Why are thoughts of some LBO-talk subscribers more conservative than a Washington Post article <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30666-2004Oct13?language=printer> and a Miami Herald [!] op-ed (see below)?
<blockquote>Posted on Sat, Oct. 16, 2004 <http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/9924297.htm?1c> IN MY OPINION Young voices could shake up war machine BY DALTON NARINE dnarine at bellsouth.net
We strode down Fifth Avenue in 1970, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Sorta like St. Paddy's day. We were bedecked in fatigues, buttons and unit insignias. Everybody in front of Saks and Tiffany's was cheering. Then we emptied out in a park somewhere, where thousands awaited our words -- manna from hell. On the grass in front of the stage were about 75 faux body bags representing the day's kill for the enemy in Vietnam. What a powerful voice about the affairs of the war. Sometimes in death, life has no peer. And the statement we made that summer day on behalf of grunts duking it out in the jungle was being made at campus rallies across the country.
Eventually, we protesters ended the war. No, not Nixon. Antiwar America, buddy, that's who. Today's antiwar gestures -- while certainly intense online -- are far from in-your-face. Perhaps Sunday's Million Worker March in Washington, D.C., will be an exception.
But where are the hordes of angry young Americans? The campus rallies? Surely the Iraqi War, with its horrors in Samarra, Fallujah, Baghdad, Sadr City, is as big a lie as Vietnam.
Yeah, yeah, I know the pro-war snakeheads will come after me with a fusillade of criticism. But if you've been a returning Nam vet seeking housing in your New York hometown so you could pick up the pieces of your life and you've answered an ad for an apartment in Queens, a rock's throw from the college that admitted you, and the landlady says on the phone that it's yours because you're the first caller and then you get there and, upon seeing your black face at the door, she starts stammering like a jackhammer, and apologizing, what're you gonna do? You walk away recalling Muhammad Ali's line at the induction center, ''No Vietnamese ever called me n-word,'' and straighten up and fly right into the arms of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Damn straight. That's what you'd do.
There's no draft nowadays. Maybe that's why there's no roar from the streets and campuses even though the Iraq War is in freefall.
''They are showing their support, for and against, on the Internet, in chat rooms, newsletters and op-ed pages of the school newspaper,'' says student Luke Kosar, president of the University of Miami Young Democrats.
''I think the majority of students at UM are antiwar,'' Kosar says.
Scott Wacholtz, chairman of the pro-war UM College Republicans, agrees, adding: ``But that's because most of the students are liberal, a feature of youth.''
In the '60s and '70s, when New Left liberalism knocked heads with the Nixon administration, the resulting bad Karma shook up America. Boomer parents of Kent State University undergrads will remember May 4, 1970, when a National Guard shooting spree during an antiwar protest at the Ohio campus killed four students and wounded several.
The apathy puzzles Sheryl Smith, associate dean of students and director of campus life at Kent State: ``There's no activity on campus and I don't know why.''
In Tallahassee, Tony Perez-Carpenter, a sophomore at Florida State University, couldn't care less about the school's war chant at football games. He's attuned to the real times. As a freshman, Perez-Carpenter hooked up with the Students United for Peace and Justice and was among the hundred or so FSU students linking hands with demonstrators at the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference last November in Miami. He says he and the SUPJ will be at Sunday's Million Worker March. ''I'm passionate about politics,'' he says, ``and since there are too many holes in [President] Bush's explanation for the war, we just can't let it go.''
So he's taking a paltry 30 students to confront the war machine in the capital. Perez-Carpenter, who is getting financial help for this quest from local labor unions, student government at FSU and fundraising parties, says he has few recruits because ``a lot of students are preoccupied with studies and plans for the weekend rather than human rights and current issues.''
THE MARCH
Organizers of the march swear that not a single politician will be on the platform, and presidential candidate John Kerry won't be involved. But backed by labor unions and a coalition of antiwar groups around the country, the march will address ''the trillions of dollars spent on the merchants of death, like the war manufacturers'' according to Ralph Schoenman, of Vallejo, Calif., communications chairperson of the Million Worker March. ''The money is being stripped away from housing, schools, healthcare and other social issues,'' Schoenman says, just like a politician.
Wacholtz, the UM Republican activist, is an ex-Marine and a veteran of the Persian Gulf War. And pro-war, ``because after 9/11 we cannot wait for these problems to erupt here. We have to eliminate them before they get here.''
Remember the vaunted domino theory that the Johnson and Nixon administrations foisted on the public as reason for going to war in Vietnam? And when the war ended (to America's shame) not one domino fell in Southeast Asia?
At the UM, there's a course, ''The Sixties,'' being taught by Professors Zack R. Bowen and Donald Spivey. Their syllabus rehashes the war, the antiwar movement, the student revolt and the campus scene, as well as the legacy of Vietnam.
''A lack of consciousness generally pervades society,'' Spivey says about the popular course -- which has 200 students this semester. ''The average American doesn't read newspapers or books. And TV's doing a terrible job of reporting the facts in depth about situations in the rest of the world.'' Iraq is also in the discourse, but the Vietnam era puts the course in focus.
ANOTHER VET'S VIEW
Placing both conflicts in context, Michael Hoffman of Morrisville, Pa., believes there's no right war or wrong war. Before his involvement in Iraq in 2003 as a Marine, Hoffman says he was opposed to the runaway buildup there. ''There's a war you have to fight and there's one you don't have to fight, like Vietnam and Iraq,'' he says. Hoffman has flashbacks of Iraqis wandering ''in a complete daze over the death and devastation of their country.'' He found solace in the Veterans for Peace, based in St. Louis. Their mission is to tell the truth at teach-ins, rallies and to the media. They'll be in D.C. Sunday.
Hoffman's movement, and Perez-Carpenter's, too, plan to continue their protests -- even after the November election.
Just goes to show that dissension is as American as apple pie, with apologies to 1960s militant H. Rap Brown. And it is dissension that has molded me into a true American. I discovered that new birthmark in 1970 in the middle of a harangue in front of 10,000 demonstrators at a Hiroshima Day rally in Times Square, which was marred by mace and clubbings by the cops. It hit me as I was strutting down Fifth Avenue with the boys. And it was corroborated during a speech I made to an assembly in a New York park that was strung out on body bags. Everybody was cheering. They were there to end the damn war.
Dalton Narine is a former editor and writer in The Herald's Features department.</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>