Memorial Day

This weekend the Gainesville chapter of Veterans for Peace held a Memorial Day protest of the wars. Courtney and I went today to see it. On a stretch of 8th Ave that a VfP volunteer said ran for 9/10ths of a mile, they had laid out miniature tombstones, Arlington-style, for all the soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq since the 2001 and 2003 invasions. The markers stood four across with about 48 inches between each row, and each displayed the soldier's name, rank, hometown, date of death, and number in the death catalogue. There were 4, 581 tombstones, divided by markers that grouped them by nation and year (Afghanistan 2003, Iraq 2007, etc).

Here are some pictures

Front of the procession

"Mission Accomplished" marker. The number of tombstones after this marker is nothing short of shameful.

The end of the procession makes the sad recognition that we have at least one more year (who knows? maybe 100 years) to run up the body count.

Looking back from the end of the procession.

On the opposite side of the street, pinned to the fence that marks the southern limit of a city park, the VfP volunteers had posted some panels from the Peace Ribbon Project. Here are a few of the many dozens of panels:


Then, finally, there were a series of posters the VfP people had put together to announce the cost of the wars--in dollars, in deaths, in injuries, in families displaced, etc:

Out of the 4,581 tombstones, only 4 belonged to Gainesville residents. That might be a little misleading since a Gainesville native may have listed his base (Tampa, Jacksonville, etc.) as his hometown, but the fact remains that this town is remarkably insulated from the wars--which you'd expect, given the density of reasonably affluent white young people running around here. It's so insulated, in fact, that it's front-page news when a UF student simply deploys to Iraq, much less meets any harm there. I hope the VfP demonstration did at least a little to make the cost of this invisible war more recognizable for the people around here.