Nonviolent victory: Keep up the pressure

When Gordon Smith voted against more war funding last Thursday, he did so in the face of a two-year-long campaign marked by thousands of petition signatures, thousands of signed postcards from Oregon voters, numerous arrests of nonviolent lobbyists who merely showed up at his Portland office and were summarily arrested, and a grassroots media outreach campaign of letters to editors and guest editorials submitted to newspapers out beyond the liberal reach of Portland, out into Smith Country.

In other words, we forced him to act as if he has grown a conscience. This is a testament to the power of nonviolence, of approaching the adversarial system of representative democracy with some non-negotiables but in a respectful manner. We never raised our voices, we didn't interrupt anyone, we didn't vilify police or PGE security or even Smith. We won.

But this is a minor, reversible victory. Smith's vote stood out but it was cast knowing that it meant little, since the Senate voted to spend the $165.5 billion on the war on Iraq and Smith's vote was not needed. He took the opportunity to vote against the war funding for the very first time. It is during an election season and he is a vulnerable Republican in a Democratic state. If he doesn't come up with one or two of these he's going to lose.

Now the vote goes back to the House, who rejected it last week and will vote again. We will see. Gordon Smith is malleable for the next few months and then, if he's reelected, he will be invincible and unreachable by our puny grassroots efforts for another six years, during which he can continue to do serious damage to our economy, our ecology, our ethical foundations and our very spirit as Oregonians and as Americans. It is good to know we can push him to act like a spineless politician instead of a rabid ideologue, but wouldn't replacing him be best?