Coaches are a bit like cheap sausages. They contain eyebrows, fingernails, gristle and bits of bone. Of course, in a coach all the other bits are attached; hearts and hopes, for a start; the gathering of stuff collectively known as human beings.
    It’s Saturday the fifth of August. Israel continues to blow the shit out of the civilian population of Lebanon, and the sky is grey. I sit on the coach with strangers. Garfield is on the TV at the front of the coach and has just let out a mighty belch. I’m writing this on the coach. with my arms so tightly pressed to my sides I feel like my kidneys are going to be squeezed into my throat.
    I’m on my way to a protest march; a call for peace; and an end to the killing in the Middle East.

The killing started because Israeli soldiers were kidnapped, because Israel holds hundreds of Hizbollah prisoners, because they fought against Israel, because Israel invaded Lebanon, because it was threatened by Palestinians, because they were exiled by Israel because Israel occupied their country because the Arabs had attacked them because…
    Well, it gets complicated after that so lets just say Israel is presently killing civilians as a lifestyle choice. More children are being killed than adults carrying weapons, and even though the past is complicated, the present is very simple.
    Israel is deliberately killing civilians.
    It claims the objective of the military offensive is to destroy Hizbollah, but it is using the wrong weapons to kill the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong place for the wrong reasons.
    That’s why I’m on the way to London. All over the country thousands of other people, have rolled out of bed, wiped the sleep from their eyes, got a little something to eat, and are doing the same thing as me; heading for the Peace March in London.

I didn’t get off to a good start. Or, should I say, anything that involves getting out of bed at 5.45 is a bad start to any day. It’s the kind of thing one should only be doing if the bed is on fire; and even then you’d still turn over and say, just five more minutes then I’ll phone the fire brigade. Lesley, bless her, got up as well. She made a cup of tea for us, and brought me to Chorlton Street Coach station. The coach was supposed to arrive at seven. Naturally it was late. In fact, after waiting for twenty minutes with no sign of it, I wasn’t even sure if I was in the right place. There was no sign for the coach; no sign saying peaceniks, sandal wearers, tree huggers and people who object to the indiscriminate slaughter of children queue here; nothing. None of the staff at the station knew anything about it as it had been privately chartered just for the day. Slightly baffled I got myself a coffee. I was hoping to find a discarded hypodermic needle outside the station, so I could fill it up with coffee, plunge it into a vein, and get the caffeine to where it was needed as quickly as possible. I had to make do with a bacon roll. The roll had no butter on it and the bacon was a dry as a camel tongue that had been nailed to a tree in the desert. It was like French kissing a dromedary only without the nice eyes looking back at you. I managed to get it down using a copious flood of hot, bitter, sugary coffee.
    And I waited.
    The first sign of anybody who looked like they would be going on the demonstration was a grey haired man. He looked like he had suddenly been ejected out of bed by a catapult and launched into his clothes. He took out a packet of Rizla and started to sleepily roll himself a cigarette and I thought he looks a likely candidate. Then I saw woman in her fifties with a colourful flag. It had the word PEACE written on it. It hung from the pole, as if it had been lynched by the warmongers for daring to suggest there is another way to resolve your differences. Chances are she was going to the Peace March, unless on the other side of the flag, was the word SUCKS.
    More people turned up; Asians, Caucasians, young and old, some bright eyed and fresh faced, others with the sleepy eyed look of late nights wrapped around them like a duvet.
    And we waited.
    By 7.30 there was no coach. I was thinking forget the ‘Peach March’. Let’s have a ‘Where the Fuck Is the Coach March.’ It would be a shame to waste so many well intentioned people and the effort they made to get to the station on time. I fulminated for another ten minutes, before the coach rolled up. I joined the rather haphazard and casual queue to get on. One guy skipped ahead of me. It annoyed me in a vague sort of way and I ruminated on the irony of slapping somebody on the way to a peace rally.
    Such is life.

I got a seat at the back; a window seat; and a pleasant looking gentleman of Middle Eastern appearance sat beside me. He smelt of hair oil and clean clothes. He gave me what sounded like a Middle Eastern greeting, something like ‘shalkalom’. I’ve been told I look quite Middle Eastern which used to mean I could appear a little bit exotic; now it just means I’m probably under observation and in danger of being shot by an over zealous policeman; thank god I don’t look Brazilian.
    My younger brother, when he lets his beard grow, looks like the entertainments officer for the Taliban; organising the bingo, line dancing and stoning of adulterers followed by snacks and a raffle. He can’t walk through the supermarket without having an ancient Pakistani asking him what village his father is from.
    I returned the greeting of the man as he settled in beside me.
    ‘How’re doing’ mate?’ I said, reducing my Middle Eastern mystique somewhat.
    I noticed another man getting on. He looked remarkably like Santa Claus. Quite possibly, he was. I mean, why not? Why shouldn’t he be here? What else has he got to do inbetween all that peace and goodwill and receipts so you can take the wrong size knickers back to Marks & Spencer’s? He only works one day a year. This kind of thing gives him something to do while he’s waiting on peace and goodwill to reappear. As for myself, while I wait for it to appear beneath the Christmas tree, I listen to snippets of conversation from my fellow travellers as we journey to London.
    They say things like this:
    ‘I introduced my children to philosophy at a very early age but they ditched it when the Spice Girls came along.’ (Goethe was a big fan, as I remember.)
    Some lady up front: rather apologetically; ‘excuse me…but you’re sitting on my butties.’
    Rather worryingly from behind me the words,’ I feel sick. I’m not a good coach traveller…’
    Despite the latter, I managed to drift off, sleepily lulled by the murmur of quiet voices. The pleasant voice of the Pakistani chap in front, followed me into the comfortable abyss. He was discussing the American involvement in the Middle East with the white guy beside him. I drifted away from their conversation, sleep slipping a pillow under my head. When my mind drifted back he was saying, ‘...yeah, I’ve got a huge collection of Irish music, but Guinness gives me diarrhoea.’

It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a demonstration. The last one involved being charged by riot police on horses at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country house. Back then, the resident, elected fuckwit was John Major, a grey faced, bespectacled accountant with no upper lip who settled for a rich tea biscuit instead of a slice of charisma when such things were being handed out.
    The demonstration was in opposition to the introduction of The Criminal Justice Bill, a piece of legislation that would give the police sweeping powers to break up demonstrations for one thing; that part of the legislation was made to appear as if it would only be used to stop somebody throwing a party on your field of potatoes.
    This March has been organised by the STOP THE WAR COALITION. From what I gather it was the Socialist Workers Party who organised the coach. I recognised one or two faces from about ten years ago when I was a member of the SWP myself. I remembered the whole thing about being on a coach and engaging people in conversation about the issues of the time, trying to awaken the consciousness of the working class. I am no longer a member, but the SWP was part of my own political awakening.

I went to sleep again, numbed by the monotony of the trip. When I awoke, this time, it was, because the chap beside me had settled into his seat and I got a warm thigh against mine. There was a petition coming down toward us. I signed it. The chap beside me had signed it first. I noticed he put ‘Dr’ somebody or the other. I put down ‘Baron’ on the spur of the moment. I also noticed how he had taken the time to read the petition beforehand; something I neglected to do. I don’t think I’ve ever fully read a petition in my life. It could have been something to get me thrown off the coach for snoring, and there I was happily putting my name to it. If it was, it didn’t work because I was still on it by the time we got to London; which is much the same effect as if it had have been a real petition. The only petition that has ever worked is the one which was made to encourage more petitions in the world; it was very successful as it happens; and probably the only one I haven’t signed.

By the time I got off the coach in London I felt like I’d had my knees in a vice for four hours, which indeed I had. Who is the short arse that designed the amount of leg room you get on certain coaches?  I’m a reasonable size. I’m not a distant relation of a giraffe, and yet no matter which way I put my legs, there was not enough room for me to sit comfortably. Douglas Bader would have had trouble fitting in there even if he’d whipped off his artificial legs.
    If you wish to duplicate the effect of the journey, just ask a midget to kick you on the patella for ten minutes and save yourself a trip.
    We set off toward Hyde Park where the Peace March was gathering. It was gratifying to see how many different colours and creeds had been sitting on the coach; all united in a desire for peace. Why can’t the world be like this? I thought, wistfully; the world as a cosmic coach, travelling into the unknown. It would be great, only with more leg room naturally and less people sitting on your butties of course; and if you were ever downhearted and said, ‘stop the world I want to get off’, we could just pull over to the side of the motorway.
    Just imagine, a world of peaceful coexistence, pissing together on the hard shoulder.
    Ten minutes after getting to Hyde Park, cutting a swathe through the good natured though sweating multitudes, the Manchester contingent had all pissed off and left me on my own. I’m sure it wasn’t deliberate; nothing to do with the petition; it just happened that way. We had gone in a bunch to find the toilets. They were so far away, if you didn’t want to go when you started out, you certainly did by the time you got there.

There was a great visual joke on the way, now I come to think of it. A security camera was looking at some graffiti on the wall.

The graffiti said:-

 ‘WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?’

    On the way back, I stopped to buy some bottled water. Thirstily, I unscrewed it, and tilted it to my dry lips. A chunk of frozen water clunked off my teeth. Bugger; it was frozen solid. I upended the bottle again and sucked. I sucked, and sucked until my head was on the verge of imploding but couldn’t get anything out.
    Disappointed, I turned around and found that I was on my own. Well not on my own exactly. I was on my own in the middle of thousands of people. The Manchester contingent had all moved on. In search of them, I immersed myself in the flow of people. Everybody was moving in the same direction, gradually adding themselves onto the end of the march.
    For a few minutes I kept an eye out for the people I came down with. I thought they would be easy enough to find in the crowd because of the peace flag. I soon realised that there were dozens of them. I gave it up as a bad idea and thought; actually, this is better than sticking with one bunch of people. I could move around freely and take my fill of the throng at my own pace.
    I walked in the midst of it all for a bit and then sat down in the grass by the side of the pavement. People moved past. Dust rose from sandals and shoes. It was an army on the march; streaming by with banners instead of rifles; no tanks but mothers pushing prams with babies; no roar of artillery but drums and voices chanting for peace. With the evocative whirring of crickets, and the warmth of the sun on my face, and the sound of shuffling shoes, I had a sudden urge of affection for the human race.
    All races, all colours, all religions from Christian to Muslim to atheist to Jewish were moving past to join the gathering mass of the march. If this truly was a democracy we would not have gone to war against Iraq. How many marched in favour of that? The number can be counted by Captain Hook on one…eh, hook; but we still did it. Sure there are millions who choose not to take part in the Peace March as opposed to the thousands who did, but surely the numbers who march are just as valid as the numbers who vote, compared to those who don’t. A non vote doesn’t count. Some apathetic tit who can’t be bothered to take part doesn’t count. This is the voice of the people, going hoarse, chanting, ‘stop the killing!’
    I’m not a good chanter myself. To be honest I find it irritating to be around and rather a distraction when I’m trying to think. I’m a closet librarian and always want to say ‘shussshhh’ but I expect chanting is not as distracting as the screams of people who have had limbs blown off.
    There were police everywhere.  As usual with these things they are not here to protect the people, but the law of the land itself and property.
    The slogans came thick and fast.
    One group passed with a large sweating lady who was walking backwards, facing her group, chanting ‘Hey hey…
    And the group would respond by bellowing, ‘Hey! Hey!
    ‘Bush imperialisms got to go!’
    ‘Bush imperialisms got to go!’
    After a few minutes of this it somehow got mixed up and the crowd then led with the chant and she followed with lung burstingly loud bellows. I couldn’t believe how loud she was. She had an enormous pair of bosoms and I wondered if they were in fact a pair of amplifiers she had managed to wedge into a reinforced bra; the sort of thing that stops cliffs from sliding into the sea.
    I was surprised to see some people who were plainly Jewish. I knew they were Jewish because nobody wears a furry cowboy hat in this heat for fun. They carried a sign which said:-
I liked it. It was catchy. Bit of a bastard to get on a teeshirt but it was good. A Police helicopter hovered overhead like a mosquito; sometimes near, sometimes far but always present and just as irritating in an intrusive, Big Brother way. I looked up at it, shielding my eyes from the sun and wondered if they could read what I had written. I was still tapping away on the laptop at this point as the march had not yet started.
    Lesley, my better half, had been worried about my bringing the laptop to London, over my shoulder in a bag.
    ‘What if the police stop you and confiscate it. Or a riot breaks out. You haven’t even paid for it yet,’ she said.
    I reassured her that I was fine carrying it around in my bag so long as I didn’t strap it to my chest and shout ‘Allah Ackbar!’ I had no intention of doing this. Suicide is the sincerest form of self loathing and I can’t see myself falling for the line about there being fifty virgins waiting in heaven for those who choose to blow themselves to death.
    Hmmm
    Maybe if the fifty offered to blow me…

Is there a chanting chart in certain circles? There were three girls, three Muslims by the look of them, who were rather good; not too loud at all and their voices were actually quite pleasing.
    They chanted:-   
    ‘Down! Down! U.S.A! How many kids did you kill today?’
    and
    ‘Bush! Bush! Terrorist! Tell me how did you strain your wrist?’
    Actually I made that last one up which is why I don’t lead the chanting. Whatever it takes to do it, the girls had it. If there is a chanting chart they would be shooting up it on Top of the Pops; miming no doubt but shooting up none the less; hopefully not in the toilets, like Pete Doherty.There was also a very English chant coming from someplace in the crowd. It went:-
    ‘Hey! Ho! Bush and Blair, have to go!’
    They were only short of saying, ‘If that’s alright with you old chap. Sorry about the noise but it just isn’t cricket you know.’ I chuckled away to myself at the idea of someone shouting ‘hey ho!’ The man to say that out loud was wearing pointy shoes with bells and wearing greet tights with a courgette stuffed down the front; (which reminds me, I better take Freddy Mercury’s biography back to the library). I waited to hear a chant with ‘hey nonny no’ but it didn’t happen.
    Instead, I closed up the laptop, put it in my bag, and walked along the length of the protesters. I took some photographs and made notes and sucked on my frozen water like a seal at its mother's teat.
    Wandering up and down, and in and out of the crowd, I felt very comfortable in myself. It was the warm glow of being human amongst humans. I could smell the perfume and sweat and aftershave and tobacco.

At long last the multitude moved forward, slowly to be sure, but forward nonetheless; for about two minutes; and then it stopped again. Then it started once more; two minutes; stopped. On it went. On and on, and I found it quite frustrating. What the hell was the hold up? Then I saw how the police had put up barriers on either side of the road to corral the marchers in, and then narrowed the barriers, causing bottlenecks. I was sure this was a deliberate policy to hold things up.
    The crowd waited politely as the police in their fluorescent yellow jackets looked on.
    And despite the noise, I felt a curious silence in myself. The noise washed over me. It was a most peculiar sensation; very peaceful and profound; like being in a temple or a church or a mosque or having one's eyes closed in a sunlit glade.
    This continued for a while, until I heard voices. It was a beautiful sound, and it entered the silent place within me. I looked to the side of the road, to the other side of the barrier. Women, old and young, and looking positively angelic were singing The Internationale. Some had their eyes closed, as if in prayer. Tears were in the eyes of others. The voices followed the slow shuffling stream of humanity. There was something about it that brought a lump to my throat. Rather than a hymn of defiance, it was a mournful lament for the times.
    More chanting from the crowd as sweat trickled down my face; it was so hot. I moved away from anyone who I saw with a megaphone. I always get the feeling that megaphones are a form of political karaoke. Gradually I threaded my way through the crowd, brushing arms, apologising, ducking under banners, weaving my way through for a couple of hundred yards, down into Grosvenor St. This leads to Grosvenor Square where the US Embassy sits, squat and smug, in the heart of London.
    In Grosvenor St. the procession had once more ground to a halt. Whistles and the drums and voices were all around me, bouncing off the walls of the large Georgian houses. Curtains twitched in the big windows and every door was locked. Metal barriers and ranks of police stopped any movement onto the pavement.
    Some of them had the look of school kids on a day out. Others though, had a look of contempt, hard faced and cold eyed.
    It doesn’t matter how nice a person the officer may be, the fact is, he is still the muscle of the State. Conscience may tell him that bombing civilians is wrong, but he would still implement the law if it forbade the people of this country from protesting. I’m not one to call the police pigs. I even passed over the chance of making a pun about, ‘when pigs fly’ when I was telling you about the police helicopter. By and large, I have a lot of respect for them for the job they do, day to day, but on occasions like this, you know which side they are on, and it doesn’t seem to be that of the people they are supposed to protect and serve.
    The slow march turned into a slow shuffle and then stopped again. We were still in Grosvenor St. As I stood there, I felt my frustration rise. This isn’t a march for peace, it was a fucking queue. It took about forty minutes to get perhaps 200 yards to the point where the embassy was on the right hand side of the road.
    By this time the march was so slow, it was like a death march, which in a way it was. As the crowd carried their banners past the embassy, parents were carrying the corpses of their children in Lebanon, while the British and American governments did nothing; scheming and fiddling like Nero, as Beirut burns.

 Just before the embassy, the police had arranged the barriers so that they narrowed again. The funnel served to hold up the march; to frustrate it; to take the impetus out it, and the sense of urgency with which people had gathered from all over the country. It would be put down as crowd control, but I realised at that moment that demonstrations like this, handled in this way, were not just a tool of the populace to impress a strength of feeling upon the government; they were also a way for the government to let people feel like their voices could, and possibly would be listened to.

But who would listen?

If Tony Blair can turn his back on the plight of the Lebanese, then there is no reason why he should listen to people in this country, peacefully walking a mile or so, on a Saturday afternoon.

Ahead of me a small woman with a big voice, berated a police officer. She accused him of selling his conscience for a little overtime. Pointing at the embassy down the road, she said, ‘those people have blood on their hands! And you’re protecting them. They’re accessory to murder! You should be arresting them, not looking at us!  Shame on you!’
    An old man who was as tall as she was short, tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention; possibly to say something about not resorting to verbal abuse. She looked bashful and was quiet for a few minutes. Though maybe the man had actually said, 'excuse me, but can you shout a bit louder. I can hardly hear you' because she started again shortly after.
    The policeman looked disinterested. He’d been told where to stand and that was what he did.
    And when we came abreast of the embassy and filed slowly past, we could see the extent of the police presence. There were at least fifty policemen in sight along the length of the road outside. Police dogs barked, or sat and panted in the heat. No faces appeared in the cold glass windows of the building.
    It looked empty; soulless and grey.

Why is it, I wonder, that we give more protection to a building, than to the civilian population of a foreign country? Our government stands by and refuses to call for a ceasefire, as does the government. It is a fact that the indiscriminate slaughter continues with the tacit approval of George Bush and his cult. He has enough political leverage to stop the Israeli offensive.
    Israeli civilians are also being killed; another sentence in which the word offensive can be used appropriately; as is the image of Israeli children signing the US made bombs that were, quite possibly, the ones which killed the children whose pictures were in the newspapers; being shoveled into bin bags because there were no more coffins; both sets of children are victims of the policies of adults;  the politics of hate and revenge.

I felt incredibly frustrated, walking with the crowd past the US Embassy. It suddenly felt like a rather futile gesture; a peaceful demonstration to be politely ignored by the decision makers. I felt cheated, somehow, which I found confusing. One of my heroes, and I use the word unashamedly, is Martin Luther King. Look what he and those who marched with him achieved through peaceful demonstration. Yet here I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to walk peacefully past this place. I want the crowd to take the embassy.’ I don’t want the police to be standing there watching this multi-limbed, vociferous wave of emotion walk by and away back to whence they came. I don’t want it to be ignored.
    I wanted some kind of reaction from the powers that be, other than that of the mill owner looking at the faces of the poor, pressed against his window. I was confused. I believe in peaceful demonstration and yet, in my heart I was angry.
    I felt the need to shout; to smash things in my anger; to not be ignored; to be a threat to the people who allow the murder of civilians just for the convenience of foreign policy.

The Israeli offensive was originally portrayed as an attempt to recover two soldiers captured by Hezbollah. The fact that Israel holds hundreds of Hezbollah members and sympathizers prisoner is a powerful negotiating chip. The soldiers could have been released through negotiation, as has been done in the past. The thought that this would only encourage more kidnappings is wrong. Israel has negotiated and carried out prisoner exchanges in the past, and immediately after this happened there was a period of relative calm between the various factions. Given the choice of negotiation, Israel chose negation; negation of the value of human life; terror over talk; the destruction of the infrastructure of Lebanon rather than any compromise. Israel has not been forced into this war. It chose to do this over other options and has gone on a killing spree. Civilians in Israel are being killed by missiles launched by Hezbollah. This is no less a tragedy than the deaths of the Lebanese. However, Hezbollah only began launching missiles at Israel in response to the ground and air assault launched into Lebanon on the pretext of recovering the two Israeli soldiers.

Violence leads to violence unless there is somebody with enough moral integrity to break the circuit; to pay for it with their own life if need be. This may be the violence of poverty or it may be the subtle violence of acquiescence to a corrupt system. Martin Luther King was such a man. He led a campaign of non-violence and paid for it with his life; but it worked; the evil of institutionalized racism began to crumble.
    Non violence was the key to success.
    Then, as I watched the dogs straining at the leash, and the police observing us, and heard the helicopter overhead, I had a sudden realization. The success of the civil rights movement in America was not successful solely because it was primarily non-violent. It was successful because it peacefully went up against the injustice of certain laws in America; this in itself, provoked violence from the State. It was this violent reaction that led to those laws being changed. It was the fact that the authorities bared their teeth to defend the morally indefensible that made the difference. How could it claim to be civilized and yet defend laws which were designed to enshrine and perpetuate the suffering of others? The answer is, it couldn’t. It was like a miser that puts his hand into his pocket because people are watching.
    The law itself isn’t an ass; but people who adhere to the letter of the law are, when that law allows an elected government to stand by and allow civilians to be murdered because the Prime Minister has turned us into an American colony. Has it come to the point where the only reason we have a general election, is to decide who will be the new mouthpiece for George Bush and American foreign policy? Tony Blair should be speaking for us, not for Dubya. Dubya isn’t here with a megaphone, not that he would know which end to speak into. We are the ones who are trying to be heard, calling for a ceasefire. In my opinion, walking past the embassy was a waste of time. We should have been marching to the house that Tony Blair lives in, knocking on the door, and sitting on his sofa until the fucker agreed he is, for better or worse, our Prime Minister, God help us, and not the spokesman for Bush. We want him to call for a ceasefire. And before you say, the ‘we’ in question does not represent everybody in this country, well tell me where the people who want the killing in the Middle East to continue, are marching to make their views known, and I’ll pop along and have a look at the closest thing we have ever had to the Nuremburg rally in this country. Blair may try to have us removed, under the law of trespass. But if that is a law that is sacrosanct surely the one about ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ holds a little more weight with Tony Blair the Christian. Though perhaps, as a barrister, Tony Blair can argue that, technically speaking, the Ten Commandments don’t forbid you from standing by and doing nothing while somebody else indulges in a little slaughter.
    Tony Blair has to be answerable to us. The laws which protect him and insulate him from us and the repercussions of his actions are unjust if they make him unaccountable to the people he is supposed to represent. Essentially they mean he can lie, take us into an unjust war, ignore our demands for a ceasefire, and then retire with a nice pension and a job for life on the American lecture circuit.
    I admit, it might seem a little unrealistic for ten thousand of us to fit into his kitchen and have a severe word with him over a cup of tea and a packet of Hobnobs, but how do we make him answerable to us?
    Maybe we should head down to the Houses of Parliament, thousands of people, and not just wait outside like tourists, but go inside, occupy the building. We could make ourselves useful and do a spot of dusting; anything; so long as it is peaceful. We could bring the place to a halt and stop anything being done… well, unless the MPs inside are on their annual three months holiday entitlement while the rest of us suckers are slogging our guts out to pay for it.

At the end of the embassy, standing on a low wall, there was a police camera unit. It continually filmed the crowd. This was something they used to do, illegally, during the marches to stop the ‘The Criminal Justice Bill’ from being implemented. They would get on the coaches of the protestors and walk down the length of it taking a photo of everybody; a form of intimidation and a presumption of guilt on the part of the police.
    ‘How would you feel if it was your mother? How would you feel if it was your sister? How would you feel if it was your daughter who was running from the bombs of the Israelis?’
    The cameras continue to roll.
    The killing goes on.
    Tony Blair goes on holiday.
  Blood flows into the gutter, and somewhere down there, something dark smiles, knowing it will go on.
    It waits on the postcard from Tony
    Weather is lovely in Barbados
    Cherie sends her love.
    Wish you were here.
    God bless and see you soon
    Tony…

Just in case there is any mistake, I really do believe in peaceful protest. But I also believe protest is not effective unless it has the moral courage to step outside the law, even if it is only the law of trespass. If a protest march of 100,000 is not willing to step on the toes of the one person it needs to listen to it, then why should that person listen?
    Shakespeare once said, ‘now is the winter of our discontent.’
    I am saying a Peace march of one hundred thousand which can be ignored is nothing more than a day out in London. It is a lot of pedestrians all walking the same way at the same time but it will make no difference to Tony Blair, or to George Bush.
    I am saying, without breaking the law, peacefully, with the creed of non-violence as the guiding light, it is closer to the truth to say the following:
    Now, is the whimper of our discontent.
    I can't help but get the feeling that if Tony Blair, and George Bush are condemned for doing nothing, what will the judgement of history be for those of us who have not done enough...?


Geetan
August 10th
2006

Peace be upon you