It's a Friday afternoon at Farragut Square, a genteel park just a few
blocks from the White House in downtown Washington. Office workers,
tourists and the occasional homeless person soak up the afternoon sun on
one of the first pleasant days of spring. In other words, it's the
perfect time for a dance party.
At 3pm sharp a mobile sound system
is rolled in to the park, and Michael Jackson's Don't Stop 'Til You Get
Enough kicks off the festivities. Scattered groups of students and
young people, some of them twirling hoola hoops, one dressed in a
gorilla outfit, take to the impromptu dance floor. When Lady Gaga's
chart-topper Just Dance comes on, the crowd goes wild. When the DJ
follows this up with Bad Romance, also by Lady Gaga, the students let
out a roar, and some hoist up signs that read: "Drop tuition, not
bombs", "Stop cheating our future", "Fund Our Future: War is Bad
Romance".
"We're the generation coming up now, sending our
friends off to war. Our peers are the ones coming back with PTSD,"
19-year old Zora Gussow tells me, a student who travelled down to
Washington with a group from Rochester, NY to take part in this Funk
the War action, organised by the Washington chapter of Students for a
Democratic Society. "I had vague hopes that Obama would represent a
change, but if he's going to be barely any better than Bush, he's going
to lose a lot of young people."
The anti-war dance party on 19 March, attended by hundreds of
students, coincided with the seven-year anniversary of the US invasion
of Iraq, and marked more than nine years of US
and Nato occupation in Afghanistan. It's an inauspicious milestone.
According to the National Priorities Project's "total cost" counter, the
price tag for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now clock in at almost a trillion dollars. The date
also falls soon after another round of recent reports about the role of American
special operations forces in the massacre of Afghan civilians, and
revelations that last year's suicide rate for men
aged 18-29 in the armed forces hit a record high.
To talk
to this generation of young people is to find a group of people whose
entire adolescence and early adulthood coincide with protracted US
involvement in multiple wars and occupations in the Middle East. The
Forever War (a phrase coined by New York Times reporter Dexter
Filkins) takes its toll on the society as a whole, but young people
bear the brunt. This is a generation battered by soaring
youth unemployment rates, spiralling
tuition costs at public and private universities thanks to the
recession and state budget crises, and a future of generally diminished
expectations. Many of those out on the streets this past Friday were
involved in the Obama campaign in some shape or form, and almost all of
them cast their first vote in a presidential election for him. The
students I talked to on Friday now say they're feeling pretty jilted.
"We knocked on doors, we helped put him in office. He told us he'd
create more green jobs, not ship more young people off to war," says
Brian Menifee, a 20-year-old mechanical engineering student at Howard
University.
Brian remembers election night in Washington when
Obama's win was announced and people swept out of houses and bars to
dance in the streets, and strangers hugged each other on the sidewalk.
Now Brian is dancing on the street with a suit and tie, and a Santa hat,
where the Funk the War moveable dance party has made a pit stop in
front of the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, a
conservative thinktank that helped make the case for the invasion of
Iraq. "I think we learned not to put all our eggs in one basket. After
these old heads retire this is going to be our country. We have to start
making our demands now."
"This isn't much different than we used
to do in the early days," Mack Bica, a member of Veterans for Peace tells me
(and seemingly one of the few people over 30 in the crowd). "These wars
drag on and on, and it's these kids who are getting screwed the most."
Another
woman watches the festive protest from the sidelines with
amusement. "I'm not sure what they're out here for, but they've got a
nice little beat going on."
