Protest—and Common Ground—in Crawford

To the casual observer, the rolling prairie is a blur of burning gold, but for someone walking, riding horseback, or biking through the Texas ranchland, as President George W. Bush does, there are meadows of yellow sunflowers, swaths of tall bright white euphorbia, and along the woody creekbeds purple violets. Though the land around Prairie Chapel Road is a commercial-free zone, it has become a pasture of political messages in recent days when a crop of red, white and blue pro-Bush placards have sprouted on fencelines and in the front yards of the president's rural neighbors.

It is not just "Bush Country" and "IM4W" signs that have multiplied in the quiet countryside. In the weeks since Cindy Sheehan set up Camp Casey there are several new encampments along the road. Camp George, run by the Crawford American Legion complete with a hot dog and lemonade stand, is down the hill from Sheehan's original campsite. Camp Reality, manned by vocal pro-Bush supporters, sits across the road from Camp Casey, and a mile or so away the peaks of a huge Camelot-like tent shades is Camp Casey II with its new field of crosses, a chow line, portable toilets, media tables, yoga tent and stage. A local landowner offered his pastureland to the antiwar protestors when the original Camp Casey spilled over the ditches and drew large crowds along narrow, winding Prairie Chapel Road.

In the tiny town of Crawford is Fort Qualls named in honor of Cpl. Louis Wayne Qualls killed in Fallujah last fall. Among the patriotic displays are the three crosses bearing his son's name that Gary Qualls has retrieved from the antiwar protest site. "There is a big difference between our wants and our needs," Qualls said. "We know what Cindy wants, but we know what our needs are."

One wall of Fort Qualls is decorated with paper hearts bearing the names of military men and women. D.J. Santiago Jr., 8, wrote his father's name on one and Douglas Santiago Sr., a Navy corpsman recently returned from Iraq, helped him stick it on the wall. "I am tired of being the silent majority," Tina Taylor Santiago, D.J.'s mother said. "So many of us support what our troops are doing and no one says anything."

The Santiago family, who drove in from North Texas, were among the thousands of both antiwar and pro-Bush forces who descended on tiny Crawford Saturday. Carmella Bradwell left Dallas and met her daughter Katelyn, who lives in Austin, at Camp Casey II. "I have been getting more and more upset about the war," Bradwell said, "and as a mom I wanted to be here to support the moms and Cindy."

At Camp Casey II where Joan Baez was on hand and Father Joe Mulligan brought a letter of support from Nicaragua signed by four former Sandinista cabinet members, there was a flavor of the past, but this was not your father's protest movement. Both sides boasted bloggers and internet radio show hosts, caterers, shuttle buses, tee shirt and bumper sticker production on a major scale, instant music CDs—patriotic or folk—and the hit of the day, saddammagnets.com, a set of refrigerator magnets featuring Saddam Hussein in his underwear.

Despite the rhetorical chasm, protestors on either side had much in common. They shared the stifling heat, they listened to the parents of the fallen, they prayed, they sang, they drank thousands of bottles of water, they ate free barbecue and bought fifty cent chocolate covered cupcakes on main street. There was even the odd ecumenical note on a bumper sticker: "God Bless Everyone—no exceptions."