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 THE PEOPLE HAD SPOKEN
photos by Kristin Callahan; essay by Nicholas Iacovino




The people had spoken.

The range of voices had become distorted statistics. A few dissident sound bites numbered the masses at 750,000 strong, though most reports totaled the power of the people at a bit more than 100,000.

Irregardless of the totals, the people had spoken. They had spoken with grace and elegance, reverence and fervor, their patience mixed with hijinks, their love and faith in tomorrow and beyond, whirling off the streets, a beatific force, bouncing off the skyscrapers and reverberating across the Manhattan skyline.



This experience of raw power and beauty led me to a question: When and how do we learn to protest, to speak, to question?

Certainly not from the most dominant news outfits of our time, Fox Networks and MSNBC, with their bully pulpit shouting down of any opinion they deem Un-American. It makes one beg for the gentle poetry of the original Crossfire gang and the shrill presence of Pat Buchanan.

In this new patriotic vortex, with its old glory stickers, pasted across an anxious nation to distill its fears, exactly where do the children learn the voice of protest and debate?




Certainly not from the man these children have been told is their leader, George W. Bush, a man showing the world his contempt for debate.

Certainly not from the Dubya Inner Brain, which would rather silence debate by holding a nation in captive fear, with their flurries of unspecified alerts, orange and red--ugly tactics in any arena.

Certainly not from Mr. Bill O'Reilly or any of his cohorts. Perhaps from Charlie Rose, though most tweens and teens are not avid viewers of PBS, though they are rabid viewers of Television.

Certainly from their families. Mine was amid talk of Sacco and Venzetti, their murders at the end of a rope, spun into folklore in a young boy's mind, right alongside Paul Bunyan and John Henry.




Certainly from educators, like Mr. Russo, who would bring his folk guitar to my elementary school and sing protest songs--my age showing, myself at the final arc of the hippie era, age 41.

Certainly from the youth's own underground network, one that every generation possesses, where idea's and emotions of the young can blaze across a nation, leaving their families whiplashed and dazed, some torn away for good.




Certainly from the society collective, this force of you and you and you and us, a fountain of love, hope and faith, erupting across the midtown streets, a power of the people, undeniable and not to be denied, a power of fury and logic, letting itself be known to this time, to this new generation.