Fort Myers Peace Fair Report

The first ever Peace Fair in Ft Myers was held yesterday. Overall we had a good turn out. Our CODEPINK and Florida For Peace Booth was the busiest and most poupular there and we sold lots of t-shirts and CP stuff, handed out flyers, got petitions and Florida for Peace/Focus on Nelson post cards signed and talked with lots of folks during the day, many of whom never heard of CP.

Quite a few folks signed up to be on our mailing list and we handed out lots of printed material about CP and how to get involved etc. CP activist Faith Fippenger was a keynote speaker and had the whole crowd in tears when she spoke about the women in Iran. We will follow up soon with a CP get together.

I will post photos soon. Because the schedule ran late I got bumped from speaking and also missed the opportunity to be interviewed. But one of our young activists, Dana, did get interviewed by the Naples News. I wish a stronger message was spoken about the war in Iraq and stopping the next war in Iran, but at least we got some press.

Our own News Press did cover the event but did not mention CODEPINK at all.
Peaceful Pink,
Holley

Here is the copy from The Naples Daily News.

Peace was a fair topic at rally in south Lee County
By Elizabeth Wright Saturday, November 10, 2007

Row after row of weathered, white crosses lie flat on the grass at a Lee County park, filling the space between the goal posts of a football field.

Each one was hand-lettered with the name and age of a soldier who died in Iraq.

The man behind the display, Naples resident John Riccio, said his collection of about 800 crosses has long since stopped keeping pace with the death count.

This is the same set of markers he will set out on the beach near the Naples Pier on Sunday.

He’s anticipating some won’t be too happy to see the crosses there on Veterans Day.

But Saturday, at a Peace Fair at Rutenberg Community Park in South Fort Myers, he only heard appreciation for the sprawling anti-war statement he usually keeps housed in borrowed trailers and sheds. It was his chance to encourage other peace activists -- a group that at Saturday’s fair included volunteers from a varied collection of environmental, political and religious groups.

“It’s to let them know they’re not alone in their thinking,” Riccio said.

Across the field, standing near a “Women for Peace” sign, Fort Myers resident Dana Foglesong, 25, who supports anti-war efforts but is still discovering her place in the movement, was among those who surveyed the display.

To her, it was a powerful sight.

“I’m not sure what it proves. But it shows we have responsibilities for what has happened and what is happening,” she said.

As an activist with the Fort Myers chapter of Code Pink, a national group that agitates to end the war in Iraq, Foglesong hasn’t hesitated to say what she thinks those responsibilities are: She’s the woman who held a flaming pink peace sign at a protest along U.S. 41 in Fort Myers two months ago.

She said she kept standing there as a driver suggested her kind ought to just move to Iraq.

Yet Foglesong still described herself as an unlikely activist. Or at least, as she put it, she’s not the “good hippy” the way some others appear to her. She has eaten chicken, and she has bought jeans that may or may not have been made in a sweatshop. She gladly voted for Bush in the 2000 elections.

And while she may understand why, across the park, other groups at the peace fair were talking about the link between environmental sustainability and peace, oil and war -- selling T-shirts that blended the arrows of a recycling symbol with a peace sign -- that’s not her passion.

More often, she’s talking about war in the context of conversations she has with friends in the military and their families, talking about their sense of duty, talking about her views on Iraq, and still trying not to offend.

“People think that people who are pro-peace are anti-soldier, but we’re not,” she said.

Those are conversations that don’t easily reduce to the lettering on a piece of poster board.

Looking over the signs Riccio had set up alongside his display, some seemed over-the-top to her, but she agreed with most of them.

“Save lives,” she said. “Yes.”

“Bring them home. ... Yes.”

“Our troops are sitting ducks. ... Hmm. Yeah, probably.”

She plans to continue attending peace events. She said she worries about the cost of the war, about the day-to-day conditions for Iraqi citizens, and she worries about the lives lost. She wonders if people have forgotten to want peace, and instead view it as “something that’s not pertinent anymore.”

But her goal isn’t necessarily to convince others she’s right that it’s time to pack up and leave Iraq -- or even that war ought to be avoided.

Her activism is more about persuading others to at least take notice of her anti-war views.

“There’s a difference between convincing someone of your beliefs and convincing someone to do something about your beliefs,” she said.