I looked around Civic Center on Saturday and wondered where the years have gone. There were dreadlocked young people and kids with pink hair and pierced faces. But most in the crowd were graying antiwar veterans of the 1960s.

Thirty-five years later, they still had the old fire.

They danced to reggae music, wore "No war" buttons and chanted "No blood for oil" on cue. They carried signs saying, "No war for votes" and "Who would Jesus bomb?" They hugged old friends and, I may have been imagining things, but I thought I caught a whiff of ganja in the air.

It was like a flashback, a reunion.

Just like the last time they protested a war, these folks can expect to be trivialized, ridiculed, dismissed.

They obviously don't care.

They had come to rile things up and to rediscover their counterculture roots.

Speakers called for "regime change in the United States" and the crowd roared. They announced plans for another protest Monday outside of the hall where President Bush will be speaking in Denver, and they cheered some more. They vowed to vote, to protest, to take to the streets, and they clenched their fists and jabbed them in the air.

Bob Musil of Physicians for Social Responsibility called war in Iraq "immoral." Civil rights activist Alvertis Simmons called it the moment of "revolution we've been waiting for." Lucia Guzman, former director of the Colorado Council of Churches and a Denver school board member, said the people waited too long to stop the war in Vietnam and she won't let that happen again.

But Vietnam and Iraq are very different.

When I stood in a crowd of protesters in Madison, Wis., in 1969, I knew that every one of us could name a casualty - and, even more importantly, we could look around at the potential casualties among us.

My brother had been drafted not long after our neighbor's son had come back in a body bag. I knew exactly why I was there.

The '60s demonstrators were angry, scared and tired of being taken for granted. The war was real. It was personal.

War with Iraq is only theoretical. It's abstract and political, a faceless debate.

At least it was until now.

On Friday, the Minnesota Democrat who vigorously opposed the resolution to authorize war in Iraq became the conscience of the peace movement.

Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash, was remembered by leaders in both parties as a man of conviction, a characteristic that even his colleagues in Congress admit has become rare in American politics.

The former Vietnam-era antiwar activist was considered one of the few who never sold out for a vote or a buck.

The crowd at Civic Center remembered Wellstone with a moment of silence and then, more appropriately, with a moment of noise - a cheering, chanting call to action.

Alan Gilbert, a professor of international affairs at the University of Denver, reminded the protesters that they can make a difference in the world.

"Here is democracy," he said, spreading his arms to acknowledge the crowd spilling out of the amphitheater.

"This is what it means to live in a democracy."

He called upon them to find the power of conviction in a desolate landscape of cheap opportunism. "Make your voices heard," he said.

"Wellstone lives."

Diane Carman's commentaries appear in the Denver Post Thursdays and Sundays.

Copyright 2002 The Denver Post

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