September 19, 2001: Seattle Says No to GWOT

It's almost wonderfully difficult to imagine today in these days of glorious conservative and neoconservative meltdown, but there once was a time when George W. "I'm a meat guy" Bush had the entire Western world deferentially eating out of his Manchurian Candidate hand--including and unfortunately much of the social justice activist community in the United States. Those days of profound intellectual and moral suspension were, of course, the first crucial weeks in the wake of the millennial tragedy of September 11, 2001.

As the White House's erstwhile tragicomic figure emerged from his cocaine Christian cowboy cocoon, magically transfigured by the fall of the Twin Towers, to become a globally Churchillian butterfly, world leaders and American agitators alike all apparently rolled over and played dead--well, almost. In grand populist fact, there were quite early on a good few pockets of resistance within the homeland to the newly empowered Bush agenda--including and especially in Seattle.

On the date in focus here, Seattle hosted one of the earliest large-scale post-9/11 antiwar protests in the US, in anticipation of the inevitable march to war that 9/11 unfortunately enabled. That evening, some 5,000 locals participated in a candlelight march down Broadway in Seattle's ultra-liberal Capitol Hill neighborhood. The march, officially intended not so much as a "protest" but rather as a memorial for the victims of 9/11 and an appeal for a nonviolent US response to 9/11, was organized by local communities of faith, and was accordingly a contemplative, rather than raucous, affair. It began at St. Mark's Cathedral on the north end of Capitol Hill, then proceeded down Broadway, finally finishing with a memorial service at St. James Cathedral on First Hill.

Other, larger antiwar events soon followed in other American cities--notably in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 29, where some 25,000 (according to the organizers) marched in reaction to Bush's belligerent "with us or against us" address to Congress on Sept. 20, and its clear implication of impending military action in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Seattle was proudly among the national vanguard with respect to the first crucial waves of resistance to the so-called Global War on Terror. Sources: ETS! archives; the author's own recollection as a participant.