Stop Sununu. Stop the War.

In coordination with several events across the country, New Hampshire peace and justice groups organized a “TAKE A STAND AGAINST THE WAR IN IRAQ” by focusing on telling Sen. Sununu to stop supporting President Bush and to start supporting the troop. Sen. Sununu is up for re-election next year and has been identified as vulnerable, so progressive groups around the country and are focusing on him. The event on Tuesday was to assemble in front of Sen. Sununu’s office in Manchester, NH, and then march down to the Veterans Memorial Park on Elm St. for a rally from 5.00pm to 7.00pm.

I had decided to go along with the Nashua Peace Group contingent. I fully expected it to be like the Washington DC rally I had participated in on Jan 27th (some pictures are at http://www.flickr.com/gp/26012104@N00/f25503).

We arrived at the park at 4.45pm, to find it pretty much empty. We then joined in with the marchers coming down from Sen. Sununu’s office, all of 60 people. Atleast they were shouting slogans which was nice. After the march reached the park the crowd swelled a little – to a grand total of about 220 people. I was really disappointed and felt almost let-down. This was nothing – where were the people? Why weren’t all the people opposing the war out here? Out here were the usual suspects – people from nhpriorities.org, from nhpeaceaction.org, from code pink, Americans against Escalation of the War, folks we see at other similar events a handful of folks from each group. Where was the outrage from others ????

The only interesting event was the prescense of some presidential candidate campaign staff/volunteers. A girl on Obama’s staff (she has visited us at a Nashua Peace Group meeting) participated in the march and then worked on collecting signatures at the rally. Bill Richardson had several folks there, all of them clearly believing in peace, and also drumming up support for the Governer. Kucinich’s folks were there, no surprise there. And some Biden folks were there. At this stage of the campaign the less well-known candidates are trying to get as many people sign up on their lists as possible, so that they can be contacted and invited when the candidate is in the area. The goal is to get the voters to come to meet the candidate.