Between 125 and 150 enthusiastic organizers and would be organizers showed up for the Sept. 7th meeting of WCW in San Francisco. The old and new WCW organizers watched a great video produced by WCW which was interrupted frequently with applause and shouts of agreement to statements attacking the Bush regime or boos when Bush appeared on the screen.
After the video, brief presentations were made by a few speakers. The first speaker was the Rev. Charles Tigard, the associate pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church, which has one of the largest LBGT congregations in the nation. He
emphasized that we have the “power in our hands to change the world”
and that “freedom is dependent on our ability to speak for it, and to
continue speaking.” Referring to the Bush regime’s actions, he said,
“fear will silence you, but we refuse to be silent.” We must “refuse a culture of silence, for our freedom depends on it.” He received enthusiastic applause.
Next came Chris Daly, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Chris was one of the first politicians in the country to sign on to the WCW call. He has put on the San Francisco ballot, a measure calling for the impeachment and removal of Bush and Cheney. He
acknowledged that they would not voluntarily leave office and
emphasized that they needed to be driven from office with a mass
movement. “It will take mass mobilization on Oct. 5th. It needs to build from there…to make sure…the rest of America is aware of the discontent of the American people…Anything less than the removal of Bush and Cheney is not sufficient.”
The next speaker was from WCW and she read a statement by Debra
Sweet. Three sentences from the speech received sustained applause. “If
you know what is happening and do nothing to stop it, you are complicit
in the crimes of the thugs and criminals…If you elect Democrats that
are strong on National Security you will get war and
oppression…History will judge us sharply should we fail to act
decisively.”
Next was Taigen Dan Leighton from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He told the crowd about the ongoing teach-in and vigil that has been held on the Berkeley
campus where John Yoo, the author of some of the torture memos and the
legal architect of Bush’s “signing statements,” is teaching atBoalt Hall Law School.
The last speaker was Daniel Ellsberg. We have a videotape of him
telling us that back in 1969 the national Moratorium prevented Nixon
from launching a nuclear attack onVietnam . No one knew it at the time,
but he lays out the timeline and why it was cancelled. He said the
people in the streets were key, indicating we are at this kind of
crossroads. On the Boston Globe editorial attacking WCW – he ran down
how Hitler transformed the German state into a fascist state, said the
Bush group ARE fascists and we don’t have much time. He thinks there’s
a strong chance that Bush will attackIran before the elections –
October surprise? – and there will be a compulsion to use nuclear
weapons, and nuclear weapons are “portable Auschwitz” that dwarfs the
holocaust and opens up a whole new era of nightmares for humanity. He
also emphasized the role of how anti-war students helped hide him in
the crucial days before the 19 papers published the Pentagon papers. He
analogized this to the role of the White Rose Society’s opposition to
Hitler. They were a group of anti-Hitler students who lost their lives
in the fight against fascism.
After the speakers we broke into various groups to work on various task to build for Oct 5th and the future.