I let The World Can't Wait consume me. Within 6 months I went from being the new guy in the room, to administering their website, to becoming the official President of the local chapter. I was even extended an offer by the National leadership to work on the national page, but turned it down mostly because I assumed I would be incapable of contributing to a we page that was probably being run by New Yorkers that are way more tech savvy than me. As I mentioned before I had a blast camping with them. For those that aren't from Michigan you need to know that the major Labor Day event in Michigan is walking the Mackinaw Bridge, Which is 5 miles of I-75 and the only road that connects upper and lower Michigan. That was what we were really doing peace camp for and the idea was brilliant. The Michigan Peace Network had shirts made up. The front was a graphic that looked like a person jumping across the Mackinaw Bridge and it said March On The Mack 2006. The Back said Bring the Guard Home, which was part of what we were saying. The Governor of Michigan, no matter who is Governor at the time, opens the Bridge walk by going across with the first of the walkers. A contingent of our group, which included me was stationed on the finish line side chatting various anti war and anti Bush things but primarily it was "Bring the guard back home from Iraq" The larger contingent of the peace camp interspersed with the crowd, which averages over 100,000 in some years, and walked the Bridge. So people saw the black shirts walking across the bridge and then got to the other side and heard the rest of them shouting to withdraw troops from Iraq, signs demanding Bush's impeachment, at times even singing. We did this for the entire 6 hours that the Bridge is open to foot traffic. Before Labor Day we had already started planning a big one day series of events on what was supposed to be a national day of action on October 5th. We had secured funding through our shell "student group" to bring in Scott Ritter, a former chief weapons inspector in Iraq who had just written a book about Iran. The day started with local speakers, then Scott took the stage at an auditorium we had reserved, then we made our way down town via traffic obstructing parade, where we had an all evening punk-a-palooza and more speeches and performances. The Hippie in the group did this amazing drum chant thing. I met the Democratic nominee for Michigan's 6th congressional district at a Halloween party shortly after that through some people I met from the October 5th thing. We did a few more weekends of standing on a street corner with signs but for the most part winter was on and it was time to stay indoors, that winter in fact was pretty bad. I made a terrorism test for the WCW website that was part funny and part informational, it touched issues from who really has weapons of mass destruction to who are the real war criminals. In March we did a three day long speaking series with people from the ACLU to WCW leaders that had been "featured" on Bill O'Rielly as the extreme left. But you could already feel that our group had reached its zenith and was struggling to keep funding and action going. Later in 2007 Bush came to East Grand Rapids to give a policy speech and we were there in the streets with our placards and everybody else that was protesting the war. I didn't get to see him, but his motorcade did drive right past our position. Over the summer our chapter of The World Can't Wait really started to fail as a lot of the moderate people of the group left. The National organization had always been, and still is, part of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and they started putting pressure on group members to embrace the whole message of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Shortly after that I was done with them too. The last thing the World Can't Wait did was "co-sponsor" a diversity and equality seminar series that was actually being organized by the Kalamazoo Alliance For Equality, One Kalamazoo, and the Arcus Foundation. The series was very cool, I loved it and it was the start of what became a city ballot proposal to pass a non discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo. That was the end of my involvement in The World Can't Wait. 2008 was not kind to me and put my political activism on hold for several years. Only recently have I really begun to get interested and involved again.
