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

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If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part One)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Two)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Three)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Four)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Five)

Jerry and I ran to the front because we wanted to be in the thick of it. "Hey guys, it's a women's march, fall back a bit OK?" said one woman with a wink. I got the feeling that there was a lot of conscious theater involved in this action and that these people were pretty skilled at what they were doing. The crowd chanted, "Run Yankee run Yankee run Yankee run. Women of the world are picking up the gun!" Toto, I thought, I've a feeling we're not in Indiana anymore.

Perhaps it is time to check in. Some may feel uneasy with what they have read. I do not blame them if they do. I feel uneasy writing it. Although this time in our nation's history was not entirely ugly--the sky was still blue and flowers still bloomed--the war and the rage concerning it were ugly indeed. It deformed us all. I, for one, am not comfortable writing about waving enemy flags, defying all decorum, and giving up on the hope I had been taught that America represents.  

I entered this great movement against the war far downstream from the purer well springs from where it had begun. This made a big difference. I had tossed my inner tube into a river that had once been fairly pristine, then had become magnificently swollen, but which was now receding by the time I had leapt into it from the shore. It had gathered a lot of debris and I was a part of this debris.  

I had earned the right to be personally alienated from our culture for reasons I do not wish to share, but I had not earned the right to be as alienated from my country as I appeared to be. Others had earned that right but I had not. That kind of alienation is something one experiences first hand, not something one adopts. This is a difficult admission to make. But I do not think that I was unique in this regard in relation to the people entering the movement at this time, six or seven years after it had begun. It was as if you knew something was surely wrong, but your recognition of this wrong was mediated by things you had imbibed second-hand, not through direct experience. 


I met precious few back then who could authentically articulate the horror this war represented, the evil our nation embraced in prosecuting it, and the despair they felt in being unable to stop it. The scope of my experience was very, very meager. Many did have profound moments of clarity about the war, but for that to happen you had to see what was really going on and to believe that what you saw was true--period. You had to be simple, in an almost meditative sense. I can't claim to have been one of those persons at the time.


When you saw the most powerful nation in the world destroying a small rural country that posed no threat, that is what you had to see. And you had to allow your heart to reverberate in the horror of this recognition unhindered. You could not see, instead, a great narrative about american freedom versus communist tyranny, when what was actually happening was an old woman running from a grass hut, her hair and clothes aflame, screaming to her grandson for help. 


What if she were your grandmother and you were her grandson and this was her last moment on earth? How could this be right? You had sat on her lap in that hut as a child and listened to her stories about the very fields in which you played, about sunny days and about her first kiss under that tree right over there, that now were all in smoking ruin. Her torturous death was not merely a result of "collateral damage," or an unfortunate mistake. Her suffering and your loss were not words; it was all real. It happened every day. This war took place in the neighborhoods of real people all the time and not on battlefields per se. How could her life, your memories of her, and your village that had been here for generations be reduced to nothing in an instant, by an "operation," staffed by young men who had pinned baseball cards against the spokes of their their bicycle tires to affect the sounds of motorcycle engines only years before? Multiply this by 2,000,000 times. This is what we had become.

You could not rest content with the phantasms of your mind alone. You had to see what was really there. When you realized that we had more respect for our garages than the grass huts of the people we burned to death from the safety of the skies, and that we valued our cars in those garages more than we did the people in those huts, that is what you had to accept. And when you saw a piece of rope on the ground, you could not mistake it for a snake, and magnify its danger beyond anything it could truly represent. 


I had not experienced this genuine moment of clarity at the time and I merely followed in the footsteps of those that had. Many of them had dropped out of the movement by this time, a movement which now had its own seeming momentum on which I was happy to be carried, unreflectively, and in faith that it was right. Just as those who supported the war had a duty to perform, a set of rules to follow, and a tradition to uphold, so did I. Both groups were on autopilot in a way.


I know I helped contribute to the next 30 years of conservative backlash by my actions. People like me alienated many. But we were never implicated in killing 2,000,000 people in Vietnam either. We were disrespectful and self-righteous and foolish often enough, but we never contributed to an evil of that magnitude and it is wrong to see a moral equivalence between the two. We never would have had high expectations for our country that could be violated if these high expectations had not been drilled into us our entire lives. We were taught and raised too well. The problem with principles, I guess, is that oftentimes people believe them and get angry when they are betrayed.


So after the clash at Georgetown with the riot police, and thanks to the leadership of the movement heavies I was emulating, I made my way with my friends to the Institute for Policy Studies on Dupont Circle to regroup.  That night we would discuss tactics, sleep on their floors, and the next day attempt to bring Washington D.C. to its knees.

TO BE CONTINUED