Cindy Sheehan spoke on the campus where I work today.  I packed a sandwich and went to hear her on my lunch break.  I didn't think to count the number of people there with me, but I could have without stressing a third digit, and barely stressing two; there were generously maybe 60 of us counting both supporters and opposition.  Sure, it's Texas, and it's 100 degrees in April, and she spoke from a raised place on an unshaded lawn, in a bus circle, but I still found the lack of audience unsettling.  Two yawning cops stood by dutifully, half-heartedly, it must have been penciled in on their schedule this morning, but they weren't necessary.  A few entitled Young Republican-types and a blonde girl from the Army ROTC fell into barely-heated argument with a hippie and a body-modification enthusiast, but that was about the extent of passionate display.  The blonde girl wore a camouflage T-shirt with the university logo worked into the pattern, and the hippie guy wore a camouflage jacket with the logos all conspicuously torn off.  Her camouflage was neat and ironed and tucked in and worn proudly, his was faded and dirty and frayed and worn ironically, both yelled things they might have read off the event flier at each other, and both gave up easily when the Radio-TV-Film sequence student with the camera finally wandered off. 

Cindy Sheehan spoke for maybe ten minutes.  She said smart things, important things, things we already knew but probably needed to hear again, but nothing that hasn't been said before.  Mostly she yelled comebacks at the few who had bothered to show up to oppose her or support the war.  A few hastily-written block letter slogans on neon poster board, a couple canned pro-Bush/anti-Cindy sound bites yelled above the small gathering.  Her comebacks were good, no doubt she's had practice with countless unimaginative hecklers before today, and in person she is still the impassioned, quietly charismatic woman she was on TV.  But it felt like passion in a void.  The only other sweat worked up in that crowd came directly from the sun. Everyone else just struck me as obligatory token characters from some over-rehearsed play.  Where was the passion?  I'd been to a protest in Austin just a year ago, the first I'd been in the country for during this war, and there had certainly been passion there. Streets had been blocked off, news helicopters summoned, people cried and screamed and discussed and argued unselfconsciously, and stayed until it was nearly too dark to see.   Where did that go?

Cindy spoke for a few minutes and called for a march to the campus recruiting station.  I had to go back to work, and walked back with the little procession behind me.  So few voices chanted, that I could hear each individual one.  Their slogans weren't catchy or thought-provoking, they weren't together, they kept changing the words in hopes of sparking something that wasn't going to happen.  Someone would cry thinly, "No blood for oil!" a few others would join in for a few rounds, and I would just think about how they must have all driven their cars there,  past good bus routes and bike trails so they could park in a multi-storied garage a few miles from their homes.  They picked up with, "Bush lies, sisters die!  Bush lies, brothers die!" and I thought about how all these privileged healthy mostly white kids were here, on a college campus with ice-cold air-conditioning and a co-ed yacht club and well-trained landscapers, because they were fortunate enough to be born into families with extra money to fund college, and not there in Iraq, like someone else's brothers and sisters, trying not to die.