Code Pink Rallies at the White House on Mother's Day

Emerson, the driver, Joshua, and Julian provided transportation (right)





The handmade banners commemorate the lives of dead soldiers from the Iraq War


To know Code Pink is to love Code Pink, its presence at the Capitol Hill hearings and the pictures and signs members hold aloft behind the heads of the Big Shots testifying as they try to wrangle out of their (mis)deeds or vie for government dollars.

For a small group, Code Pink garners an unusually large amount of media attention. Hurray for Code Pink!

With admiration for its unceasing efforts and always applauding its goals, I joined the group last Sunday at Lafayette Park for a small and sincere rally to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a gorgeous Mother's Day afternoon we carried the long banner made by women from 20 different countries who sewed more than 4,000 squares in pink of many different shades. We marched in front of the White House chanting "I will not raise my child to kill another mother's child'" which is based upon the 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation composed by Julia Ward Howe

Code Pink leaders charmed the White House police corps which waived an arrest for one Pink member (for what I don’t know), and permitted, after denial, the laying of hundreds of pink, white, and red roses at the base of the White House iron railing.

Sadly, the withering roses represented the brief lives of soldiers and citizens
who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Shoes for Bush in Washington, D.C.

As I approached the scene 20 minutes past the 11 o'clock hour in front of the White House Wednesday, the atmosphere of the Code Pink rally to memorialize Sunday's shoe throwing incident at George Bush was almost that of a garden party on pavement. The press vastly outnumbered the few activists who showed up, and together they stood around laughing, smiling, talking on a cloudy, cool day.

Some of the 20 activists threw shoes at the weaving, unsteady "George Bush" life-sized bobblehead dressed in mask and prison garb and holding "dollar bills" which he periodically offered to those nearby. An abundant but permissive, polite police force stood back, under worked by the small crowd.

Attending were Dana Milbank with photographer in tow, and David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org who graciously consented to yet another interview when approached by an Arabic cameraman and a reporter. A girl, about 8, dressed in pink, explained her presence at the rally to a television crew.

Was the Christmas message affecting everyone?

I added my old shoes to a small pile in front of "Bush" and sadly took note of the rows of shoes with widows' and orphans' names attached, like headstones at a cemetery.

A likely Code Pink representative "rescued" Bush when a senior citizen with a long grey beard beat the bobblehead with several shoes which were scattered hither and yon on the street, much like the bodies of the the injured and the dead from a bombing in Baghdad today.