Dare I argue with Molly Ivins after her death?

In her January 11 column Ivins said, "The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. . . . How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue."

The war is no mistake, as Ivins implies. Rather, it's part of a centuries-old American tradition of conquering peoples (including those on this continent) and stealing their resources so wealthy corporations and individuals could become richer. (Don't take it from me: read A People's History of the United States and Hegemony or Survival:  America's Quest for Global Domination.) This war is deliberate and systemic. It's an act of foreign policy. Starting and conducting the war has everything to do with furthering the power elite, and ending it has everything to do with exercising the power of the people.

Lawmakers exist to carry out the will of huge corporations, and those corporations are the real governors of the United States (poclad.org, wilpf.org).It perplexes me that this last truth hasn't seemed to take hold in people's minds in such a way as to guide them toward effective activism to stop the war and other injustices. The result of this failure to recognize the facts is near-futile, self-deceiving activity to stop the war by appealing to congresspeople for help. You can write, e-mail, call, fax and attempt to persuade them in person until the buffalo roam in Brooklyn. I doubt whether any congressperson, given a choice between an e-mail petition with 400,000 signatures for one policy and $400,000 from an industry lobbyist for another, will vote according to the former. Industry lobbyists and contractors clog the halls of Congress, and the government-industry revolving doors spin faster than the unaided eye can see.

Ivins ended her January 11 column by saying, "And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on January 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

Here Ivins and I concur. What stopping the war needs is collective resistance—creative, relentless and nonviolent, from the grassroots. It's happening, though you wouldn't know it from consulting the corporate media. A few examples:

• In  Seattle on January 27, over 2,500 people shut down a military recruiting center. With members of Iraq Veterans  Against the War leading a march from a largely working-class and heavily recruited neighborhood, the crowd chanted, "You gotta resist, don't enlist!"

 •  At the DC peace march that same day, thousands of labor union members, with coordination by U.S. Labor  Against the War, participated to oppose the war. Unions, labor councils and individual unionists joined in calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

• On Sunday,  February 4, supporters from around the country gathered to demonstrate their support for Lt. Ehren Watada the day before his court martial for refusing to serve in Iraq.

• On Superbowl Sunday in Miama, Veterans for Peace and Democracy for  America hired a plane to fly for two hours over the Superbowl area with a banner proclaiming, “Bring the Troops Home Now!"

• The Occupation Project, a large coalition of peace organizations, called for sit-ins, beginning the first week of February, in every legislator's local office until those lawmakers pledged to vote against additional war funding. Among the actions on February 5, four people were arrested for holding a funeral service in the Chicago office of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), another four were arrested in the Chicago office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) while reading aloud the names of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers killed in the war, and 10 people sat down and were arrested in the Washington, D.C., office of Senator John McCain (R-AZ).

In thinking toward the future beyond the war, Ivins's and my views might diverge again. If we want to stop fighting injustice in an endless series of reactive "fire fights" and hopeless reforms, the people of this nation will have to eliminate the source of the problems, corporate governance, for it sets the endless "fires." We need to start governing ourselves from the neighborhood on up, as historian Howard Zinn suggests. Ivins might not agree at first, but I hope she'd give the idea a hearing.

Linda Greene is an activist and writer in Bloomington, Indiana.

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Linda Greene

7487 N. John Young Rd.

Unionville, IN 47468