Cindy Sheehan demonstration, crawford texas, august 2005, by gene walker
From MemoryArchive
Who: Gene Walker What: Cindy Sheehan Demonstration When: August 2005 Where: Crawford, TX
The last trip I took to Austin was in August. I was taking a vacation and my girlfriend, Jamie, and my buddy Josh were coming down with me. I lived with josh in austin so he was just getting a ride back home. He had been sleeping on my couch for 6 weeks after getting fired by the a [WP:YMCA|YMCA]] summercamp in Michigan. Its cool though because he kept himself busy by getting a job as a carney at the Wisconsin State Fair cooking steak sandwiches and stealing 20lb. slabs of steak for us to grill [on the grills we don't have.]
we left on August 21 around 2:30 in the afternoon and drove through the night. we were in oaklahoma by sunrise. by 2pm on the the 22nd we had reached waco, Tx. Josh had been going on and on about how we had to go see the Cindy Sheehan protest in Crawford. I had already been driving 24 hours and was very tired but agreed to go anyway.
Once we got out to Crawford I hardly recognized it. there were protesters everywhere; it struck me how well they were organized. Their headquarters was the Peace House. My friend brandon jarvis used to live in this house. Josh was very excited by this point and volunteered us all to help anyway we could. this meant going out to the borders of president bush's property to a couple of camps that had been set up on land that people had volunteered for the cause.
It was about a 15 minute ride down to these two camps, dubbed: base 1 and the Freedom Tent. five minutes after we had been driving we came across a tree that had fallen into the road. The other 12 people in the van besides myself, jamie, and josh all thought that someone had cut it down to sabotage the protests because Joan_Baez was playing that day, though josh was beginning to agree with them by the time we reached the first camp.
the camp was not really a camp. people had put up tents on the sides of the road at an intersection where three roads came together. along the roads before and after the camp, someone had placed a cross for every soldier who had died in the Iraq war, along with a picture of that soldier. There were a lot of crosses. Maybe it was just that we had to drive slow on the dirt roads but those crosses seemed to just keep coming. its incredible really, how a point is driven home with a physical display of the numbers we hear on the news everynight. The soldiers pictures were laminated. Funny i think, since its not likely to rain in August in Texas.
After a brief stop at this camp to let people out we continued to the second camp. This camp was considerably larger than the first and much more organized. The freedom tent was quite a large tent actually, probably used before this to hold evangelical revivals. There were probably a thousand people at this camp and a woman was on stage singing a protest song to the CEOs of the oil companies, who i'm sure were listing in rapt attention. ha.
There wasn't much going on though and most people were just sitting under the tent to escape the unbearable August heat. I started talking to this one guy who had come from alaska and had brought an enormous United States flag that he had taken to a bunch of different protests along the way. he had gotten as many people from as many protests to sign the flag.
I talked to another woman who had lost her son in the war. She showed me his picture. She kept it in a locket around her neck. When I asked her what i thought was going to be accomplished by the protests she started crying. She said that she didn't think anything was going to get done because "the president is just so ... stubborn." after that she started sobbing uncontrollably. i reached out to comfort her and she fell into my chest sobbing. what could i tell her? that it would be ok. that her son died for a just cause. that he died righting a wrong. no. i couldn't tell her that so i stood there with her and shared her grief and we cried.
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