On the November 6th, organizers from the World Can’t Wait participated in the All Souls Procession in Tucson, Arizona. The WCW had put out the call to represent to the horrors of the Bush Regime. The
All Souls Procession is an annual Day of the Dead Parade, which draws
thousands of locals to see performances by puppeteers and flame
jugglers. The parade is typically promoted as an apolitical
event. People from many different classes and nationalities from all
over the city come out to either participate or watchthe parade.
There
were about a dozen people involved, including students from Refuse
& Resist and members of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Bridgade.
Some organizers dressed in US military fatigues while dragging a half-dozen Abu Graib detainees by dog leashes. The Soldiers led the hooded detainees in silence behind the ‘World Can’t Wait! Bush Step Down’ banner while other organizers engaged the crowd.
When we first arrived at the starting point of parade the mood was a bit somber. We set up and waited for the parade to start. As we silently stood many people stared at us not quite knowing what to think. Some people approached the soldiers and said things like ‘I hate Bush he murders and tortures people’. The soldiers responded by saying ‘We are just following orders, sir’.
When the parade started there were literally thousands of people in the streets. People came rushing up to us to take our photographs. The whole time the soldiers stayed in character by staring blankly and expressing zero emotion. As we marched down the street people on the sidewalks started clapping in response to what were doing. Soon enough, hundreds of people were cheering and some spontaneous agitations were coming from the crowd. Some people started chanting ‘Bush Step Down’. People were coming up us asking how they can get involved. We got pages and pages of contact information.
There were quite a few different responses to what we were doing. For a lot people it was a reminder of how messed up things are right now. Even a cop had tears in her eyes at the sight what we were doing! It was really interesting to see the responses of young children. The children would look at us and ask their parents ‘Why are those people dressed like that?’ and ‘Why are those soldiers holding those people by dog leashes?’ So the parents had to explain to their kids what this whole thing was about. One organizer was talking to someone who supported Bush and was really turned off by the banner. But when the Bush supporter saw the soldiers dragging the detainees he began to reconsider his positions. One person said, ‘This is the scariest thing in this entire parade’. Another organizer was having a conversation with someone and said this is really terrible that we have to wait until 2008 to do something. The organizer boldly stated that by 2008 it would be far to late to do anything. Many people overheard this conversation and asked to sign up on the email list. Some people tried to ignore our presence at the parade while many people came up to us and thanked us for doing what we were doing.
After the parade we all sat down and summed up the whole experience. The consensus
was that this was an incredibly successful action. One of the
organizers said that the action was almost as effective as the November
2nd demo.