March 26, 2003

In This Issue

FOR MOST PEOPLE in this country, I suspect the war is only just beginning to hit home. Over the weekend the first real war stories started to trickle into the news media, stories about prisoners of war and ambushes and U.S. soldiers who won't be returning home. But it's still been a fairly antiseptic media war: people in this country aren't getting a real picture of what's going on in our name 8,000 miles away.

Here's what a London ad exec named Aida Kaisy, whose family is from Baghdad, writes in an opinion piece in the U.K. Guardian: "If you catch yourself getting a bit of a kick out of seeing all the weaponry in action, remember that, contrary to the images on your television screens, people live in the building you've just seen annihilated, or in the suburb that they've just announced is the next target. A missile that 'accurately' hits the ministry of defense could well flatten a school next door, and on the pavement outside there will be people carrying on with their lives as best as they can."

On page 22, Robert Fisk describes the scene in a Baghdad hospital: the wards are full of children whose bodies have been mangled by shrapnel from U.S. bombs.

This is the context for the protests that have nearly shut down San Francisco in the past week. Most people I talked to along Market and Mission Streets seemed to feel it was entirely appropriate for the city to be engaging in a couple of days of "No Business As Usual." People in Iraq are dying, and we can't miss a day of work?

It's too bad the cops felt they had to arrest 2,400 people and clear the streets – better the city saved all the money that's going to police overtime, and just let people protest. No traffic was getting downtown anyway. Most of the actions were peaceful. Why weren't the mayor and all the supervisors and all the rest of the people who run this town joining the activists in the streets, saying to the rest of the world that in San Francisco, we're not going to act as if Bush's war is acceptable behavior?

Tim Redmond