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| The Great Peace March |
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| when did it become about money? where did they spend it all in a desert? |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 19, 1986. Any week when three way grocery prices are a big story, we have to cover this: Fingers trembled on the button recently as Soviet and American nuclear forces accessed the meaning of the pivotal event. To wit, The Great Peace March ran out of money (?) in the desert and disbanded. Reports from the front suggest several hundred people have vowed to continue this non-event so essentially related to the continuation of our species. One wonders why the marchers did not apply for an Art Grant, for surely and recently lesser events have been funded. Instead of highlighting its political connotations, the March could have been called Performance/Audio/Video Project '86. The Great Peace March is fully in keeping with Ed Sullivan protests so dear to Boulder’s heart. An E. S. protest is like an E.S. act: impressive but pointless, like a swimming dog with trained mice signing by semaphore on his back. The classic example is the hands not quite around Rocky Flats of years past. Listening to the converted - pardon the pun - one would think that there were not miles of emptiness despite news helicopters and newspaper shots. Yet there are enclaves where it is treated as a seminal event, even a meaningful one. But like the Peace March, the circling of Rocky Flats does nothing but provide a masturbatory outlet under the guise of calling attention to a problem. Hog-wash. It is preaching to the converted and much easier than trying to convert the opposition. But who is the opposition? Nobody wants nuclear war. But disarmament, arms reduction, and peace are terms used more or less interchangeably in this crowd, which makes them easy to make fun of. The Great Peace Mess may or may not continue, in spurts or hops, but the best they can hope for is toleration. They started off with a lot of hoopla and still screwed up. This is less than a convincing premise that they understand something as complicated as violent tendencies in a species. Face it, what the left refuses to recognize is that people are not essentially peaceful. There are powerful religions that assure heaven to certain murderers. It is convenient to find blame with the military industrial complex because it is a word they can pronounce and something they can understand, or pretend to. They do not represent peace; they represent innocence, perhaps ignorance. As painful as this fiasco was, we should be sure not to cast out their aspirations with the worn Adidas. It is true that our citizens do not give enough thought to wage constructive peace. Calling attention to a celebrity media event only lessens it. |
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