circling the block and are parked around the corner,” says the blackboard at Convergence headquarters -- the basement of St. Regis Catholic Church in Oakland. “No words of mass deception.” The name and phone number of a legal counsel are also posted, but the crowd of more than 100 activists seems more intent on cadging food and getting their bearings than worrying about resistance to their resistance.

Recent CMU student Laura Shaffer of Shadyside, in a “Charm School Dropout” T-shirt, says she is still trying to figure out whether to link up at tomorrow’s march with the Pink Bloc -- there to highlight issues of war relating to the gay and lesbian community -- or the Black Bloc: the anarchists. Yesterday she volunteered with Food Not Bombs, helping prepare meals for Convergence attendees.

Eleven volunteers crowd the kitchen at 1 p.m. A cardboard box with a few sandwiches sits beside two foil pans, where a volunteer finishes making the sauce for a tofu bake. Their weekend food budget: $57, he says.

“I’m just an extra hand in the kitchen,” says James Knopf, about to graduate in art from CMU, struggling with a food processor pureeing onions, garlic, olive oil and spices for mashed potatoes. “People dropped off so much shit,” he marvels. “It looks like they emptied their apartment.” Knopf’s shirt says simply “Peacekeeper.” There are more slogans on people in the Convergence center than on the walls: “Born consumers. Die consumers”; “Anti-Nowhere League”; and “Civilian Casualty,” written on a “Hello My Name Is” tag.

“I wasn’t expecting to see so many people here,” says Alexis Miller, a POG member, Pitt student and a former CP intern who lives in Polish Hill. In the past three hours she has met people from Michigan, Meadville, Boston and West Virginia.

Most of the crowd gathers in one half of the room to attend “Abolish gender, abolish patriarchy, abolish war,” a seminar by RESYST, which calls itself “a radical queer project” of the Merton Center.

“We have a dominant paradigm that is patriarchy, and our gender roles perpetuate that paradigm,” says panelist Amber Baker of Wilkinsburg. People who resist war, for instance, “will be labeled as pansies,” volunteers someone in the standing-room-only crowd of 60 or so. “That’s the gender bias of war.”

Although this is perhaps the audience least in need of the panel’s message -- many in the crowd wear pink in sympathy with the gay community’s concerns -- attendees say they still learned something. Ryan Conrad of Lewiston, Maine, says he’s friends with the panelists and still learned a new perspective from Miles, a female-to-male transsexual panelist who spoke of his consternation at signing up for the draft as a man. “Being here and learning from other people opens up your mind more,” said Conrad. “You never stop learning.”

The panel is interrupted by an announcement: The health and safety training -- essentially a how-to-survive-demonstrations course -- was unfortunately cancelled. “It’s mostly, like, stay warm and drink water,” the young man shrugs, “and, I don’t know” -- he holds his arms over his head in mock defense.

Saturday, Jan. 25, 3-6 p.m.
About 2,000 people trek from Station Square to Pittsburgh’s FBI headquarters next to the Hot Metal Bridge, drawing signs of support -- including “Wiccans for Peace” -- and the occasional heckler: a man in front of Jack’s Bar shouting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Marching to the beat of plastic buckets, the crowd is rife with costumes, including a man dressed as a dog on stilts -- a “Dog of War” -- black-and-gold-attired Steelers Fans for Peace and a striking group in white masks labeled “Exxon,” who in unison showed the white palms of their hands stained blood-red.

At the Indy Media Center’s temp site -- the home of Emma Rehm, Matt Toups and four other housemates -- the front room is crowded with four computers, two laptops, a digital camera, audio recorders, a communal cell phone, a photo scanner -- and a police scanner. After the parade, Toups retrieves photos from a digital camera: The line of traffic behind the parade; a marcher being blocked by a police officer on horse-back; a protester holding a sign: “Yinz Shall Not Kill ’n’ at”; police on bicycles; yet another protester’s sign: “No war. No empire. War is always an acknowledgment of failure.”

“I was really quite surprised that it was the whole street, four blocks long,” Toups says.

Rehm is posting a brief parade account (“Over 2000 in the streets for the Parade for Peace!” www.pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2003/01/767.php) as she laughs over the signs of the Steelers brigade: “End Zones, Not War Zones.” “What Would Jerome Bettis Do?” “Make Touchdowns Not War.” IMC technician John Harrold watches parade video.

There are occasional glitches in the IMC ideal of disseminating news unfiltered by professionals. Toups reads a post he had phoned in to Harrold during the parade. It says he gave an interview to “the corporate media.” He can’t recall telling Harrold any such thing.

Saturday, Jan. 25, 6 p.m.
At the William Pitt Union, the Merton Center’s Palestinian Solidarity Committee addresses how Palestine’s past and future relate to the Iraq war. For the U.S., says Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, it comes down to two words: human rights.

Qumsiyeh is a biologist and director of Yale University’s Cytogenetics Laboratory (which explains why his Mammals of the Holy Land sat on a table otherwise filled with political literature). But he’s also a co-founder of The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which works to aid refugees and tell the world why Palestinians should be able to live on land they once inhabited but which is currently occupied by Israelis.

Mass displacement of Palestinians from their homeland began at Israel’s founding in 1948 and expanded with subsequent conflicts and settlements. Qumsiyeh characterized it as the world’s biggest refugee problem, and the violent suppression of Palestinians by Israel -- with U.S. backing -- as a human rights crisis and “[t]he biggest source of instability in the world, even for Pax Americana.”

Recalling the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from 1947-49 and again during the Six-Day War in 1967, Qumsiyeh believes Israel backs a U.S. war on Iraq because it would provide cover for further expulsions.

Saturday, Jan. 25, 6 p.m.
“We’re sending our troops into the biggest toxic wasteland in the world,” warns Major Doug Rokke, speaking about a possible war with Iraq. “And those respirators do nothing to block out DU particles.”

DU is depleted uranium. Each anti-tank shell contains 10 pounds of it, says the Gulf War veteran at CMU’s McConomy Auditorium. Rokke’s 100-person crew cleaned up after spent anti-tank shells in Iraq a decade ago and his documentary, The Invisible War, new to the U.S., shows the effects of the experience. The camera zooms in on a picture of Rokke with his unit. “They’re all either sick or dead,” he says.

DU continues to kill long after it punches through tank armor, Rokke explains, disintegrating into uranium dioxide dust on impact, which is responsible for large numbers of Gulf War veteran deaths and more than a quarter of a million vets on permanent disability, he maintains -- including Rokke himself. He believes the U.S. Army is conducting a massive cover-up in order to keep DU in its arsenal.

The crowd gasps as the camera shows the same striking birth defects -- another DU result, Rokke says -- in children in Iraqi hospitals and the children of American Gulf War vets.

“This is a very, very real problem,” says Rokke, who has lost most of his fine motor skills, 60 percent of his lung capacity and much of his eyesight. “I live with continuous pain.” He’s optimistic about one thing: The cancerous uranium dioxide particles left over from 290 metric tons of DU used during the Gulf War will eventually go away --“in 4.5 billion years.”

Sunday, Jan. 26, 12-4 p.m.
The crowd begins gathering Sunday before noon, massing between Pitt’s student union and the Cathedral of Learning. State Sen. Jim Ferlo, fresh from his Pittsburgh City Council post, addresses the crowd, backed by the sign “Win Without War.”

“George Bush says you’re either with him or against him,” Ferlo shouts. “We stand here to say well, George Bush, we’re against you and your military madness. George Bush, we have just begun to fight you and your wicked policies.” The most dangerous weapon of mass destruction, he says, is the “two-legged Texas buzzard in the White House.”

The crowd quickly overflows the street on both sides. Signs betray the variety of groups participating (“Gertrude Stein Political Club,” “The Blind for Peace,” “National Council of Urban Peace and Justice,” “Edgewood Primary Students Against the War”) as well as the singularity of sentiment (“Pro-Life Bush to Bomb Babies?” “Stop World War ‘W,’” “Osama bin Bush or George W. bin Laden?” “How many dead Americans does it take to fill your tank?” “Bush + Dick = Fucked,” “Retreat Now,” “George Bush, Raise Any Decent Sons?” “No Blood for Elitist Bastards,” “Think Outside the Barrel,” “Peace is Patriotic,” “Protest is Patriotic” and, most inexplicably, “Fuck You, Possum Face”).

“Support the troops, not the war,” says the sign held aloft by a member of the U.S. armed forces who refuses to identify himself. Shawn Godwin’s group of more than a dozen protest veterans from Lansing, Mich., have come to Pittsburgh because “the action … seemed interesting. This war, it’s been going on for like 12 years. It’s really time to get the resistance started.” There are groups and busloads here from Youngstown, Oil City, Morgantown, Ithaca, New York City and Cleveland, comes the announcement. As a television camera pans the crowd, a well-coiffed mother grabs her daughter to her. “You want to be on TV? That’s all daddy needs to see. Busted!”

“As - salaam alaikum,” intones Brother Michael Bartko from the stage, representing the Islamic Council of Pittsburgh. “How yinz doin’? My friends, Islam is not the enemy. Maybe it’s not Islam after all but the fact that so much oil lies beneath the feet of Muslims. If only they would just get off your oil, Mr. Bush.”

With the chant, “This is what democracy looks like,” the march moves onto Fifth Avenue, down Meyran and up Forbes, led by police in cars and motorcycles. “This shit makes me sick,” mutters Edward Adams, a Pitt senior, as the march begins past the Pitt bookstore. “Because when I graduate I’m going into the army as an officer” -- in training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he explains. “People like me that are willing to risk our lives for our country allow people to hold signs like that and not get shot in the street.”

“A lot of people ...” marvels his friend as the peace ranks roll past. In truth, the march has very few spectators on this frigid Super Bowl Sunday -- apart from the all-important television cameras. But hours later, when the Merton Center’s Tim Vining tells die-in participants to rise (“If you want to get up and not freeze -- hypothermia is not our friend. We need you for the next protest.”), participants agree they have made their point.

Sunday, Jan. 26, 3:40 p.m.
Next to the die-in, another crowd gathers: Dozens of younger protesters, wearing all-black clothing and black balaclavas covering their faces, are jumping up and down in their bid to stay warm. (Or, as one onlooker puts it, “pogo-ing for peace.”)

With no warning, the black-clad group begins a fast march away from the still-closed section of Fifth Avenue, racing towards Forbes Avenue. Police in riot gear scramble to line the walls of the CMU buildings as protesters pass, and a solitary motorcycle cop jets ahead of the breakaway group of about 120. As they skirt the parking lot of St. Nicholas Church, two protesters grab sawhorses from the lot. Once the crowd hits the open traffic on Forbes Avenue, they put the sawhorses behind them. They circle Oakland in much the same pattern as the permitted march but with a different message.

“No War Between Nations -- No Peace Between Classes” reads the banner at their front; other marchers carry the half-red, half-black flag of anarcho-socialism. The slogans chanted by these “disobedient” marchers, as pre-rally information called them, are different from the anti-Bush and anti-war slogans of the earlier march: “Anarchy and Peace” and “Off the sidewalks and into the streets,” a slogan used at 2001’s illegal May Day parade that ended with arrests in Market Square.

For more than an hour and a half on Sunday, this so-called “black bloc” owns the streets of Pittsburgh, claiming no leaders. “Which way should we go,” those at the front yell to those in back, as they wind toward Walnut Street in Shadyside. (“March to a bar!” respond a few marchers, who begin chanting “What do we want? Beer! When do we want it? Now!”)

There are few incidents on the long, cold trek: When the protesters pass the Marine Recruiting Office on Meyran Avenue, someone smashes the office’s glass door. Other regular targets of abuse from these veterans of the anti-globalization movement draw anti-corporate chants, or, in the case of the Shadyside Starbuck’s: snowballs. But even this unscheduled, permit-less march is more interested in making verbal and symbolic statements than in using violence.

“Why don’t you all go to fucking Cuba!” yells a passerby. A marcher lifts his mask and gives the man a dead-serious look. “I really wish I could,” he says.

“We thought there might be the disobedient bloc,” says Pittsburgh Police Commander William Valenta. “Really, our main concern at this point was to ensure there was no destruction of property. To be honest, in the scope of this entire event one broken window is regrettable, but was [a small price]. The participants were very good, they were peaceful, there were no problems and we’re happy.”

Just after 5 p.m., the black bloc returns to the police blockades at the official protest site. Three protesters remain on the ground as part of the die-in, and dozens surrounding them begin to cheer as the two groups join to chant “Our Streets, Our Streets.” While the demonstration’s action are grinding to a halt, the police and the die-in protesters are at a standstill -- until protestor Beth Ornton approaches Valenta.

“If the police ask us to get up, we’ll get up -- we’re not trying to be troublemakers,” she says she told him. These final protesters are “doing it in solidarity with the people in Iraq who’re going to be lying in the streets in terrible pain waiting for anybody to come to help them.” “She said they’re just looking for someone to come over and ask them to move,” Valenta says. “So I figured, if that’s all it took, I’ll be more than happy to oblige. I’d like to go home, too.”

Within minutes, the last of the die-in participants emerges from under the pile of protest signs that were his makeshift blanket and leaves with the remaining crowd.