Code PINK has dissipated, or maybe they're on vacation?

I've resisted the impulse for weeks to do the Code Pink thing and proclaim "Victory in Shattuck Square!" because those wailing wimmin have become absent -- even though their absence is in no way my doing. Granted I've been busy and often out of town and may have missed one or two assaults on the USMC OSO -- but I've encountered no one for weeks. The last person I remember seeing was Toby Blome, one of the whiners, I mean wailers, chalking important messages along the court mandated DPZ (DePinkedZone) and then stepping back into the no-fly zone to admire her work. That would have been a day or two after Judge Jacobson's ruling that the gurls need to stay within 4' of the curb -- a ruling they called a victory because they didn't have to stay entirely away from the OSO. Zanne Joi put icing on the little Pink cupcake by announcing as part of her victory statement that they didn't need to touch the building anyway, "we have other people to do that." As I've probably said before - but maybe not here, my first-grader knows better than to act like that. CP goes on advertising their big demonstrations on IndyBay.org and their own website -- but I truly believe that the battle is forfeited when even the activist/demonstrator/witch-crones are no longer showing up.

The Code Pink site says you can just pick up the "action kit" at People's Cafe if you want to be your own protest. I'm tempted to pick up the "action kit" and toss it in a dumpster....but I won't.

Part of the problem with being on this side of the issue (in the good company of the USMC and much of America), is the constraints that come with reasonable behavior. Reasonable people can't just proclaim victory "We Shut them DOWN!" or behave like small, hungry children (wailing, having tantrums, sitting down and refusing to move until they get their way). Reasonable people behave reasonably and quietly, confidently. They don't attract undue attention, if they attract attention at all.

If you haven't yet read Capt. R. Lund's "Open Letter to Code Pink" and Zanne Joi's response (both in the Berkeley Daily Planet Archives, on line) you will surely see what I mean.

Throughout this odyssey the protesters have been extreme. I'm sure they feel strongly about their positions... but so do I. So do many of us, unfairly hobbled by our sanity and maturity. If you are looking for another interesting viewpoint on all this, Google "Jane Stillwater Blog". Ms. Stillwater is currently embedded with troops in Iraq -- its her third time -- As much as she wanted to hate the Marines first time she went, she came home with a healthy respect for Marines and their work, and an unhealthy respect for dining hall food, especially dessert. Strangely enough, the Berkeley Daily Planet has not published anything by Jane Stillwater since she started saying nice things about The Troops. As a privately owned newspaper, that is the Planet's right, but its not really journalism.

Lest you, or the Planet, think Stillwater has "drunk the Kool-Aid" -- her hatred for President Bush remains, which makes her support for the military, as humans doing hard work, more gratifying. I mention her because of the way in which her opinions have been shaped, through time, by facts and rational thinking. Zanne Joi and Medea Benjamin are incapable of that kind of adjustment. For them the World is seen in shades of pink -- or everything else.

I hope Code Pink has given up and gone home. They went into SF to help World Can't Wait! this week, and have been hanging out with the Berkeley Tree Sitters for months. But, allying themselves with Communist front groups and would be anarchists doesn't give them any credibility with anyone outside the Movement... For all their talk of Peace, Code Pink, WCW!, and most of the local anti-war groups here support continued fighting -- by anyone but the United States of America. As one who grew up thinking the "Menace of Communism" was a phobia affecting my parents' generation... I'm telling you, its real here. "Zombie" a local photographer, photographed and counted the number of Communist groups at a Iraq 5th Anniversary Protest this year -- the pictures are on his site ------> Zombietime.com. Please check it out!