War in Iraq: A campus reacts

By Troy Simpson

San Francisco Police arrested 11 Santa Clara students and one Santa Clara lecturer along with 38 other protestors on Thursday, March 20 for blocking traffic at a San Francisco intersection in an anti-war protest.

Members of the Santa Clara community joined with students from Stanford University and others to block the intersection of Third and Folsom as a part of a larger city-wide civil disobedience protest effort that resulted in a total 1,400 arrests, said Sergeant Neville Gittens of the San Francisco Police Department.

"We feel so strongly about the cause that we tried to shut down the infrastructure of the city; to call attention to the fact that we are aggressively bombing another country and that the people involved don't want things to go on just as they always do when there's a war going on somewhere else," said junior Dave Zwaska.

Junior Blair Thedinger said that after the war in Iraq began, several students from Santa Clara formed an affinity group, which later worked in conjunction with other affinity groups in the Bay Area to organize and participate in what he described as a city-wide system of protests to disrupt key streets, federal buildings, military recruitment centers, corporations dealing in arms or construction in Iraq and business in general.

Aside from disrupting businesses, the demonstration also had an effect on the activities of many San Francisco residents.

"Of course it's an annoyance," said resident Robin Ziegler. "When the one way out is blocked and you need to go pick up your 7-year-old from school, it's aggravating and annoying. It's not that you don't support what the people are doing, but it's causing problems for people. I think it did more harm than good because the majority of people got so angry at being inconvenienced that [the protestors] lost their support."

Lecturer in philosophy and religious studies David Perry said that the sizes of many more recent demonstrations are considerably smaller because some demonstrators are frustrated with the backlash against protestors as a result of inconveniencing people.

"I don't think [blocking streets] is effective," said Perry. "I think it's actually quite counterproductive. I think it just pisses people off; it alienates them even if they're in agreement against the war. If you're just somebody who's just trying to get to work or to your kid's school to pick them up, you're just pissed."

Jonathan Hunt, a Santa Clara lecturer who attended the protest with members of the university affinity group, said that despite some frustration for residents, the protest was important because media coverage of the events in San Francisco sent a message that many people in the United States are strongly opposed to the current policies and strategies of the U.S. government. Hunt also said that the people most inconvenienced by the protest were the most deserving of inconvenience.

"The people who were most inconvenienced were the single motorists," said Hunt. "If you take Bay Area Rapid Transit to work, there was no inconvenience to you. If you take the bus to work, there was a minor inconvenience to you. If you drive your own car alone into the city every day, you were inconvenienced, but it's your very dependence on oil which is at the root of the whole problem. The individual commuter is inconveniencing me. Everybody who's out there driving their own car to work, they're inconveniencing the whole world."

In addition to disrupting traffic flow and businesses, multitudes of protests such as the demonstration on Third and Folsom cost the city of San Francisco large sums of money in terms of additional fire and police presence.

"I'm sad that they had to spend extra money on police, but if you look at what they spent, they said like $90,000 a day while the protests were going on, they just requested $70 billion for the war," said Thedinger. "So if you just do a simple fraction there, it's pretty ridiculous."

However, Perry said that the money spent by city governments to cope with the war protests differs greatly from federal funds spent on the war itself because local and federal budgets are entirely separate.

"Doing something that forces the police or the fire folks to come in and extract you, arrest you or clear out the mess, those are cops and firemen who are not at that time available to handle more serious concerns," said Perry. "And it costs money, money that might not be able to go toward homeless projects or schools."

Freshman Jenn Bevard said that although blockades such as the one on Third and Folsom may frustrate some citizens and commuters and cost a considerable amount of money, it was an opportunity to speak out about an important issue and connect with people.

"I think that doing that blockade was a way to reach people individually and say 'Stop. Just stop and look at what's going on and be present to what's going on'," said Bevard. "I know that there are two sides of the story. There are people in traffic who need to go to work, who need to go home, who have families at home. But on the other hand, I think that we do have the right to ask them to take some time out of their day to look at what's going on and to join a greater movement of people."