This afternoon I was proud to march up sixth avenue and back down second avenue, to the United Nations, in the latest anti-Iraq war rally sponsored by United for Peace and Justice. It was a great event, many thousands of people chanting "we will not be silent", "bring our troops home" .etc Even some of the cops guarding the march route joined in on the chanting. Great liberal progressive comraderie, met a lot of cool people.

The last march I attended in midtown was a couple of months back, the Sean Bell rally. There too great liberal progressive comraderie, met a lot of cool people.

But there was a difference between the two marches. In the Bell march, I was among very few whites in a sea of african american faces. At the anti-war rally today, I was in a sea of almost all white faces. The fact is that neither march reflected the diversity of New York City. It reflected different communities, or different demographics, apparently having mostly different priorities. Yet these communities share the same political beliefs and world outlook for the most part. Which leads to the question, why don't more of the same people come to both of these kinds of marches?

Recently I finished Taylor Branch's fine "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968", and in this book it details Martin Luther King's last years, when he started going to anti-vietnam war rallies despite the objections of some of his top lietenants at SCLC, who felt like the vietnam war wasn't their fight. King tried to tell people that the three major problems he saw in the world (racism, poverty, war) were in actuality the same problem. Which comes down to how human beings live and relate to each other.

Racism is at the heart of violence in the Sean Bell shootings, and it is also at the heart of the Iraq war. So in my mind I don't understand why more of the people out there marching today in the anti-war march weren't at the Bell march, and why more of the Bell marchers don't come out for anti-war marches. This speaks to a weakness on the left, the inability to bring the different communities together for common cause, and surely that is in part failure to link all these problems in the world together as King was trying to do before he died.

The question then becomes, how do we change this? How does United for Peace and Justice, or other anti-war groups get more african americans to come to their marches, and how do organizers of civil rights marches like Reverend Sharpton get more whites to come to their events? How do we bring all communities together?