"...Ifoolmah, can't get fooled again"

Scott IMed me earlier today and let me know that a global candlelight vigil was going on tonight. I caught the message just before my local area one was starting, thought about it, and decided to head over. I usually don't participate in "activist" branded activities (for a number of reasons) but I decided I wanted to see the people who came, see how many would be there, and perhaps be a visual indicator that there is one more person who believed that Invading Iraq Now was Wrong.

I'm glad I went. When I arrived there I guessed there was about 200 people there (parking was a bitch!), but afterwards I walked around and I'm guessing it was closer to 500 jammed into that park. As I suspected, it wasn't your stereotypical liberal yahoos, radicals, and unionists "protesting" as the media (or our President) would have you believe. These were all regular people, of all ages and walks of life, my fellow Americans, united in one way -- belief that the war we find our government putting us on the verge of is not the Right Thing to do.

There is much more that I can say on why I believe this, but I will just say the following for the moment. As much as high brow intellectuals may think otherwise, people are not stupid. Sure we let ourselves get manipulated or bamboozled all the time, but when we feel that we're being hoodwinked we're virtually always right. When you have tens of millions of people in the Western world and several hundreds of thousands of people in our country all publicly congregating in numbers like never before in recent history, can anyone think they are all part of some collective political agenda or gaggles of people with unreasonable views? No, these are people who feel like they are being duped. They don't want to be taken advantage of and they want to let it be known. We must listen.

We must take the power of choice on this issue out of the hands of our President, and back into the hands of our Congress... now before it is too late. Your individual Congressmen have taken all the accountability out of their hands and we must put it back. War is supposed to be debated and declared by Congress for a reason -- so that anyone voting for it truly feels held accountable to the people they represent. When we let Congress hand over that decision to someone, they have washed their hands and feel no pressure to answer to their constituents because they will never make the final decision. There are bills on the House (Res. 20) and Senate (Res. 32) floors to repeal this blanket authorization, and United for Peace & Justice has called for massive nationwide congressional pressure to pass these bills. With War action coming to a head tomorrow (Monday), please act -- if only to call your Congressmen. These are not bills stopping war, they are bills to put the responsibility of declaring war back into the hands of people who can be held directly accountable to us, the People.

Hardly a word was said tonight despite all the people and all the differing backgrounds people brought with them. The one prevailing feeling was entirely clear -- hope, hope that madness would not be allowed to prevail. [06:04]