Middle-Class Dissent on Display at War Protest

Antiwar rallies tend to draw the usual suspects, and Saturday’s in downtown Los Angeles was no exception. You had your socialists, anarchists and various professional protesters among a rag-tag, bang-the-drums throng of several thousand.

But there were baby buggies and suburbanites in khaki shorts mixed into the crowd, some of them looking as if they’d taken a wrong turn on their way to the mall.

“They’re the very people who are being hurt the most by national policies,” said Craig Frey, 48, a software engineer from San Diego. Frey held a sign that neatly expressed his middle-class dissent:

“Saddam Didn’t Steal My 401(k).”

“They say Iraq is such a threat to the U.S.,” he said. “But there are people in the Cabinet who’ve done more harm to us by protecting corporate criminals.”

Another sign in the crowd borrowed from the same theme: “Iraq Never Closed My Health Clinic.”

Only a few hundred people had gathered at Olympic and Broadway by 10:30 a.m., and I feared the rally would be a bust. But within an hour, thousands had fallen into line, with more on the way. My guess is that they bolted from their cereal and raced downtown after reading the morning newspaper. Current events these days can really get the blood boiling.

We’re on the verge of war against a country that hasn’t threatened us and has no nukes anyone can locate. And do you remember those mysterious aluminum tubes that got the White House worked into a lather about an Iraqi nuke program? Looks like it was all a mistake.

Meanwhile, North Korea’s leader gets a little more like Yosemite Sam every day. He’s kicking President Bush around as if George were the schoolyard wimp, and Bush has shrunk into a corner with his legs crossed.

Kim Jong Il is rolling out his missiles and writing Bush’s name on them, practically taunting the world to come get him.

Our response?

We’re sending 62,000 more troops to the Persian Gulf to keep an eye on Saddam.

If it sounds batty to you, maybe Craig Frey can explain.

“North Korea doesn’t have oil,” he said.

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. But I still like the button worn by Frey’s wife, Heather Smith, a textiles artist.

“Are you Willing to Die for Exxon?”

Alexis Robinson’s answer is no.

Robinson and her husband, Roy, along with their 6-month-old daughter, Emma, and Roy’s brother David, took the train from Claremont to save gas. About 10 others had the same idea, said David, all of them boarding at the Claremont Metrolink station.

“We wanted to make a statement,” said Alexis, a young mother who had never before attended a political rally.

If the Iraqis had nukes, Alexis said, she might feel differently about the march to war. If they had threatened the U.S. or been linked to Al Qaeda, that could put her in line behind the president, too.

“But without that, are we going to war just because Bush and Cheney want to? What’s happening in North Korea makes it all the more hypocritical,” Alexis said.

“The Democrats in Congress have no backbone,” said her husband, Roy, a studies-abroad counselor at Claremont McKenna College. “The NRA, the Republicans, they stand up and say they’re proud of who they are. But isn’t there one Democrat who will challenge this?”

Ismael Alsharif, a Web engineer who lived in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, fears that a strike on Iraq will be a gift to those who recruit terrorists. He and three friends from West Hollywood -- Pat Amirault, a TV producer; Mark Zecca, a film producer; and Pat McFadden, an administrative assistant at Disney -- came to the rally with a simple objective.

They hoped a sufficiently large crowd would send the message that reasonable people have legitimate questions about where the United States is headed. Questions about the cost of war, the motives, the benefits, the risks.

Look, the awful truth is that Saddam is scary. Kim Jong Il is, too. But Bush is no slouch in that department, and if we sit here waving a flag over everything he says, the planet could blow.

It’s a complicated world and there are no easy answers, said Canoga Park’s Merilie Robertson, 74. But she came to the rally with friends from her Presbyterian church and asked a perfectly sensible question:

Why not continue a policy in Iraq that has worked reasonably well to date?

Good question. The situation isn’t perfect, but why war, and why now?

The one event that set in motion all this brinkmanship and saber-rattling seems, at times, to have been forgotten. Frey, the software engineer from San Diego, brought it back into focus.

“Why not just go after the terrorists?”

Oh yeah, the terrorists.

I leaned in closer to Frey so I could hear him over the drumbeat, and here’s what I read on one of his buttons:

“If you’re not totally p-----off, you’re not paying attention.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at [email protected]