Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 3, 1992 TAG: 9203030176
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK LAYMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They ate a potluck dinner and watched videotape documentaries of the devastation inflicted on Iraq and its people by weeks of allied bombing.
They nodded as Susie Fetter recalled how "puny" she had felt against "the incredible power of the government propaganda machine," and as Bob Harrison recalled the "hatred" he was confronted with when he pinned a white dove to his shirt to express his opposition to the war.
But there was a sense among those at a get-together last week that history is proving them right.
"At this point, it's popular to realize it was a bad war," Harrison said.
"A lot of people who thought [President] Bush was so grand a year ago don't think so now," another said.
Fewer people turn out for events such as this one, sponsored by Roanoke's Plowshare Peace Center, since the war ended. Still, the war might have marked the start of a new era for local peace activists.
In recent years, Plowshare and its supporters were best known for their weekly demonstrations on the City Market, during which they protested U.S. involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and for their candlelight vigils to protest executions at the state penitentiary. Neither cause stirred a lot of public support.
But as the United States and Iraq moved closer to war after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Plowshare's telephone kept ringing. "We got a lot of calls from people we'd never heard from before," Fetter says. "People identified us as being the organization in the community that could respond to this."
The public response was gratifying. "We realized the peace center was a significant presence here," says Polly Branch, one of Plowshare's co-directors. "People were ready to do things. It was almost overwhelming for us."
Plowshare got even more visibility when it bought time on local TV stations to show an anti-war commercial that featured Ron Kovic, the wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran portrayed by Tom Cruise in the movie "Born on the Fourth of July."
The higher profile made Plowshare an easier target for critics, though.
One letter to the editor suggested that, instead of "peace groups," local war protesters should be called "pro-Iraq" or "hate America" groups. Another letter said, "The Plowshare magic markers were quick to lament the casualties sustained by Iraqi combat troops, but have yet to mourn American dead with so much as a ballpoint pen."
"We've always been an alternative organization," Fetter says. "There have always been people who were eager to discredit us, and people who were supportive of us."
Like the Pentagon, peace activists learned some lessons from the Gulf War.
Raising the specter of "another Vietnam" with tens of thousands of U.S. casualties wasn't an effective strategy, Branch says.
The best arguments against the war were moral ones, she says - such as whether it was right to go to war over oil, or for a superpower to turn its military might against a Third World country.
The war reminded peace activists of the importance of symbols, too.
When troops first were sent to the Persian Gulf, "we put a yellow ribbon on the door, to show we wanted them to come home alive; we didn't want them to fight," Plowshare co-director Pat Pratali says. "But as it went on, the yellow ribbon came to mean you support the war. So we took the ribbon down and got a new symbol - the dove."
Peace activists displayed cut-out doves on their windows and cars and wore dove pins.
"We wanted to express our opposition to the war without it seeming like Vietnam, with the black armbands," Fetter says. "People seemed so happy to have a positive symbol. We got letters from all over the country."
The war also showed peace activists the value of building coalitions. Environmentalists, African-American groups, feminists and others joined together to call for non-military responses to the invasion of Kuwait.
"We've seen how important that is," Harrison says. "We're pretty active in working for that now. If we want to create a more just society, we need a lot of people to do it."
Peace activists are "such a minuscule part of the electorate, [local leaders] won't listen to us unless they know there are more of us," he says.
One event that helps build bridges between like-minded groups is Plowshare's Peace Bazaar, which will be held April 4 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Roanoke on Grandin Road Southwest.
Plowshare is putting more emphasis on local issues, particularly problems faced by teen-agers.
And it will continue to serve as a resource center and to sponsor discussions and workshops on racism, conflict resolution and other topics.
"We're most visible when we're protesting," Fetter says. "That's unfortunate, because we do so much more than that."
by CNB