Wow. What an exciting day! Went to the anti-war rally and march today held at the Vietnam veterans memorial. Over 200,000 were there. It was very inspirational because no one I knew was going. Like I said most people feel content with just watching stuff like that on TV, staying home and doing their own thing. So I had this lonely feeling flying up, like, “man what are you doing now…” But then I woke up this morning and started walking towards the rally spot and before I knew it I am surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country who feel the same way that I do about things. I met up with the bus that came from Florida. There were about fifty of them. 


We all hung out together and listened to the speeches at the rally. Busses were arriving throughout the day from every state in the nation. Susan Sarandon spoke very passionately; patty smith sang the song ‘the people have the power.’ Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson spoke. One of the best speeches was by Ramsey Clark, the ex-United States Attorney General. He blasted Bush and what he calls the real axis of evil that is made up of Bush, Colin Powel, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. All oil and big business war mongers ready to take down as many American lives and Iraqi lives as they want to in their little war for oil. And of course they won't fight. Plenty of young poor Americans will. Al Sharpton used the bogie-man analogy and said that George Bush was just trying to use this war as a means to get the public’s attention off of what was really important to us right now, like the falling economy, horrible education problems, the federal deficit, the recession, disastrous health care—this is something I can relate to because almost all of the musician friends I have all over the country do not have any health insurance—they are just  ‘winging it’, the Enron scandal, a company that he and Cheney were both very close to, and many other real problems. And of course the fact that we haven't made any progress in catching anyone responsible for the September 11^th attacks, including Osama Bin Laden.

  

Once we took to the street I was so moved by how many of us there were and how we all just walked together in unity for this cause and so many others. I had my guitar with me and I strummed ‘Give peace a chance’ while various groups would start chanting things over bullhorns. Eventually a man with a bullhorn joined me and then a man with a drum and then a man with a tambourine and we started singing ‘give peace a chance’ and pretty soon the whole crowd was singing with us and I was strumming and singing and this man next to me was shouting over the bullhorn, “we can stop it if we want to” “we have a choice” in between verses. I got chills. It was a groovy scene. People were hanging out of all the buildings waving to us and cheering us on. 200,000 people marching in Washington DC is a powerful sight.     

Check out photos here: http://www.tmgservers.net/photo_albums/BAND/peacemarch1002/

Now this is truly amazing. I am sitting in my hotel room now taking some notes and watching CNN. And in the last hour they have dedicated ten minutes to rap group bone thugs and harmony and another ten minutes to singer faith hill and maybe a half hour worth of news to various different George Bush pieces about his war on Iraq and all this stuff, and they showed all of one minute to this huge peace march today in the Nations capital. 200,000 people marched together to the white house to protest not just the potential war on Iraq but many other issues that real Americans are fighting everyday, like health care reform and the fact that George bush stole the presidency in the first place. Protests and marches also took place in San Francisco, Berlin, Italy, Tokyo, Mexico, and many other countries all over the world. And the mainstream news media barely covered it. So what is going on there? 

People always talk about the mainstream news media selling their souls long ago to whomever will pay their bills and I was never quite sure if I was sold on that notion a hundred percent. I mean granted, they never report on anything that is anti-government and they definitely seem to be a government run organization the way they pander to the feds and never really give the people any airtime. But I am almost convinced now that it really is that way, just a government machine owned by large corporations and the government to feed fodder to the people who don’t know the difference. I was there today. I am still here. There were hundreds of thousands of Americans in the street marching and chanting, “give peace a chance, impeach bush, no more war, we won't die for oil,” etc etc, and almost not a peep out of the mainstream media about it. You could see that there is this major consensus that Bush stole the White House and that the American people do not like him or how he has acted since he has been playing president. There were just as many signs to impeach bush or for “regime change here” than there were for no war. He is not a well-liked president. He doesn’t even pretend to care about the American people. He doesn’t even pretend to not be a corporate whore. He is just carrying it out right in front of the whole world and a lot of the people kind of seem oblivious to it.  

Also curious is once you start studying all this stuff you start hearing a lot of different things that the media doesn’t tell us about at all, like the fact that this new war that Bush proposes will cost us, the American tax-payers 200 billion dollars and we are already in a disastrous recession. They also never bother to tell us how close he and the Enron CEO were, that Enron contributed tens of millions of dollars to the Bush campaign, that he warned Bush six months before it happened that Enron was in bad financial trouble from inside dirty business and that Bush never warned the American people. One would assume that they just thought they could cover it up or fix it. There is so much more. My mind is over-whelmed with so much that I learned today. So now all we hear about is this war that Bush wants to get us into. He is saying that he doesn’t care if the UN backs us or not. He is willing to break the international law if he has to. He doesn’t care if anyone backs us or not, he just wants to do it. And it's just so amazing that the media really hasn’t focused on the fact that most people in and out of the United States are against this war. It really makes you wonder who they work for. Whose war is this anyway?

Part two

Went to dinner tonight at a French restaurant to celebrate. French onion soup, flank steak with shallot and red wine sauce, profiletores for desert, a double espresso and a cigar. The meal was delicious. Everyone at the various tables at the restaurant we’re talking about what they saw today in the streets of their city. I soaked in this wonderful feeling of what I experienced today with so many beautiful intelligent people. While I was eating and smoking and enjoying this great feast I was ruminating about how many more people could have been there today. What a small percentage of America showed up. But the people who did were from a wide spectrum of different classes and cultures. It wasn't just the granola crowd. There were all ages and classes. You didn't feel like you were at a grateful dead concert like one would think. it was everyone of us. just people speaking up. all kinds of people. Lots of parents with their kids who worried about what kind of country we are turning into. Older people who remembered the consequences of when we went into Vietnam without the support of the American people.

People who are sick of the government doing whatever they want to at the expense of morality or ethics or concern for the majority. At the expense of what may happen to us in the future if we make more people angry and resentful towards us. September 11^th wasn't an accident. And it wasn't for nothing. It was real. It was an attack on our people as a way to get back at things our government has done to other countries people. We need to remember that. if we don’t want another September 11^th, we need to keep a better eye on our government and maybe it's time we started ruling them a little tighter as is our right. After all, they work for us. We don’t work for them. I hope today accomplished something. If we woke up tomorrow and the news was starting to talk about real issues rather than this war on Iraq, then American would be a better place.

Improving health care in America so everyone had real health care would be a great place to start. Improving education so we ranked number one in the world and not way down at the bottom—can you imagine? Assuring there were no more homeless and hungry people walking around our streets. These are issues to fight for. This is news worthy. We have a mission. All of us. to wake up and fight to live in a world that feels good. Where we don’t have to pretend all the time that everything is alright when we know it's not. It is our right here in America. But we aren't going to get there by sitting around and watching TV or going out to bars and clubs and drinking and dancing all the time. With the Internet now, we have access not only to tons of useful information but also to petition sites. We also have the ability to connect up with other people who feel the same way we do about issues we are interested in. There is a Yahoo Group for just about any cause you could care about. Today was a glorious step in the right direction for those who were there in any of the cities that participated. I hope that we can make tomorrow even better.