Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 2, February 2003

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Call to arms for local peace activists

By MATTHEW PREUSCH

When U.S. Postmaster General James A. Farley visited Seattle in the 1930s, he made the following tongue-in-cheek toast: "To the 47 states and the soviet of Washington."

In the seven decades since that salute, Seattle has maintained its reputation as anti-establishment, with the current reaction to a possible war in Iraq being no exception.

Most notably, U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, the Democrat Congressman from Seattle, drew the ire of conservative pundits after criticizing President Bush on a trip to Iraq, earning him the moniker "Baghdad Jim."

More recently, a Seattle Times poll found two-thirds of Puget Sound residents did not think the president had provided enough evidence to support attacking Iraq.

Polls and pundits aside, it is at the neighborhood level, at potlucks or meetings in bookstores, that Seattle's anti-war effort has really taken off.

Since last fall, thousands of neighborhood activists have made opposition to war part of the work-a-day landscape across the city. Most noticeable are the "No Iraq War" signs, which seem to pop up every day at intersections somewhere in Seattle, be it in the Ballard, Greenwood, Ravenna or Lake City neighborhoods.

Hoisting those signs are community activists largely organized under the umbrella group Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War (SNOW), whose Greenwood offices have been humming with activity since a kick-off rally last December at Garfield High School.

At that rally the crowd broke off into about 40 neighborhood groups, swapped contact information and began planning for future meetings and "actions" for their area everything from peace potlucks to public marches. Each group also designated a person to relay information between the neighborhood groups and the larger coalition.

So who are the 1,000 Seattleites that filled Garfield's gym? Many are perennial protesters, the usual suspects at Seattle's marches and rallies; some just showed up for the spectacle. Others are first-time dissenters, drawn into the movement by personal concern.

John Bito is one of the latter. The 39-year-old Web designer said he had never thought of himself as an activist before the Garfield event. But once there he was impressed by the large turnout of like-minded individuals.

"They organized us into little neighborhoods and had us fill in contact cards, and somebody had to volunteer to take all the contact cards," he said. For Phinney-Greenwood, that somebody turned out to be Bito.

For an individual whose most political act had been voting, Bito has taken to the protest movement like a fish to water. He even organized a rally at the Federal Building downtown for January.

But why get involved with this conflict now? Bito said he is doing it for his children. "After thinking about it a lot, I couldn't reconcile myself to spending time with the kids without doing something to work for their future," he said.

If Bito is the rookie activist, then Shirley Morrison is the seasoned veteran. Morrison, 80, is a member of the Seattle chapter of the Ragin' Grannies, a national group, as well as a local group called GROW (Greater Ravenna Opponents of War). She has been involved with different peace movements since the 1960s. She was born in Tacoma and moved to Seattle at age 2, but has lived all over the world.

Now you can find her, at least once a week, outside the Ravenna Third Place Books, manning an ironing board covered with anti-war buttons, stickers and pamphlets. From behind that humble pulpit she expounds a message of peace honed over a lifetime.

"Hopefully we're at least talking to people and they're talking to us, and we're hearing some views expressed. Some people aren't at all interested, or don't want to be bothered. [Others] are very supportive of what the Bush administration is doing," she said.

At other times her neighborhood group, about 30 strong, takes up position outside University Village to wave "No Iraq War" signs at passing traffic.

"You can't fail to see us," she said.

Much has been made of technological advancements in protest politics e-mail lists, cell phone-coordinated marches, online news sites but it is the traditional means, such as marches, letter writing, rallies and teach-ins, that SNOW and its member groups are relying on in the current conflict.

Ruth Warrow, a worker in SNOW's Greenwood office, said those remain the best way to spread the word.

"We think that's the effective and the right way to be opposing the war effort," Warrow said, "We thought really what we need to do is help people feel that they are not isolated and it's not hopeless and they can be empowered to take action. To do that we needed to get organized."

It's hard to say how much of an effect all the organizing is having, but Jane Sanders, in McDermott's Seattle office, said it gets the attention of those in power.

"It's certainly been very effective here in Seattle in finding interesting ways to get people talking about the merits of going to war," she said, "They certainly have paid attention."