The auditorium at Columbia College was full, with people sitting in the aisles. We estimate around 150 people came, and they were a real mix, from college students to retired people (or as Timuel Black put it, “I’m retired but not tired,” and he’s 88 years old!), all nationalities and backgrounds. At least four colleges were represented, several business owners and college professors, free-lance professionals, and a few marketing people were also in the crowd. Well over half of the people there had never attended a World Can’t Wait meeting before, although some have been receiving our e-newsletter. A show of hands revealed that many had heard about us on Air America, mostly online since reception in the city isn’t good, and many had seen the full-page ad in the Chicago Reader.
Abbie, a Columbia College student organizer who’s on our Chicago
steering committee, gave an inspiring talk based on the national
presentation. She was interrupted by applause many times, and several
people commented afterwards how moving they found her talk.
Bob Bossie talked about how history didn’t start on 9/11/2001;
that’s also the anniversary of the US-engineered coup against the
democratically elected government of Salvadore Allende in Chile, one of over 70 such US
armed interventions around the world since WWII. But he outlined how
this regime is going to new depths, highlighting Iraq in particular
since he has been there four times and is a founding member of Voices
in the Wilderness, as well as the danger of justifying all this on the
basis of a hate-filled religion. He tried to describe the almost
indescribable devastation of US occupation. Like all our speakers, he urged everyone to build October 5 as a day of massive resistance to bring this to a halt.
Jed Stone railed against the destruction of “my America, real or
imagined”, a country that, among many other things, stands for due
process of law, not warrantless surveillance and secret evidence; the
Geneva Conventions, not codified torture. He spoke against the urge to
feel overwhelmed and the crying need instead to come together in
action, focused on October 5th, to resurrect what America should and needs to be.
And Tim Black spoke about his witness of the destruction of Europe
in the wake of WW2, pointing out that Hitler had written out his plan
years earlier in Mein Kampf, the people of Germany had a chance to stop
him, but they ignored the danger until it was too late. He also
described the devastation of Hiroshima, a non-military target hit by US nuclear attack, and warned the meeting not to think it can’t happen again.