Last Thursday, the Granny Peace Brigade went to trial in a Manhattan Criminal Court. Eighteen anti-war protesting grannies have been charged with 2 counts of disorderly conduct each following an October protest at the recruiting station in Times Square. Their lawyer is civil rights advocate and failed NY Public Advocate candidate Norman Siegel, who has represented many other related free speech cases, notably some from the RNC convention. The grannies, aged 50 - 91, could be fined $250 and sent to jail for 15 days if found guilty. They want this to go all the way and don’t want to accept fines and community service, per Kristen Lombardi’s Village Voice article.

You’ve got to love the grannies, who came to court with canes, t-shirts (e.g. “We will not be silent”) and about 75 supporters. They, and their fellow grandmothers around the country, have been staging similar, weekly protests at recruiting stations.

As Lombardi points out in her piece, the idea of "grandma" resonates:

"Grandmother struck me as a powerful word," [Grandmothers Against War founder Joan Wile] says, thinking that someone seen as wise, nurturing, and loving could appeal to people's consciences like no one else. So, as Wile explains, "I thought that to see grandmothers on the street would impress people with the gravity of the situation."

She’s right. The fact that a 91-year-old legally blind grandmother in need of two canes (Marie Runyon) would take the time to protest the war seems to carry more weight than 1,000 20-somethings marching against the war. I think the grandmothers are fantastic, but it makes me sad in some ways that younger people don’t carry that same gravity when they protest and, IMHO, that protest and street theatre (particularly involving young people) is easily ridiculed or diminished these days.

Perhaps the gravity doesn’t exist for younger people because a draft hasn’t made them random victims of this particular war. Lombardi’s article takes this on:

These grandmothers may be filling a void in the anti-war movement. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of U.S. history at New York University, notes that campuses have yet to become the epicenter of the anti-war scene as they did during the Vietnam War. One reason is obvious. "The draft created an imminent and urgent reason for young people to protest the Vietnam War," Zimmerman says. Most of his students oppose the war, he says, but none of them are in danger of being sent to Iraq or even know people who are there now.

Even though I’ve been down on Kerry (and was in my last post), he does have something important to say about dissent in his Boston Globe op-ed. So, go grannies, for your peaceful protest and for pushing the case to court for that extra media coverage. We’ve got to find our way to a balance in which dissent and risk-taking are not shot down as unpatriotic at every turn, and I think our grannies have the cachet to bring back a little significance to the act of protest.