If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part One)

The Sixties were over, but I wanted in. I was lolling around in early 1971 in an ornate sitting room of Purdue University's spacious Memorial Union, a school Time magazine called a "hot bed of student rest." A leaflet stating, "If the government doesn't stop the war, we will stop the government," had fallen into my hands. This was my big chance. I had grown up with the Vietnam War and the many actions taken against it, but I had been too young to take part. I was in college now, I had grown my hair long, I wore an old army coat and bell-bottom jeans, and I even knew people who painted flowers on their faces because they had seen photos like that in Life magazine. But even now I was missing out by attending a conservative school, and this great adventure of travelling to Washington D.C. to shut down the government was my chance to finally make a mark. 


One-third of my life had been spent as a mere spectator, watching the nightly news as our nation thrashed in turmoil day after day, year after year. The killings of students at Kent and Jackson State had happened not much more than six months before. I had witnessed the carnage in Grant Park at the Democratic convention in Chicago from afar, and had watched the Columbia University uprising on TV. I remember seeing James Simon Kunen, a Columbia student who had taken part in the sit-in, on a TV show while I was visiting my sister in upstate New York. He was earnest and impassioned and I knew at that moment that I had more in common with him than I did with the program's churlish host who mocked him. I had also read a book about the socialist icon Eugene V. Debs in my idyllic small-town library around the same time. Debs' life made me feel certain that cooperation was better than conflict in meeting our daily needs, and I experienced a breathtaking and rapturous vision of all humanity uniting in common purpose as I read that book. The world seemed entirely new to me at that moment, and I continued to feel that way from then on. Whenever I think of peace and wisdom I remember the scent of that library reading room and its comfortable sofa chairs.

If you were not alive in the mid-sixties--and even if you were--it can be hard to understand the level of rage engendered by that war. Much depended on the state of your awareness and when you had become aware. If you were old enough and politically astute, and you were already a part of "the movement" or touched by it, you believed in the chosen status of your generation. You had seen President John F. Kennedy assassinated, you had witnessed or endured attacks on civil rights activists that had escalated to murder, and yet you believed in the promise of America. You already knew more about the complicated and contradictory nature of our nation than many had learned in a lifetime. Then the Vietnam War occurred. 


The war was a terrible interruption in what many thought might be a difficult but inevitable march towards a new and more just society. You already had an extremely nuanced feel for your country and its mythologies by 1965, but the next several years would take you places you never imagined possible. The war began small and grew and grew and grew. And as you learned more about it you realized it was not an ordinary war like your father had fought, where one large army squared off against another. This was a war where one large army attacked ordinary people in grass huts, and where small children were burned alive as they raced into their homes to rescue their treasured toys.

The disparity in firepower was unimaginable. You knew that more bombs were being dropped at a far higher rate on this small rural nation than were dropped on areas hundreds of times larger during the Second World War. There were massacres, carpet bombings, and body bags on the tarmac as you landed in Saigon to do your patriotic chore. It was nothing at all like what you had been taught your nation was about. You knew the death tolls were nightmarish and the war served no practical end, but the war went on and on. The fact that they were the communist enemy seemed insignificant when you looked at everything else. They weren't the Russians--with immense resources and a nuclear arsenal--they were poor people living in grass huts. You couldn't cooperate with this kind of evil, with this kind of madness, that linked these two different situations together simply through the use of a word.


Finally, two million Vietnamese would die due to our prosecution of this war, and the Pentagon papers would reveal that 70% of our reason for being there was to save face. Two million people died so our leaders could save face. What nation on earth could do things like this and still wake up in the morning and shave as if nothing were really happening? Ours did.


You felt betrayed because the liberals you might ordinarily trust were prosecuting this war, and the Republicans whom you distrusted supported it even more. You were backed so far into a corner that it radicalized you. And the war went on and on. You couldn't trust your country or your government to do what was right or even practical. And you yourself seemed to have little effect on the war no matter what you believed or did. You became bitter, and were in some ways ruined for life. You could never think of your country or its people in the same way again. Marches, rallies, sit-ins, none of it worked. A large share of the public was deaf and were more likely to rely on a phrase like "My country, right or wrong" instead of any evidence. And when public opinion later turned to a huge majority against the war, it still didn't matter and Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.  It was insane, and it drove many into despair.  

"The movement" had died in some ways due to infighting a year or so before, but I didn't know this. I was signing up for something that was losing many committed supporters to burnout and disillusionment and I possessed neither their experience nor their insight. I was a wannabe. I just knew which side I was on but I wasn't sure exactly why. I was making it up as I went and trying to act as if I knew what I were doing even when I did not.


As I looked over the plans in that sitting room with my friends, my eyes widened and I smiled with anticipation. How would we prepare? How would we get there? What would we do once we did? I could hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing "four dead in Ohio" in my mind as we studied the leaflet, and wondered what fate we would meet in DC. and how it might change us all.