"When this country began, Native Americans were considered insurgents, we were terrorists, too! Iraqis aren't terrorists--they're not insurgents, they're just trying to live their lives. They're just trying to live the gang warfare the U.S. has put into their lives!"

A Latina/Native American speaker then described a U.S. military recruiting practice: "Recruiters hold up a card and tell Latinos, if you sign up here, you'll get citizenship and you'll be able to sponsor your parents and your family! Then they go to war, they die, they don't come home, they don't get benefits,and their families are left in the dark. If you can't give them the right to vote and live free, then don't ask them to fight your war!"

It's a big price to pay for citizenship.

Peace Activist Maggie Coulter coordinated this bit of street theater in which participants holding "coffin lids" with valued ideas such as "Peace," "Education,"or "Civil Rights" read statements about these values before placing the coffin lids into a casket.

This young woman read a statement about education: "In his "No Child Left Behind Act," better known as the "No Child Left Alive Act," President Bush used this bill as a means to get recruiting information from schools."

A Code Pink was called on the day of Bush's inauguration by CODEPINK, "a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement that seeks positive social change through proactive, creative protest and non-violent direct action."--from CODEPINK mission statement.

A worldwide network of women (and men), CODEPINK was created by Global Exchange activist Medea Benjamin and 100 other women in November 2002 to protest the first U.S. pre-emptive strike in Iraq. The name is a spin-off of Bush's color-coded Home Security warnings. While Bush's color codes signal levels of fear, "the CODEPINK alert is based on compassion and is a feisty call for women to 'wage peace'."--(from CODEPINK website).

The group holds peace vigils in front of the White House, celebrates women as global peacemakers, and calls on women around the world to rise up and oppose the war in Iraq.

Idealistic, mobilized, colorful, and with a great sense of humor, the CODEPINK women were the first group motorists saw as they stood on the frontlines of the Counter Coronation at the Federal Building.