By Farah Stockman
Boston GlobeOctober 14, 2002
As Congress prepared to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq last week, college campuses were quiet and just a few dozen peace demonstrators stood with signs outside Senator John Kerry's Boston office.
Yet on Amy Hendrickson's computer, a movement was brewing. ''I get 600 e-mails a day,'' said Hendrickson, a Brookline software consultant who works from home. ''These days, I spend 10 to 12 hours a day on the computer.''
When tens of thousands of people came out on Oct. 6 to protest US policy on Iraq, the seeds of action had been sown not on college campuses, which had their own, much smaller protests last Monday, but on the computer desktops of people like Hendrickson, 58. From her living room, she helped organize simultaneous protests in 14 countries, including Japan, Bangladesh, Germany, Austria, Australia, India, and Nepal.
This year, for the first time since the advent of the Internet, Americans are engaging in public debate about whether to go to war, and a great deal of the opposition has coalesced online. The ease of electronic communication allows like-minded people to sign petitions and coordinate protests far more easily than they could in the 1960s, or even a decade ago during the Gulf War. But it also raises a question: Can a movement with no physical center and no pen-and-ink signatures really have a political impact?
''The Internet makes the potential for protest much more vast, but at the same time much more elusive,'' said Timothy McCarthy, a faculty activist at Harvard University who teaches in the history and literature department. ''You can sign an e-mail protest, but you can't engage in civil disobedience on the Internet.''
Hendrickson's sons were young when the Vietnam War broke out in the 1960s, so she watched the peace protests from afar and did not become an activist herself. But earlier this year, she became part of an e-mail group discussing newspaper articles about the war on terrorism. The articles she read made her increasingly alarmed with the Bush administration's policies, so she signed her name on Internet petitions and wrote peace groups offering her help.
She got a message back from Not In Our Name, a New York-based peace group that asked her to get the word out in Boston about the Oct. 6 protest.
Not In Our Name is, in many ways, typical of the groups protesting the White House stance on Iraq. Formed eight months ago by veteran peace activists worried about the direction the war on terror was taking, it gained sudden momentum when the Bush administration turned its attention to Saddam Hussein. The group picked up celebrity endorsements from actress Susan Sarandon, radio emcee Casey Kasem, hip-hop musician Mos Def, playwright Tony Kushner, and authors Alice Walker and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, who signed a call to resist the government's policy of ''military coercion'' and published it in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times.
Hendrickson joined the movement alone, in a living room cluttered with Mexican tapestries, wind chimes, origami peace cranes, and foot-high stacks of books on computer programs.
On her own, she decided to send more than 1,000 e-mails to peace groups she found on the Internet around the world, inviting them to demonstrate alongside protesters in the United States by holding protests outside US embassies at noon. People at Not In Our Name discouraged her, Hendrickson said, saying the group wanted to focus on Americans.
But she pressed on anyway, with e-mails that suggested slogans and possible demands on the US government, as well as a copy of Not In Our Name's resistance pledge, which is translated into 12 languages on the group's Web site. ''Help launch the first World Wide Peace Demonstration!'' she wrote, calling on them to ''protest current US policies.''
A few days later, the first message came back, from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
''They said, `We'll be demonstrating with you,''' she said. ''That first [e-mail response] was a hell of a kick.''
Next came a missive from Nepal. ''Dear Peacefriends,'' it read. Then Manila (''Dear comrades'') and Berlin (''Hi peace-loving Americans!'') and ''Hello from Helsinki, Finland.''
In all, people in more than 14 cities wrote back that, in groups large and small, they had demonstrated. Some sent e-mail pictures to prove it.
''Part of the promise of the Net is that people can communicate unmediated,'' Hendrickson said. ''It's people to people, not from one government to the other.''
Boston did not host a protest of its own. Hendrickson handed out thousands of flyers inviting Bostonians to the rally in New York and she helped gather a group of about 40 people to travel to New York, where an estimated 10,000 people crowded Central Park in what is believed to be the largest-yet protest against military action in Iraq. At least 20,000 more demonstrated in Los Angles, San Francisco, and Seattle, according to Not In Our Name and newspaper estimates. And thousands of others gathered in smaller cities across the country, using kits downloaded from Not In Our Name's Web site.
Several petitions opposing the war are also circulating, including an open letter on www.noattackiraq.org, signed by more than 19,000 faculty and students around the United States, and a peace pledge by American Friends Service Committee that has gathered 50,000 signatures.
In the last week, Kerry's office says, it has received more than 20,000 e-mails about Iraq - most of them against US military action, said Kyle Sullivan, a spokesman for the senator. Kerry went the other way - deciding to vote in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of force.
For Hendrickson, who rarely travels but makes her living sending tech support e-mails to strangers worldwide, there is nothing strange about engineering a peace movement from her Hotmail account with people who will never meet each other.
''I don't think it's different from any political movement,'' she said. ''You're trying to reach out to people who share the same point of view.''
Apart from Hendrickson's efforts, bizarre, unconfirmable e-mails are still rolling in: Scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica said they took the pledge, and even 100 people in Phnom Penh in Cambodia took it.
"We think they are Americans living there,'' said Mary Lou Greenberg, a volunteer at Not In Our Name's New York headquarters who was trying to tally the total number of participants. ''We don't know for sure."
More Information on NGOs
More Information on Advocacy Methods for NGOs
More Information on Networking
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
