Shari Korthuis did the calculations. It had been 10 years since the start of the Afghan war.
The goal was to multiply the years and months and have at least 120 people in attendance at Sunday’s peace rally, “Enough! Stand for Peace & Social Justice,” she said.
The number that joined the rally surpassed the goal. Approximately 170 people gathered at Columbia’s Courthouse Square in protest of the war in Afghanistan on Sunday afternoon.
Some carried banners reading “Peace is Patriotic, Not War” and “Support the Troops, Bring Them Home,” while others opted for hand-painted peace signs.
“We had more (people) than what we expected,” Korthuis said. “We are going to try to stop the war, stop the madness, stop the insanity. We have to take care of each other.”
Hosted by the Columbia Peace Coalition, an organization composed of 18 different groups, the rally marked the 10th anniversary of U.S. involvement in wars overseas.
“It is our time,” Peaceworks Director Mark Haim said. “We need to do this. This past Friday, we marked the 10th anniversary of a tragic war, the longest war in our country’s history. It’s been nothing but a tragedy for everyone involved.”
Haim stressed his sadness on the Obama administration’s plans of continuing the war for at least three and a half more years.
The rally opened with hand-holding and live music. Jamie Meadows performed an original composition called “Stand Together,” based on her brother’s survival of the World Trade Center attack. General Manager of KOPN/89.5 David Owens shared a poem he wrote in celebration of life. The group Romani Blue also performed.
“It added a little break from the monotony of talking and some flavor from the Middle East,” Peaceworks Steering Committee President Amy Dove said. “It’s where we have been involved in perpetual war. We wanted to get a little more political, so we thought this was a great opportunity to do that.”
Speeches and short statements were alternated with the musical stylings. Haim spoke against the war, and Lily Tinker Fortel, a worker for Grass Roots Organizing, discussed her hopes for a “peace economy.”
The peace economy is the rejection of the prevailing narrative that wars and other forms of military spending are worthy economic stimulants. It is a viable, practical and superior model to the world economy, Fortel said.
Fortel’s speech catalyzed Dalton Perry, a student at Indian Hills Community College, to join Peaceworks in high school.
“The war is doing more harm than good,” Perry said. “It almost destroys all infrastructures (in Afghanistan). It killed a lot of civilians.”
Healthy audience participation was also a key player in Sunday’s walk. Haim drew cries of “unacceptable” from the audience after shouting a litany of phrases, such as “Afghan War,” “civilian deaths,” “war profiteers” and “corporate greed.”
“You sounded good, but we’re going to try that again, though,” he said to the audience. “You have to work on that ‘unacceptable.’ We should make this so loud they hear it in Washington.”
The rally also focused on an ongoing campaign to bring concerns of area citizens to Missouri senators Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt. The coalition passed out sign-up slips and encouraged people to work a visit to the senators’ offices into their schedules.
“We got people signed up to go the senator’s office everyday from October 11 until November 12,” Korthuis said. “We are going everyday at noon.”
Since the war in Afghanistan started, Haim and other members of the coalition have protested twice a week on a regular basis. A peace vigil is held on each of the four corners of Providence Road and Broadway every Wednesday and outside the Columbia Post Office every Saturday.
Overall, Haim believed the goal of the rally was well received.
“We definitely got the message across to people here, for sure,” he said. “People were paying attention, they were responding very positively. We had people signing up to go to our senator’s offices. I think that we have shown that we have strength in new interest. That is a lot of what we are looking for.”
