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Grandmothers for Peace InternationalActivism > Other Granny Groups > Grandmothers Against the War > Reviews of the Grandmothers Against the War Book |
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Grandmothers for Peace InternationalActivism > Other Granny Groups > Grandmothers Against the War > Reviews of the Grandmothers Against the War Book |
Getting off our Fannies & Standing Up for Peace
By Joan Wile
Citidel Press/ Kensington Publishing Corp
New York, NY
193 pages, Softcover
Throughout the early months before the US Invasion of Iraq in 2003, the global justice movement morphed into a global peace and justice movement. And movement narratives intersected. From 2003-4, the movement against the US invasion of Iraq built on the momentum and infrastructure of a mobilized movement (Kauffman, 2004). The results included a defiant, robust pre invasion mobilization (Shepard, 2003A). October 2002, a group of these activists chained themselves inside the New York office of New York Senator Hillary (who went on to ignore her constituents who overwhelmingly opposed the war and vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq October 11, 2002). This wave of actions culminated with simultaneous protests in cities around the world on Febuary 15th, 2003, a date recognized as the largest single day of protest in world history (Cartright, 2005; Shepard, 2003). Despite a pre invasion mass mobilization larger than anything which preceded the Viet Nam War, the new anti war movement struggled with its footing as the invasion began in 2003. Many openly lamented the lost final chance to stop the war (Shepard, 2003B; 2004). And hope rescinded from a once abundant movement scene (Solnit, 2005).
Yet, not in all quarters. As initial wave of movement momentum waned with the re election of President Bush, a new cohort of actors emerged to take the lead in organizing against the war from an unlikely source. With Grandmothers Against the War: Getting off our Fannies & Standing Up for Peace, New York performer turned activist Joan Wile tells the story a group of grandmothers who took a leadership role few others were willing to accept. While at first the notion of a group of grandmother activists seems like an unusual source of movement vitality, the notion of women taking the lead in an anti-war movement is not particularly new. One needs to look no further than the wives in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, who refused to copulate with their husbands during the 410 BC drama. (Actors around the world read from the play as an intervention on March 3, 2003 before the Iraq invasion.) More to the point, women often take the lead social movements (Shepard, in press).
And lead the Grannies did. Through Wile’s memoir, one can witness the stages of an organizing campaign, from formulation of a goal, communication of that goal via email, social networks, and media, continued mobilization, coalition building with veterans against the war and civil libertarians, and direct action. After years of standing for a weekly Vigil outside of Rockefeller Center the Grannies escalated their campaign. On October 17th, 2005, a group Some eighteen grannies, including Wile, went to the recruiting station in Times Square to volunteer fight so their grand children would not have to. When the group approached the recruiting station, no one answered the door. “[I]t looked as if nobody were inside at all,” Wile writes. “Just then I saw a young man’s head pop up from behind a desk and then quickly duck down again.” Seeing this, Marian Runyon, a 90-year-old member of the brigade started to bang on the door to the recruiting station with her cain, screaming, “’Open up, come on, lets get cracking..” Still nothing. “If we could so frighten our own tough soldiers that they cowered behind desks rather than face us, imagine what we could have done ...” Wile laments. So the grannies sat down on the onramp in front of the recruiting station in “peaceful non-violent protest.” Part of the theatre of the whole episode was the spectacle of the grannies heroic and occasionally funny attempts to put their bodies on the line. “This was quite difficult given our ages and the other various forms of arthritis and the other incapacitating muscular-skeletal infirmities of aging bodies” Wile explains. “I took about five minutes to accomplish the task.” And finally, the Grannies were arrested by the NYPD. “As we were being led away, one of the grannies overheard a bystander remarking, ‘The cops were the only ones with their original hips.” For many the moment was powerfully charged. “During the entire experience, I never for one moment considered I never for one moment considered the fact that I would be in jail for an indeterminate amount of time or perhaps eventually have to go to trial,” Wile ruminates. “The exhilaration of the moment overcame any such worries, and I, and the other grannies, instead felt glowing euphoria. We had done what we set out to do,” (p. 15-16).
The chapter on zapping Hillary and Bill Clinton includes some of the most charged and poignant in the entire narrative. Throughout Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign, observers have noted that her campaign represents a culmination of a social movement for women’s rights. This logic is not new for the Senator. “In 1998, she [Clinton] visited Seneca Falls for the 150th Anniversary of both the first women’s rights convention in the US and the beginning of a mobilization that would lead to the Women’s suffrage movement,” social movement scholar and sociologist Holly McCammon (2008) writes in Critical Mass, a newsletter on collective behavior and social movements (p.3). Reading the Grannies speak out about Clinton’s support for both the war and the Patriot Act, this reviewer would propose that the grannies are closer inheritors of the legacy of the Suffragettes. “The bird dogging of Hillary continues to this day,” Wile writes, describing the uncovered stories of the confrontations with Clinton over the war. Wile confesses she could have said more to Bill Clinton, she was star struck and a bit overwhelmed to be around a president with an intellect (unlike the current While House occupant). Once she was done with her anti war rap, “like any awestruck teenage groupie, I gave him a piece of paper to sign. ‘To Joan Wile, Thanks for your devotion to peace. Bill Clinton.’ I said, ‘Thank you, President Kennedy,” Wile confessed. Clinton did not mind. “That’s all right,” he responded when she pointed out what she had said to him. While Wile wishes she’d said more, the person she really wanted to confront was Hillary Clinton. “If my Grannies and I, just ordinary citizens, could clearly see that we were being led with subterfuge and lies into a disastrous war, why couldn’t she?” Wile laments (p. 119-20).
Grandmothers against the War is many things – a self deprecating memoir, a telling unwritten history, a confirmation of Margaret Mead’s adage that small groups such as the grannies really are the most likely ones to change the world, these things yet there is more to the volume. On a number of occasions I found myself breaking down as I read the stories of women who have lived for most of a bloody century, who chose to use some of their last years and breaths to speak out for the only thing still important to them: a peaceful future for their children and grandchildren. At the beginning of chapter three, “Seventeen Remarkable Women and Me” Wile quotes from “Tomorrow, When I’m Young Again” from the musical Seven Ages of Women. The lyrics speak to the spirit of regeneration which pulses through Wile’s movement memoir:
I may be over the hill
But I’ve got mountains left to climb
Take away your clocks, I still
Have lots of time, I’m in my prime
tomorrow when I’m young again
Tomorrow when spring has sprung again
Tomorrow when I begin again
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, when I win again! (p. 18).
Here, the movement against the war is not only a struggle for life and love, but an effort to embrace life instead of descend into a long dark night.
Cartright, David. 2005. The Peaceful Superpower: The Movement against the War in Iraq. Charting Transnational Democracy: Beyond Global Arrogance. Ed by Janie Leatherman and Julie Webber. New York: Palgrave