in dozens, possibly even hundreds, of demonstrations over the years,
and helped organize more than a few, but since I’ve never lived in a
big city like New York or San Francisco I’ve never been intimately
involved with the organization of the really big demonstrations. Today
I decided to do something I hadn’t done before, which was to go in to
San Francisco and spend the day volunteering at the ANSWER office,
offering my two hands to help with the preparations for tomorrow’s
demonstration. It turned out to be quite an experience.
Bear in mind that
ANSWER volunteers have been preparing for this demonstrations for
weeks, making thousands of signs, dozens of banners, and so on (not
even mentioning leafletting, postering, etc.). But even with all that
pre-preparation, anywhere from one to two dozen volunteers spent the
entire day doing various tasks which still remained to be done to make
a large demonstration a successful one. For my part, I spent the entire
day preparing clipboards with attached pens, making boxes to collect
sign-up cards, and preparing press kits. Doesn’t sound like the work of
an entire day? It wouldn’t have been for any other demonstration I’ve
ever worked on, but when you are talking about a dozen clipboards, and
ten boxes, and 75 press kits, believe me, that was a full day’s work,
and I wasn’t slacking.
All around me people
were calling the press, taking calls from the press, taking calls from
volunteers, answering emails, planning the arrangement of booths,
reconfirming with speakers, filling boxes of materials organized by
location (this demonstration has two sites and two stages), making
signs for volunteer sign-up tables, medical tents, and on and on and on.
A lot of people speak
very cavalierly about the efforts of ANSWER and seem to think that a
demonstration is just something you put out a call for and then it
happens. To put it mildly, it just ain’t so. We owe a tremendous debt
of gratitude to those activists, volunteers all in this case, who are
able to devote countless hours to making the antiwar movement, and many
other movements, happen.
Now read their How NOT to stop the war