On February 16, 2003, my wife and I took our young daughter (and her stroller) to the Iraq War protest in San Francisco, CA. It was a beautiful Sunday, and millions of people around the world turned out (during that weekend) to protest the thrust toward war by the G. W. Bush Administration. That war was launched, regardless, on March 20, 2003.

Most of that weekend’s protests were held on Saturday, the 15th, but the protest in San Francisco was delayed one day so as not to disrupt the Chinese New Year parade on the 15th. The crowd in San Francisco amounted to between 60,000 to 200,000, depending on time of day, and how the count was estimated. I can verify that there were people EVERYWHERE, and we were channelled along Grove Street, from Market Street to Civic Center, where the crowd pooled on the Green, and speeches were made, and children played on the swing set.

The most important thing about the event was the feeling of solidarity – for truth without war – with so much of American and foreign humanity. It was so obvious to so many that great injustices and grave war crimes were to be unleashed (as proved to be the case for the next 8 years), and we were making our moral outrage bodily present in the hopes of shaming the Bush Administration (and the Blair government in the UK) to refrain from committing the ultimate crime.

EVERYONE in the U.S. government at that time, who pushed for or acquiesced to the perpetration of that war is a war criminal. Hillary Clinton is one of the more prominent of these criminals, and the fact that so many today consider this war criminal a viable candidate for US president is an insult of any concept of national honor.

This experience can be summed up by Albert Camus’s epigram: “I rebel, therefore we exist.” Here is my photo of that day.