February 4, 2003
A Longtime Antiwar Activist, Escalating the Peace
By CHRIS HEDGES
ESLIE CAGAN is willing to count many things. She will count the billions the United States will spend if it goes to war in Iraq. She will count the dead. She will count the oil companies that line up for the spoils. She will count the nations that turn their backs on this country in anger. And she will, on Feb. 15, count the demonstrators who are to gather in Manhattan and three dozen cities around the globe to rally to stop the war. She will count all this. She is counting now.
But Ms. Cagan will not count down the days until a war. She is an apostate, an unbeliever, a heretic to those who preach the gospel of glory and power and empire. They count one way. She counts another.
"This may be our last chance to stop the war," she said. "If it starts, it will be much harder to end. If marches do not work, we will escalate. We will have to do things to disrupt the normal flow of life in this country. There will have to be more civil disobedience. If bombs are being dropped on other people in our name and with our tax dollars, we will do what we can to make sure these bombs do not get there."
Ms. Cagan, 55, is the co-chairwoman of United for Peace and Justice, the umbrella group that is organizing the protests. The city has refused to grant her a parade and rally permit for more than 10,000 people. She and other coalition representatives have scheduled a second meeting with the Police Department and the city's corporation counsel today.
"If we do not get a parade and rally permit for over 100,000, we will go to court," she said.
Ms. Cagan, in a zippered sweatshirt and baggy jeans, sat in a small corner cubicle set up in space donated by the Local 1199/S.E.I.U health and hospital workers' union on 42nd Street. Her graying hair was chopped and cut in what looked like a studied snub of hair stylists. The rows of fluorescent lights overhead were turned off "because it gives people headaches." And in the gloomy half light of the room, her face was lit up by the backlight of her Apple computer.
She has kept ideological leanings out of the protest. The fliers being distributed are simple and direct, with the slogan "The World Says No to War," along with a list of cities from Copenhagen to Rome that will also see protests on that date. The first call for demonstrations on Feb. 15 was issued by the European Social Forum.
She is one of the grandes dames of the country's progressive movement. As a student at New York University in 1968, she did not drop out because that would have made it "harder to organize on campus." She graduated with a degree in art history to become a professional organizer, emerging as a national figure in the antiwar movement.
But unlike others who cleaned themselves up, got a conventional job and looked back on protest as one of the dalliances of youth, she kept at it. She alternated between managing independent, left-wing political campaigns, like Mel King's Congressional run in Boston, to working in the lesbian-gay rights movement, the antinuclear movement and the campaign to normalize relations with Cuba.
"I am not a pacifist," she said. "I am a scaredy-cat. I can't imagine going up against the military might that we can unleash on other countries. But I believe people have a right to self-defense. I hope that if I had been in the Spanish Civil War I would have found the courage to fight back."
HER organizational skills are prodigious. Young women and men leaned into her cubicle every few minutes to get checks signed, confirm meeting times and pass on messages. Outside her office, a group of activists were seated in a semicircle, backpacks strewn across the floor and buttons on their shirts reading "No Blood for Oil," passionately debating tactics. On the wall were sheets of white paper with the names of speakers who have agreed to address the demonstrators in Central Park after the march, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Julian Bond, Patti Smith and poets from "Def Poetry Jam."
There are some 300 volunteer groups currently passing out hundreds of thousands of fliers across the city in languages from Creole to Arabic to Chinese. If they are as warmly embraced as Ms. Cagan insists they are, her math may soon mean a lot.
"The difference between this antiwar protest movement and the Vietnam antiwar movement is that we have a huge grass-roots campaign before the war has even begun," she said. "Our volunteers on the subway are approached by strangers requesting leaflets."
Life as an activist is not easy. The pay is meager, the job security poor and the stress, especially given the effort to hold together fractious and opinionated groups, tremendous.
At the end of the day, which can run quite late, she takes the subway to the Brooklyn home of her partner, Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, and does a most unactivistlike thing. She watches television, and not public television.
"After trying to save the world from war and holocaust I need a distraction," she said. "I like `Law and Order.' I like `E.R.' I like all those shows. I watch `Judging Amy.' I watch New York 1, CNN and MSNBC. It is what everyone else watches. And while I may be an activist, I have to speak the same language, to see what everyone else sees. I have to be able to talk to people."
