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For several years there has been a group of people from the other side of town showing up on Tacoma’s beautiful Ruston Way waterfront once a week, setting out and holding signs that show how little they know about the world we live in.

They’re with a group that calls itself ‘United for Peace, Pierce County’. Normally there are between one and three of them out there, but they’ve had as many as eight. Once they even flew a United Nations flag. I wanted to burn it but that would have been vandalism. Guess I’ll have to buy my own. I wonder if I need a permit for that.

The group is affiliated with a national BDS, anti-war group but with their swelling numbers I’m guessing they don’t get a lot of interaction.

So over the years we’ve had many opportunities to discuss relevant issues. Here are some highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspecitive).

• When they first started showing up they often claimed that they were representing the soldiers and their families. So I asked one of them exactly how many soldiers they had spoken with. You’ll never guess the answer. That’s right. None. So I asked how many of their parents they had spoken with. The answer surprised me. They had spoken with one couple who had a son in the military. Can you imagine? Parents who didn’t approve of their son’s life decisions.

• Once, as I walked by, one of them asked me if I was still supporting the terrorists. Naturally, I about took his head off (verbally, of course, I’m against violence unless it’s to stop violence). I tried to explain that it was his antics that were lending aid and comfort to our enemies. But as soon as the facts started coming out in the conversation he put his headphones on and tried to ignore me.
• When he was holding a sign that said, “Who would Jesus bomb”, I figured it was a good time to mention that I have a Bachelor’s degree in Christian Theology. I asked the man if he had ever read the Bible. He said he read parts of it. Asked if he’d read the parts in the Old testament where the Lord ordered Israel to kill every man, woman and child in a village, he said he had heard about those parts. I went on to explain that Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world so his disciples wouldn’t fight. I tried to explain the fact that Jesus was apolitical, but by then the headphones were back.
• Then there was the time that one of them said, “You would have a hard time proving that al-Qaeda actually exists.” There was only one proper response to that. I asked him if his hat was made of tinfoil.
• We’ve had discussions about several of the signs they like to hold up. It’s pretty easy since every one of their signs is either a blatent lie or a misrepresentation of the facts. It’s also interesting to ask if they’re aware of all of the schools, hospitals and utilities that our troops have rebuilt.
• There have also been numerous discussion about the ‘Bush lied’ rant. There’s little desire for the facts in discussions like that. Generally the conversations decays to “well, I don’t know where you get your information”.
• I’ve tried to explain many times that we’ve been making progress all along rebuilding schools, hospitals, utilities, etc. That in most parts of the country our troops are greated as liberators. That they’ve had successful elections that even anti-American foreign observers said were fair and accurate. That the surge is working. But they still put up the sign calling Iraq a quagmire.
• We only ever agreed on one thing. The Saudis are not our friends. Suprised me that we could agree on anything, but there you have it.

I could go on, but you get the point. What I’ve found is that reason fails with these people. They’ve made up their minds and facts seem unimportant to them. They are persistent. Persistently annoying. If they weren’t so insignificant, I’d suggest a counter-protest. My sign would say, “If you believed any of that, you probably wear a tinfoil hat.”

Here are some pics for you to ‘enjoy’.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:31 am and is filed under Military, Puget Sound. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.