Duct Tape This!

by Howard Altman

The peace train out of Chestnut Hill is packed, amazingly so for a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon in February.

The train, also known as the R8, is packed with people heading into Center City for the demonstration against war in Iraq. There are bundled-up children who can barely pronounce Iraq and venerable oldheads in hippie-dippie knit hats who marched for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam.

There is plenty of good-natured banter among strangers coming together to show their displeasure with George Bush and his refusal to listen to reason.

Me, I'm a little reserved.

I haven't been to a protest as a protester in nearly 30 years.

A pen and notebook I know what to do with.

My chanting voice is a little rusty.

Any reticence I am feeling about being a journalist joining the ranks of protesters is only magnified after I get off the train, when I run into an old colleague, Jim MacMillan, now a shooter for the Daily News.

"Good to see someone on the streets as long as I've been," says Jimmy Mac, one of my oldest buddies in the business, back to the days of the Waltham, Mass., News Tribune, when we worked -- and were fired from -- our first newspaper jobs.

"Not today," I say to Jimmy Mac, one of the best shooters ever to lug a Nikon, who today is lugging several to the protest. "I'm here as a protester."

A quizzical look creases Jimmy Mac's craggy face. He tells me he has struggled with the ethics of crossing the line, deciding ultimately that he is a photographer, not a protester.

"That's the good thing about being an editor at an alternative newspaper," I say. "But I've struggled with it, too. I finally decided that, as a columnist, I have a voice. And now is the time to raise that voice."

Until Saturday, my biggest political activity outside my column has been my semiannual trip, with or without my kids, to the voting booth.

Much to the chagrin of my wife, who would like to see me more involved in the efforts to free homeschoolers from the clutches of the state's education system, I remain on the sidelines, content to let my 800-odd words in this space count as activism.

Like Jimmy Mac, I firmly believe that, under normal circumstances, journalists should refrain from public displays of political affection.

But these are no ordinary times.

The man in the White House, who does not even have a mandate from his own people, is hell-bent on waging war on Iraq regardless of a lack of international support -- the likes of Latvia and Denmark notwithstanding.

He is hell-bent even though the concept of pre-emptive war is an affront to civilization.

He is hell-bent even though the results of that war will mean more than a million dead Iraqis, thousands of dead soldiers from the "coalition of the willing" and, if you want to examine this issue in purely selfish terms, not one bit of relief to you, dear reader, from the threat posed by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah or anyone else who will use pictures of dead Iraqi children to help recruit terrorists.

George W. Bush, who lost the popular election in 2000, is hell-bent on war, so now is not the time to worry about what my colleagues might think.

Now is the time to join the millions of people around the globe who are marching, perhaps in vain, in an effort to convince Bush and his fellow chicken hawk, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, that their way is the wrong way.

Now is the time to listen to the French and Germans, who know a little about the horrors of war, and to pay particular attention to the Germans, who twice in the last century were on the wrong side of wars that cost hundreds of millions of lives. The fatherland as home of doves is something to seriously ponder.

The instant the first cruise missile flies out of its launcher, it will be too late for protests and demonstrations. Shock and awe will be upon Mesopotamia, and the endgame that Bush speaks of will be on.

So here I am, in the cold, among 10,000 fellow antiwar protesters, heartened by the turnout, heartened by the sentiment and heartened by the fact that there's a lot more to this protest than "hey-hey, ho-ho, whatever we don't like has got to go."

"It used to be that the protests were attended by people who thought there weren't enough holes in Cheerios," says Capt. Billy Fisher of the Philadelphia Police Department's Civil Affairs unit. "Today, there are a lot more mainstream people coming out. That's a pretty good indication of the way people feel about this war."

Don't tell that to Bush.

He's shrugging off the estimated six million protesters and charging full steam ahead toward Armageddon.

Habiba Ali, a convert to Islam, utters perhaps the best protest line ever as the truck she is riding stops in front of City Hall. And I repeat it here as a message to the president and his warmongering fellow travelers.

"Duct tape this!"

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