By Farah Stockman, Boston Globe, 10/14/2002
As Congress prepared to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq last week, college campuses were quiet and just a few dozen peace demonstrators stood with signs outside Senator John Kerry's Boston office.
Yet on Amy Hendrickson's computer, a movement was brewing. "I get 600 e-mails a day," said Hendrickson, a Brookline software consultant who works from home. "These days, I spend 10 to 12 hours a day on the computer."
When tens of thousands of people came out on Oct. 6 to protest US policy on Iraq, the seeds of action had been sown not on college campuses, which had their own, much smaller protests last Monday, but on the computer desktops of people like Hendrickson, 58. From her living room, she helped organize simultaneous protests in 14 countries, including Japan, Bangladesh, Germany, Austria, Australia, India, and Nepal.
This year, for the first time since the advent of the Internet, Americans are engaging in public debate about whether to go to war, and a great deal of the opposition has coalesced online. The ease of electronic communication allows like-minded people to sign petitions and coordinate protests far more easily than they could in the 1960s, or even a decade ago during the Gulf War. But it also raises a question: Can a movement with no physical center and no pen-and- ink signatures really have a political impact?...
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