More
than 100 people gathered at the Federal Building in downtown Rochester late
last Friday afternoon, October 29, to mourn the death toll in Iraq.
The
mock funeral procession came just one day after The Lancet, a British medical journal, released a study estimating
100,000 “excess” civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the US
occupation. The somewhat controversial cluster sample survey, which can be
downloaded at image.thelancet.com/extras/04art10342web.pdf, estimated that the
risk of death for Iraqi civilians is 2.5 times greater since the start of the
war.
Demonstrators
dressed in all black and wore white armbands as a show of solidarity. Two women
in funeral garb wore black veils over white masks, and students from Fairport
High School carried coffins. Activist-organizer Jan Bezila addressed passersby
with a megaphone. Minutes after 4 p.m., several protestors gathered around the
Federal Building’s flag pole and with the words, “We’re mourning this very devastating
war,” they fell to the ground, imitating death.
“We’re
hoping this non-political protest will touch people’s hearts,” Bezila said. “I
am really quite disappointed that both [presidential] candidates are talking
about killing people; they’re talking about killing terrorists. I don’t think
the way to peace is through killing.”
High
school students made up nearly half the group. Seventeen-year-old Michael
Freeman said this war will become, “the next Vietnam.” First-time protestor
Ishita Ferdous expressed her concerns over the Bush Administration’s approach
to foreign policy.
“If
you take the literal meaning of a terrorist, it’s a person who inflicts fear
upon others, and [the US is] kind of like that too, we’re inflicting fear upon
the Iraqi people,” Ferdous said. “It’s disgusting how we say they’re the
terrorists. They’re just mad that we’re in their country. I would be too.”
—
Rebecca Shore
Squaring
off
Before
the request for proposals in the preliminary design phase of Renaissance Square was even officially
announced, the web page of the RFP (www.rensquare.org/rfp.aspx) was getting
hits.
That’s
what County Executive Maggie Brooks told reporters when she formally publicized
the opening of the bidding process.
“This
is truly when the public phase of this process begins,” said Brooks. Sharing a
stage with Mayor Bill Johnson, RGRTA Chief Executive Mark Aesch, and MCC
President Tom Flynn, she lauded the project as a way to “help us create a new
sense of place in downtown.”
Johnson,
meanwhile, acknowledged that despite the sense of excitement in the air
“there’s also a certain amount of anxiety.” The Renaissance Square project has
been criticized for lacking any substantial public input. Johnson’s statements
were aimed at soothing that anxiety, and more than once he argued that the
process would truly be open. “There is no one model that’s conceived that will
be jammed down people’s throats,” he said.
“The
bottom line is we want to get it right; we want there to be a lot of community
involvement,” Brooks said.
Whether
that assuages the fears of Renaissance Square’s critics remains to be seen.
From
Johnson’s perspective though, one important hurdle has already been cleared.
“For the first time we have real cooperation with the county” and with the
transit authority, he said. The challenge now is to see if this newfound
cooperation translates into results for a chronically troubled stretch of East
Main Street.
“This
[area] has really stymied us,” Johnson said.
Fantastic
disaster
Reinforcing
the suspicions of many US citizens, a Cornell University professor has just
issued a study stating that the approval
ratings for President George W. Bush jump slightly each time the federal
government issues a terrorist warning.
Robb
Willer, the assistant director of Cornell’s Sociology and Small Groups
Laboratory, tracked all terrorist warnings made from February 2001 and May 2004
along with the 131 Gallup Polls conducted during the same period.
“Results
showed that terror warnings increased presidential approval ratings
consistently,” Willer says. “They also increased support for Bush’s
handling of the economy. The findings, however, were inconclusive as to how
long this halo effect lasts.”
The
boost to Bush’s economy ratings is particularly odd, since his handling of the
economy is largely irrelevant to terrorism. Willer attributes this phenomenon
to “social identity theory.” The theory, in this application, basically says
that threats of attacks from foreigners cause Americans to feel greater
solidarity with their leadership.
Willer’s
findings also are consistent with terror management theory, which indicates
that threats involving mortality increase nationalism. “This research
suggests that individuals may respond to reminders of their mortality, like
terror warnings, by supporting their current leaders,” he says.
A
PDF of Willer’s study can be found here:
www.uiowa.edu/%7Egrpproc/crisp/crisp10_1.pdf
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2004.
