War in Iraq stirs grassroots conflicts in polarized United States boston.com
[ In the equal opportunity name calling department, this came across the AP wire today. Vaguely amusing, if OT. ]
By Jeff Donn, Associated Press, 4/2/2003 02:33
In Chicago, peace activists bellowed ''Killers! Killers! Killers!'' at demonstrators for the war in Iraq, and one yelled back, ''Idiots! Idiots! Idiots!''
In Reno, Nev., about 200 demonstrators at a ''Rally for America'' marched several blocks and challenged in many cases face-to-face about 150 anti-war protesters at a federal courthouse.
Rallies on both sides of the war have been overwhelmingly peaceful but many have been far from polite. The war has provoked an extraordinary outburst of grassroots confrontation, perhaps the most intense since the Vietnam War, historians and sociologists say.
War nearly always stirs some quarreling in democracies like the United States. But scholars and activists say it has been magnified because Americans were already divided over President Bush's narrow election victory and uneasy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
''When they're fearful, they will often be moved into other kinds of protective stances and that may be to rally,'' said activism researcher Patrick Coy, of Kent State University in Ohio.
Since the war began on March 19, rising numbers of opposing demonstrators have traded insults and tried to shout each other down in Albuquerque, N.M.; St. Charles, Mo.; Cleveland; Paterson, N.J.; and elsewhere. A gusher of hate mail and nasty phone calls, which has been building for months, has tarred both sides.
In the streets, anti-war protesters have been branded as communists, traitors, and naive ne'er-do-wells who should ''get a job'' or ''go to Iraq.'' War backers have been jeered as warmongers, bigots and morons.
In Albuquerque, about 3,800 war supporters were rallying when veterans among them encircled about a dozen counterdemonstrators and began chanting, ''Go home, cowards!'' Police rushed on foot and horseback to keep the war protesters safe.
At the University of Minnesota, war protesters and backers engaged in a tit for tat, starting when war sympathizers crashed a peace rally within days of war's outbreak. Late last week, a few dozen anti-war demonstrators descended on a pro-military rally. At one point, police moved in to keep the two groups apart.
War backer Chris Hill, who leads the conservative Young Americans for Freedom at the campus, said the instigating ''goes pretty much equally both ways.'' However, he believes many military supporters would vanish from the streets if anti-war protests were to fade.
''It's like a dance. When the anti-war movement gets larger, then the countermovements appear,'' said sociologist Eric Swank, who teaches theories and history of peace activism at Morehead State University in Kentucky.
Keith F. Shirey, a peace activist in Altadena, Calif., has sold buttons promoting Democrats, peace, the environment and other causes for three years, so he knows about differences of opinion. But he was caught by surprise when he opened a threatening e-mail last month.
''I was very upset never had a death threat before,'' he said. A ''belligerent jingoism'' has taken hold of the country, he said, fanned by conservative talk radio and fear of terrorism.
Glenn Beck, a syndicated radio talk host who has been promoting ''Rallies for America,'' has been called a ''sick, opportunistic traitor'' and worse in e-mails. His show is full of strong opinion, but he said, ''I couldn't handle the nature of the hate mail, because it was so intense. It was eating me up.''
He decided to post it on his Web site, as a way to defuse it, and boosted security at home and work as a precaution. ''We have become a harsh, coarse people. That's the problem,'' he said.
Scott Lynch, a spokesman for the anti-war Peace Action, keeps a ''threats file'' with letters culled from a ''steady stream of hate mail.'' He looks upon it, though, as a mark of success for the anti-war group.
''If we weren't making progress,'' he said, ''then the really spiteful ones wouldn't send us hate mail.'' |
