Peace Activists Find a Gung-Ho America a Hard Nut to Crack

Jo Seidita, a somewhat rumpled grandmother who wears wire-rim glasses, began to understand the anguish of Iraqi mothers while soothing the hurts of her 14-month-old granddaughter.

When the child falls and skins a knee, Seidita said, she kisses away the tears.

What good are mere kisses, she asked this past week’s San Fernando Valley Peace Coalition gathering, when an Iraqi child’s injured leg is amputated without anesthesia because none is available? How must it feel to know that the blood transfusion your injured child needs to stay alive may kill him, but cannot be tested?

How can one go on after seeing the charred bodies of children stacked on the street?

“How can any mother or grandmother react to this and stay calm?” she asked, a day after hundreds of women and children were reportedly killed by allied bombs. “Why are we not clamoring and screaming and shouting and raging that this cannot go on in a civilized society?”

Some are. But in the view of many who met at the “Onion,” the domed home of the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society, the numbers are pitifully few. And several complained that the broadcast media, in particular, are ignoring their message.

“Waging peace,” as the coalition’s members term it, involves making endless copies of manifestoes, flyers and news clippings. There are committees to join, “actions” to participate in, letters to write and petitions to sign.

The coalition is organizing a system that refers military families with problems to social help agencies, a computer network for getting messages to soldiers and a system to monitor the way the print and broadcast media report the war. The coalition’s draft counseling service--laying the groundwork for an eventuality they fear--is up and running and also needs volunteers.

Such efforts, several said, are frustrating when the country seems to be rallying behind what, for the U.S.-led coalition at least, has so far been a relatively antiseptic war.

“We meet and have vigils and we talk and no one knows we’re here,” said one of the 45 activists.

“The movement is growing stronger all over the country” but no one would know it from watching television or reading newspapers, said Javier, a pale, studious young man with a peace symbol hanging from his neck who wore his thin hair in a ponytail down his back.

Another activist said he telephones TV stations to protest whenever he hears anything he considers militaristic. The reactions, he said, range from rude to patronizing.

Robert Blume, a Los Angeles water treatment worker, rubber-stamps his outgoing mail with the words “Pray for Peace. Speak the Truth” or “Support the Troops. Bring Them Home.” Now he is urging people to send letters asking for the resignations of the members of Congress who voted to authorize the use of force in the Gulf. The campaign was “born out of the frustration” of not being heard, he said.

“We have to get visible, obviously,” said Richard Potter, a furloughed middle-aged auto worker at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys who wore tattered aqua corduroys and a shirt adorned with purple flowers. He said he wants to organize a weekly Sunday afternoon peace rally in the Valley, even if only a handful are willing to show up.

“This is a war. I’m ready to do as much as I can. It’s no time to be surfing at the beach.”

Despite such commitment, few spoke loudly. The exchanges were polite, earnest. Those at the gathering waited their turn, and then one after the other quietly proposed detailed strategies for scouring every grain of militarism from the nation’s political system.

Many are white-haired veterans of past protests who bristle with a very present anger.

“We’re all here because we are reacting to this war. . . . but our country’s been at war for half a century,” said Nick Seidita, Jo’s husband. “We always seem to be reacting to our country’s acts of war, one after the other.”

Seidita said he wants peace-minded voters to require politicians for national office to take a peace pledge. He wants candidates to pledge to halt all U.S. military intervention, to agree to wage war only if U.S. territory is attacked and to cut military spending by 50% in five years.

Jo Seidita said the group had decided not to hold regular meetings, but since the start of the war, has met weekly anyway. For some, the work of organization is balm on wounds opened by sympathetically feeling the pain of distant foes. Others come to talk. And all hope each time they come that they are attending for the next-to-last time.

“If the war stops next Monday,” said Jo Seidita, facetiously, “come anyway and we will have champagne.”

Before such a celebration, however, more Iraqis and more allied soldiers will die. And the activists figure that means that the work of waging peace must continue.

Yousefe Haddad, an accountant who heads the Jordanian American Assn. in the Valley, paused when he stepped to the microphone.

“I always try to come across as a strong man and hide my emotions,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Today . . . when on the news I saw these children and women killed the way they were killed, it made me sick. And what makes me even more sick to my stomach were the excuses for why this happened and this made my commitment to the peace movement even stronger.”