Common Ground, Perhaps
By Callimachus | Related entries in Good Decisions, Hurricane KatrinaSmash finds the CodePink anti-war group in his town engaged in the execrable and ghoulish practice of pickets aimed at wounded military personnel. He counter-pickets, but he also tries to find common ground on the matter of Katrina. An initial attempt to talk about it is firmly rebuffed.
Once they recognized me as a Protest Warrior, I was greeted with nothing but hostility. They rejected my fliers, and shouted down my calls for unity on this one issue. They insisted that they didn’t need any information on how to contribute to Katrina relief, proudly proclaiming that they had already contributed as a group. They further crowed that they had a blood drive planned for later that afternoon, before telling me that if I wanted people to “come together,” I should take my group and “go home.”
But he does his homework and finds that CodePink, by its own proclamation, decided to channel to Red Cross hurricane relief a mere $100 of the money it raised for the trip to the big anti-war rally in D.C. later this month. And since some of his own friends already had signed up for the blood donation, he learned “the CodePink ‘blood drive’ consisted of only one person, chapter leader Candace Ross. So kudos to Candace for giving a pint of blood (for the first time in her life, she confessed to me), but what happened to the rest of her CodePinkers?”
Smash didn’t give up on the common ground effort. He emailed the group with a proposal:
A handful of you are planning a trip to Washington, D.C. later this month, to take part in a large anti-war protest outside the White House. We all know that you are against the war, and that you generally don’t like President Bush. So, what are you trying to prove?
Travelling across the country to Washington is going to cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Can you think of any way that this cash could be better spent? Is there, perhaps, a more pressing need that might be alleviated with that money?
How about, instead of going to Washington, you donate the dough you would have spent on that trip to the Red Cross? If you agree, San Diego Protest Warrior will match your donation.
A challenge is not an insult. It would have been an easy moment for Smash (an Iraq veteran) and those in his group to flip the stupid “Chickenhawk” meme and say no one dare advocate for more assertive federal disaster response who hasn’t personally gone down there and personally waded through the foul waters to rescue people.
But they didn’t. And as it turns out, the CodePinkers thought enough of the offer to open negotiations on some more robust fundraising for hurricane victims.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 and is filed under Good Decisions, Hurricane Katrina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 13th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
[...] So how did the contest turn out, between CodePink and Protest Warrior in San Diego to see whether Iraq war supporters or Iraq war opponents could raise more money for hurricane relief? [...]