At the end of a week that saw the lives of 50 young Americans erased in a reinvigorated war 7,600 miles away, a playful wind kicked through the intersection of Garfield Avenue and Main Street in Alhambra.
It was Good Friday, 5:30 p.m. Traffic was a little lighter than usual and some drivers shielded their eyes from the low-angled sun in the west. On the northeast corner, peace activist Al Maldonado and half a dozen others from San Gabriel Valley Neighbors for Peace and Justice had to keep propping up the placards ("Liberate Iraq from Halliburton," "Bush Lied, 640 U.S. Troops Died," "These Colors Don't Run the World") that the breeze kept flattening.
However dire the week's news or earnest the protesters' message at Garfield and Main, they had to compete with the natural buoyancy of an emerging weekend in a peaceful, thriving place.
The mosaic-inlaid concrete fountains at the Alhambra Renaissance Cineplex Plaza splashed and gurgled. Lines began to form at the box office of the 14-screen Edwards theater, which offered such fare as "Starsky & Hutch" and "Scooby-Doo 2." Pedestrians strolled, rather than hurried, through the plaza. The conversation of early diners at the outdoor tables of chain restaurants rang with gaiety. Even the bleating horns of motorists signaling their sympathy with the demonstrators seemed festive.
The peace demonstrators, who have been coming to this spot every Friday evening for 17 months, were convinced that public sentiment -- as measured, however imprecisely, by horn honking -- had swung their way. Like participants in the 45 other weekly neighborhood vigils that have been in continuous operation in the Los Angeles area since well before the Iraq war, the Alhambra demonstrators endured long periods of public indifference after it seemed that invading American troops had the Iraq situation well in hand.
"The public doesn't react very quickly to news," said Maldonado, a blocky, graying man of 51, as he righted another blown-down placard. "But a lot of people who support Bush are starting to think in the back of their mind that something smells, that something isn't right."
By 6:15, the number of protesters had grown to 13, and cars blasted sporadic, sometimes prolonged, honking through the intersection. The noise was punctuated by constant bursts from a small bugle blown by demonstrator Raul Orozco, a 33-year-old, erstwhile elementary school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
