Marchers: No trickery, just solidarity with anti-war veterans

Published on August 29, 2008

To the Bulletin: We were stunned by Mary Carey's recent article, "Activist admits marchers not all Iraq War veterans." She implies that there was some attempt to trick the public about the identity of the marchers in the Amherst Fourth of July Parade.

We were two of the non-veterans who marched with Albert Sanchez of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and members of the group Veterans For Peace (VFP).

As long time anti-war activists, we were proud to be there marching in solidarity with courageous vets like Al Sanchez.

There was no attempt to portray everyone marching as an Iraq veteran. Members of VFP carried their banner. Al carried the IVAW banner on behalf of the new Western Massachusetts chapter. We marched alongside them with our two children (who at ages 4 and 1 are clearly not veterans.)

We'd like to remind everyone that the march organizers had forbidden us to carry our own signs at a parade to celebrate the Declaration of Independence so we had no way to identify ourselves. If we had been "allowed" to exercise our First Amendment rights instead of being threatened with court action, we would have carried signs reading "We support war resisters, they're our brothers and our sisters" and "Fund the wounded, not the war."

The real story is not the fact that we marched, but why we marched. Veterans who have the courage to organize against the war play a vital role in ending this horror, and they need and deserve the solidarity of non-veterans. From budget cuts in social services to the brutal price increases at the gas pump and the supermarket, all working people are paying for this war and we all have a right to march against it.

Instead of trying to find a non-existent scandal, reporting time would be better spent covering the real scandals around this war, such as the bipartisan project to to justify the invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq, the continued death and destruction being waged there, the persecution of Arabs and Muslims in the United States and the thousands of injured veterans who return to America unable to get the health care they need.

Annie Zirin
Jason Yanowitz
Amherst