Eric Alterman again:

These are upsetting times. You can sense the nervy dejection in the emails and calls we get here at CounterPunch. True, testing times loom, though not in such measure as for the people of Iraq, or for Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza every day of the year. And how could one be entirely disheartened amid the amazing flowering of the anti-war movement, a movement that has produced the largest (almost entirely peaceful ) protests in the history of the world.

In my local northern California town of Eureka, there was a march over the weekend that brought out 3,500. Huge for Eureka. Only a handful of louts jeered from the courthouse at the marchers. There was a vigil here in tiny Petrolia, as there have been with growing numbers across the country. I wrote over the weekend here of Greenville, South Carolina, as being "not noted as a bastion of antiwar sentiment, at least when I was there a couple of months ago." Dumb, because I should have remembered what I written and said so often, that in every American town there are people of spirit and conscience. John Hanson, Secretary of the local Amnesty International chapter, promptly emailed me from Greenville, advising me that "You may be pleased to know we scheduled a small peace rally two weeks ago (@200 people) and a vigil just last night (@80). We also put on Lysistrata at Furman University March 3."

Multiply that a thousand times over, and you have a huge movement, a new generation of young people inducted into the fun, boredom, fear, exhilaration and experience of popular protest. It was that movement, here and across the world that frightened Bush out of the Security Council and into the lawless cliches of a Hollywood Western. That's something to exult over, as we brace for the next stage.