“They say you’re preaching to the choir,” Jim Crampton told a roomful of people Monday evening. “Now, I’m in a choir, and our choir rehearses and practices until they get it, and even then they go back and practice.”

Crampton, from 1199 Service Employees International Union, spoke to about 100 activists at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo at Elmwood and West Ferry, on the evening of the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the current Iraq war. The event, sponsored by the Western New York Peace Center, aimed to strengthen the peace movement through workshops that examined different strategies for speaking out and taking action.

Sophia Azeb, a co-leader of University at Buffalo Anti-war Action, an organization formed in August 2006, spoke briefly about the need for a new generation of activists. Azeb explained that Vietnam-era protest tactics wouldn’t work today, and that “new tactics representing a broader group of people” were needed.

The evening included a workshop to discuss these new forms of student-based activism, which was moderated by Azeb and Buffalo State College student Irene Morrison. “Apathy is our biggest problem here,” Morrison said during the workshop.

They talked about the role of technology in rallying people as well as ways to get students into the streets. UB Anti-war made use of Facebook, for example, an Internet networking system that connects high schools and colleges all over the world, to bring together students insterested in protesting the war. Within a few days of creating Facebook group, they hade 400 online members.

Faizan Haq, who teaches Islamic cultural history at UB and intercultural communications at Buffalo State, preferred the term “pro-peace” to “anti-war.” He ran a workshop in which he offered a sketch of Iraq’s history and its present position in the Middle East and the Arab and Muslim worlds. “I don’t see it as anti-war, I see it as educational,” he said of the evening’s proceedings. “It’s always great to learn something new.”

The weekend saw a string of anti-war protests across the country. Tens of thousands marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon to protest the current war in Iraq and to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, an iconic event that galvanized opposition to the Vietnam war across the nation. Four years into the current war, even as political support for the war evaporates, today’s protesters sometimes sound disaffected. McKinley High School freshman Desmond Abraham attended attended the rally in DC because he is against the war, but he personally feel rallies are of little effect. Even with that low standard, he was underwhelmed: “I thought it would be better, compared to other rallies I’ve been to,” he said.

Bruce Beyer, a Vietnam war resister who famously holed up in the Unitarian Church as one of the Buffalo Nine in 1968 and subsequently was sentenced to three years in prison, attended Monday’s workshops with his wife Mary. Both are long-time peace activists.

“This church should be full and it isn’t, which is said,” said Bruce Beyer. He and Mary have helped US soldiers opposed to the war in Iraq to cross the border into Canada and expressed disappointment at the lack of discussion about dissent in the armed forces.

“Helping those guys get to Canada is the most importnat thing we can do,” he said. “Ain’t nothing radical going on here.”